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nonymous--on Bad Microsoft

You keep touting brain surgery as if it's the yard stick by which all other endeavors (including pure mathematics and astrophysics) should be measured for difficulty and cognitive ability required--it isn't. The brain may be immensely complex, but neuroanatomy at the macroscopic scale isn't and has fewer inter-connected components than a large software project.

The only reason you think brain surgery is so complicated is, again, because doctors have excellent PR.

nonymous--on Bad Microsoft

http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/24/valley-heavyweight-vinod-k...

http://www.businessinsider.com/ibms-watson-may-soon-be-the-b...

nonymous--on Bad Microsoft

Perhaps I should have been more specific. I was referring in that sentence to Contributor License Agreements (CLAs), specifically the most egregious ones, such as Canonical's CLA that not only transfers your copyright to Canonical but grants them the right to relicense your work under any license they wish, even proprietary.

If I'm going to give something I produced away under a permissive license, I'd rather not be harassed to sign an actual, physical contract with some company as well, let alone one that places additional obligations on me while offering nothing in return.

nonymous--on Bad Microsoft

Thanks. I wasn't really advocating unionization or really anything in particular, just marveling at how stunningly clueless (or, if you prefer, generous and egalitarian) programmers can be.

The amount of money we collectively leave on the table is staggering.

nonymous--on Bad Microsoft

For people supposedly so intelligent, programmers often appear quite foolish, at least when compared with other professionals.

They give away enormous quantities of their labor for free through open source (some even going so far as to sign one-sided contracts granting the copyright to for-profit corporations without compensation). They openly denigrate their own skills by spreading egalitarian myths like "everyone can be a programmer" (whereas I doubt many doctors or lawyers would make similar declarations concerning the practice law or medicine) and by preferring the title "coder" over its considerably more prestigious alternatives like "programmer" or "software engineer." They promote bootcamp-style vocational schools to flood the market with cheap labor to compete with them and to further bolster the perception that programming is an easy, low-skill trade, perhaps a rung or two above mere clerical work.

And then when it becomes apparent that they are getting screwed by their employers who collude with one another to drive down wages with no-poaching agreements, H-1B visas, and by firing senior devs in favor of 20-somethings, the long-ignored subject of unionization is revived.

And of course, being programmers and therefore unsavvy, the model proposed is invariably that of a blue-collar trade union like the United Auto Workers Union and never an innocuous-sounding, white-collar "professional association" like the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, or American Dental Association. These outfits are so successful in both their lobbying and PR that they've made their members among of the highest paid practitioners in the world (particularly doctors), and the gullible masses remain wholly ignorant of their true nature and consequently spare them from the condemnation usually heaped upon unions, both public- and private-sector alike.

In fact, their PR has been so successful that I wouldn't be surprised if someone responded to this very post contesting my characterization of them as unions, despite evidence of their anti-competitive practices being trivial to come by: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2006/216804.h...