Is There a Case for Programmers to Unionize?
qvault.io
qvault.io
I tend to agree. I would ask: Isn't the individual's capacity to learn more important than regurgitating to pass a certification test?
Imagine an interview where the interviewer is figuring out an area where the candidate is missing some knowledge, then the interviewer goes through and helps them learn that knowledge. Concrete example might be candidate has zero experience with vuejs, so interviewer works with them to build a vuejs prototype.
The answer is yes. We are workers. We’re just as likely to benefit ourselves and others in solidarity by organizing as other workers. The resistance to the idea is cultural and a class misalignment.
That said I’ll address some stuff in hopes it’ll benefit others.
> While we’ve made advances in technology that make our lives better, they’ve simultaneously made our lives more expensive. You simply must pay an exorbitant [...]
It’s good that the author acknowledged this early on. I was looking for it by that point and it’s basically table stakes for any kind of historical comparison. However,
> I think this is a problem, but developers are some of the most highly-paid workers out there. The solution likely resides outside the domain of software specifically, seeing as people of other professions, even highly-unionized professions suffer more.
The author should be encouraged to become more familiar with the role unions have played in cross-discipline improvement. The fact that tech workers are privileged relative to other workers isn’t a reason—on those other workers’ behalf—not to organize. We’re in a much better position to bargain for and with our less privileged class peers, in service, health care, and trades, with a formal structure oriented around labor solidarity.
> Wealth inequality is a real problem, but I’d rather see a more simple and targeted solution like a small UBI. It would help workers across all industries without needing to add paperwork, membership, and union dues to our already complicated lives.
The author should also become more familiar with the role of unions in shaping policy. This call for UBI (which warrants its own digression) would have much more leverage and be much more effectively refined with a powerful, organized labor movement.
> Standardizing testing and certification systems likely wouldn’t be effective in a field as fast-paced as software engineering. Best practices in 2019 can be obsolete in 2020, and I just don’t trust union administrators to keep up.
But organizing would empower us to set that pace and that tone. A tech union would be much better equipped to determine which technologies are outdated and which are worth keeping fresh for the next generation.
> We can solve this problem without unions. I think there’s a growing market demand for developer-vetting. Right now this need is mostly filled by service-based recruiting companies, but I think there’s an opportunity for a kind of developer-profile industry to emerge. Ideally, it would make it easy for developers to showcase their knowledge and projects in an effective and streamlined way, and at a fraction of what union dues would cost.
This is almost certainly the author’s business goal. Moreover the cost of union dues is fairly insignificant compared to the benefits, especially given the privilege of tech workers as noted by the author earlier.
> This is a real problem that doesn’t just deal with gender inequality, but race, age, culture and perhaps religion as well.
> Huge problem. Hard to solve. Unions might help, but to be honest I’m not sure.
Again the author should become more familiar with the role of unions. Not that I have a particular bone to pick with any of the proposed solutions, but if those are actually effective solutions they’re more achievable by organizing.
> The junior/senior problem seems to mostly be a supply and demand problem, with perhaps a residual effect of problem #2, junior developers have a harder time proving their worth since they lack experience.
I sincerely encourage the author to just go check out a trade union. They do address this, not as a profitable business but as a general service to help entry level workers get good work. Apprenticeship programs, job partnerships, all just for being part of the union.
> This is mostly a problem for foreign workers and entry-level developers.
Then this is a problem of solidarity.
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I’m mostly laying off the gobs of obvious thinly veiled marketing material for the author’s business but I have to just acknowledge that it’s not a good look.
It tested your ability to program basic loops, but I could see an algorithm that would have enveloped the loops,but the test had no questions about that.
So what do you want out of a developer? How about an ability to dig into the problem domain and come up with an economic way to produce a good solution from the available data?