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I certainly wouldn’t join a union (and a “guild” would not be legally distinguishable from one).

I don’t want a levelling effect in our industry. I don’t want gatekeeping either. We aren’t interchangeable cogs, and people who do better than average should not be held down. Promising people with nontraditional backgrounds should not be prevented from entering the field. Despite what people claim, unions would definitely hold people down and lock out new people.

Things are going really well for us actually, compared to people in other professions. That’s partly the case because our industry has been able to remain dynamic and innovative. Much of the success we’ve seen was built by people with nontraditional professional backgrounds and would not have happened if we got bogged down by gatekeeping and credentialism.

When the pie stops growing and we need to fight management over how to divide it, maybe a union will be attractive. But right now the pie is growing rapidly and workers are getting a huge amount of it in the form of both cash and stock. I’m all for continuing with this free, dynamic, and incredibly successful model.

By the way, unions don’t make layoffs a thing of the past. Look at what happens in the auto industry. The beat thing we can do for laid-off tech workers is ensure that we keep our industry dynamic, so there will continue to be new employers to work for.

I want a leveling effect, but I don't live on a US coast...

My guess is 80% of developers think they're above average.

Depending on the distribution, they may be correct

> We aren’t interchangeable cogs

Turns out we largely are, just like in most other industries. Probably like to think we’re irreplaceable snowflakes. But we’re not.

> people who do better than average should not be held down

Ah yes that old chestnut, that unions mandate No Employee May Achieve Above Average

No, I meant that above average achievement is not rewarded. (And in that case, why would anyone try harder than the bare minimum?)

One of the first things a union would do is decouple compensation from performance and introduce a standard compensation structure for all workers, segmented by job level. (And somehow the people who are personal friends of the union leaders seem to rise in job level faster than the others…)

The kind of people who are attracted to that kind of structure are not the ones who build successful industries, and they are demoralizing to have as coworkers.

Counterpoint: Hollywood.

Some of the most famous and wealthy people on earth are in the same union!

> One of the first things a union would do is decouple compensation from performance and introduce a standard compensation structure for all workers, segmented by job level. (And somehow the people who are personal friends of the union leaders seem to rise in job level faster than the others…)

This argument is a strawman, and really is a worsr-possible-case caricature of union activity. I've worked in a number of workplaces having a unionised workforce my entire professional career (~25 years, private industry and government) and I've never observing anything like the scenario you describe. Ambitious, talented people are promoted and improve their compensation. Average-performance clock-punchers reach a certain level and stop. Poor performers are managed out of the organisation. Union membership is no ticket to a cushy job for life.

I'm not denying that the worst-case scenario could happen, but it's by no means a given. IMO this kind of fundamentalist opinion is unhelpful, and doesn't reflect the reasonable balance of priorities and opinions which people have out there in a modern society.

Are you a software engineer? What union(s) and what do they do for you?

Yes, I'm primarily a software engineer. Unions are quite often sector-based rather than profession-based. For example, the union I belong to currently covers the public sector in Western Australia rather than any specific profession. As to what it does for me: negotiates on my behalf for any required changes to my award, provides a counselling service to assist with localised work issues or general mental health, provides a travel insurance policy that covers my daily commute, provides a purchase negotiation service for appliances and furniture, and provides a number of other discounts at various stores.

How much do you get paid as a fraction of what unionized tech workers in the US get paid?

There are many legitimate criticisms one can make of American unions, but this isn't one of them. I am not a union cheerleader by any stretch of the imagination, but you obviously don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about. Hard work and valuable contribution are recognized, celebrated, and rewarded as much or more among union workforces as otherwise.

The original case of tech startups was that if you gave people a living wage (such they were comfortable), then the fact that they're not keeping up with the Jones's becomes meaningless, and then how they thrive is about how interesting their job is to them.

This is seen, at least partially, as what drew a lot of people to the current "big tech" companies. They wanted to work on interesting problems. The pay was high, but it mattered a lot less than that the work was actually rewarding.

Yes but also No.

Onboarding or 'getting someone up to speed' is a far more invasive and disruptive task than many believe. Manager probably dream about adding and removing employees as easily as buying more or less food for a catering event. Institutional knowledge and employee quality are no where near that easy.

Onboarding is also very dependent on employee goodwill. Too much churn, and people stop wanting to bring new employees up to speed.

It is more like they want to fire and hire to show shareholders they want maintain status quo. Business don't really save money firing and hiring over and over. It is the share holders who think nothing good is coming from employees who stick around or have earned too much annual increase in pay to keep them. If you make 180k a year and you get an annual bump of 4% pay every year, you'll get 7.2k bump. So 194, 202, 210, 220... in five years. It is a sizable bump. They fire rehire to sometimes reset those annual bumps.

I don't see how this position is tenable after seeing what generative AI can do for code.

> Things are going really well for us actually,

Not right now anymore. Have you seen the layoffs? Things went well because of years of cheap cash. The music is stopping and there will be even more layoffs before this is all done.

I forget who wrote this, but there was a famous CS-related paper from a while back that made the point that when we automate the easy stuff, the only remaining problems are the really hard ones that require human expertise and domain knowledge to solve. So there will always need to be human software engineers.

AI being able to code is going to be like what happened when construction workers started using power tools: now that one man can saw boards as fast as 5 others with handsaws, wouldn't we see a lot less demand for carpenters? What happened is that per-worker productivity went up because of the new tools and the construction materials and techniques they use were adapted to take advantage of that, there was still plenty of work, and we can build better things faster than before.

In software, imagine how much more effective engineers can be if the grunt work could be more automated. People loved autocomplete and smart IDE features and graphical debuggers because they made coding more productive. A lot of those things already do write some code. AI provides a much better version of that.

People whose only contribution to software is the grunt work of writing simple code might need to worry, but there is a lot more to working as a software engineer than grinding code. These AIs are also repeaters of existing solutions -- maybe they can solve simple problems that have pre-existing solutions in their training corpus, but an AI is not going to be able to create the next Redis or Kubernetes or AWS simply by recombining existing text.

Regarding layoffs:

Even after all the layoffs most companies still have more employees than they did in 2020. Many of the people being laid off today joined since then. They will get other jobs, maybe not in a few weeks like what used to be possible, but still. This is not like 2001 when entire companies were going out of business and laying off 100% of their employees.

A lot of the the American tech industry developed when interest rates were higher than they are now. What we had in the past decade was not normal, and in some ways it was pretty crazy -- investors didn't care if companies were sustainably operated, and now they do, and that's good for the long-term health of the industry.

Tech is not immune from the business cycle, because nothing really is, but this really is not as bad as previous downturns. Even if it gets worse before it gets better, the tech industry is fundamentally strong and will handle it.

Regarding your points on automation - it's an inherently contradictory position. If automation didn't save time/money/labor costs, we wouldn't invest in it. Carpentry being in demand has to do with external factors, not technological factors. There was no demand for carpentry in 2009, for example.

New industries will have to spawn from generative AI for there to be a net positive. Most IT and tech jobs are lower level coding positions. This will all but eliminate these roles. SWEs especially top ones will likely be safe. But that doesn't solve the societal problem.

Regarding layoffs - we've barely touched the surface. We haven't even entered recession yet, and a financial crisis looms. Most are on hiring freeze now and just in the last 2 weeks both meta and amazon slashed additional jobs. More will be coming. The industry won't completely collapse because it's a mature industry now - FAANGs are now like Coke. Blue chip. This says nothing about its workforce though - there's nothing these companies would love more than to be able to reduce the cost of their software devs.

There isn't really such a thing as "external factors" when the entire economy is an interdependent ecosystem. Construction getting cheaper and more productive actually created more demand for it, made it economical to build large suburban subdivisions, etc.

> Most IT and tech jobs are lower level coding positions.

I don't really buy that. It's true that most positions are IC positions, i.e. not managers, but quite a lot of them require domain knowledge and human intervention in edge cases which can't be handled by automation. If automation could solve all the problems, why are so many people oncall?

Construction hasn't gotten cheaper in the US, though. In fact, it's more expensive than ever. Yet, individual labor wages have not increased, So...what's going on? Other factors. You can't ignore them just because it suits your argument. The fact is, it's demand driven, and why in 2009 there was no demand (despite how much automation was available.) And workers aren't seeing the gains of automation (e.g. many are being replaced by them.)

> I don't really buy that. It's true that most positions are IC positions, i.e. not managers, but quite a lot of them require domain knowledge and human intervention in edge cases which can't be handled by automation. If automation could solve all the problems, why are so many people oncall?

I don't mean IC vs manager. In any case, at my company our support staff has been reduced by 75%. In my previous life as a mechanical engineer, I've seen control systems replace 90% of powerplant staff. Also, generative AI just became a thing - because SWEs can be more efficient, you simply need less, UNLESS there is growth or a new market emerges (certainly possible), in any case millions will be left behind, just as what happened in the rust belt when manufacturing collapsed.

In any case, I hope you're right and I'm wrong :)

Specifics on using an API, configuring a deployment, or describing best practices for a tool are relatively easy, and ChatGPT had been amazing answering questions in these areas.

Designing large coherent systems for a business use case is hard. I don't think ChatGPT will ever manage that.

Even if it does, it will simply mimic the systems other companies have created and documented, because GPTs don't create anything new. They recombine what already exists.

Plus let's be honest, the technical problems are the tip of the iceberg for software architecture. If an AI ever manages to convince my director to pay for things I'd be happy for the help.

Just a year ago people were saying ChatGPT couldn't do what it's doing now.

Wrt your guild-proposal specifically, one concrete outcome I'd like to see is accreditation, something similar like certification exams administered by society of actuarians.

High bar standardized exam on fundamentals of CompSci, which waives every whiteboarding/leetcode interview. It sort of exists today, if you have a CompSci degree from reputable college, but this way people can get the certificate without the formal education, just pass the exam. It's ok if it's difficult.

Every industry has gotten less and less unionized.

Why would software buck the trend?

Starbucks has way more unionized stores now than last year.

True

Because we’re smart enough to see the difference between a craftsman’s guild and a traditional workers union.

For starters guilds tend to have progression by merit, requiring an apprentice prove they are competent enough to be considered a journeyman.

And you know … not wanting to be exploited… healthcare sounds nice… ( on this point, I’d like to point out that as an Australian software engineer, I long ago resolved to never start a company in America because of how insane healthcare in America is. I can understand the guns, the polarised politics and all the rest of the things that make America what it is… but healthcare is just so fucking insane that i haven’t even seriously considered taking a holiday there to see the museums that have been on my bucket list for half my life… the idea of starting a business there is just an immediate non starter… I’ll take US cash and setup a holding corp if they demand US incorporation and employ people elsewhere… so having a guild where healthcare was provided would make American developers more competitive in the job market)

I would join a guild for at minimum protection for our fellow h1b visa holders. They’re constantly and regularly abused.

We should just eliminate H1bs and expand the green card program together with eliminating per country quotas. Relying on a union to protect workers with precarious visas is really just trying to address the symptom rather than the cause.

Are they any Real World examples of "guild" vs "union"?

About the US healthcare expenses: When you travel on holiday, you can buy pretty reasonable travel insurance. For example (no shilling): You can get one week of healthcare coverage from World Nomads for 130 AUD. Not so bad.

130 AUD for a week is considered reasonable?? For travel insurance even?

Unfortunately the only “real world” examples I can personally think of for craft guilds are from more than a century ago, making them quite poor examples of the practice in a modern context. However if your not opposed to a little bit of history, I’d recommend checking out the history of craft guilds which goes back well over a millennium and it represents one of the earliest forms of “qualification” outside of religious or spiritual contexts (since determining if you have a suitable priest of Zeus, etc… has basically been a thing since forever)

There will be no guild or union. Guilds exists where the market has difficulty moving/outsourcing. If you have a mine in Alabama, you can't mine it from China. You are going to mine it with the most powerful group of the closest community (that happens to be the "union" of mining).

In tech, a union/guild is massive hamper on efficiency and control. Tech will quickly be outsourced to other places. It has become easier and more possible to outsource to other countries now (English is becoming more common, and education has improved in third-world countries). This will accelerate that.

Employees are often investors too