> And this is not a matter of pay, e.g. airline pilots are paid more than programmers here yet they are heavily unionized.
[Citation needed]
[Citation needed]
* https://centreforaviation.com/news/pilot-union-accepts-emplo...
* https://www.flightglobal.com/strategy/klm-clears-path-to-bai...
VNV is the pilots union of KLM, the Dutch national airline. IIRC they were the very last of the unions to sign up to the 'commitment clause' the Dutch gov required as part of their bail-out during Covid. Not a union without teeth.
I was contesting that pilots are paid more than developers. If you have data that supports that, please share. It seems like an absurd claim.
My country: https://www.platy.cz/platy/doprava-spedice-logistika/pilot https://www.platy.cz/platy/informacni-technologie/programato...
Average is CZK per calendar month gross (which is some 25-30% higher than net).
Pilots 38k - 132k Programmers 36k - 86k
as employees. If you work as a freelancer programmer (i.e. you have your own trade license) you can easily earn twice as much but if you count-in all the employee benefits granted by the Work law it's usually not worth it if you already have a family (which I have, therefore I switched from freelancing to being an employee).
And of course, Ryanair/EasyJet pilots are not counted in the statistics. The same goes to students - programmers which kludge together a Wordpress site and "sell" it.
I think part of the push-back against programmer unions from American programmers is that there's such a wide range of skills, and at the moment the market allocates compensation more-or-less according to capability. In many important ways, a programmer earning $500,000 per year at Google is in a different industry than a programmer earning $50,000 per year at General Motors.
[0] $52,000 per year according to https://www.indeed.com/career/pilot/salaries
Ironically, as Ryanair pays pilots significantly more than the range in the GP's comments (at below the low-end and high-end), including them would support their argument.
The only way to make the claim that pilots earn more than developers stick is to ignore all but the high-end of pilot salaries at major airlines and include all developers. A fairer comparison would either be to include all pilots (including the low end piston engine pilots at skydiving DZs and other utility roles) or to only include the top-earning professional developers (maybe MAGMA).
https://fr.glassdoor.be/Salaries/airfrance-pilot-salary-SRCH...
https://www.payscale.com/research/FR/Job=Software_Engineer_%...
The answer is obviously not - do you have any salary data?
I’m not saying they are perfect sources, but they do align with anecdotal datapoints.
> I’m not saying they are perfect sources, but they do align with anecdotal datapoints.
So you say, but that's definitely not true for me (who lives in the States and Ireland). In fact, it's an absurd claim to me.
> airline pilots are paid more than programmers here
(emphasis mine)
I just gave one geographical example where I believe that to be true. I don’t think it is true everywhere, nor do I think OP meant that.