Devs are the factory workers of today. You’re going to be sorry in 10 years when AI is fully mature and all the cheap talent overseas takes every US dev job just like it did to factory workers in the 90s and there’s no unions to even attempt to slow it.

And in an unlikely case that there were a union, US would lose competition to China and the union will be involuntarily disbanded.

Factory workers are the factory workers of today.

I believe what they mean is that software devs are the lowest of the low of the totem pole for making software. We, manually, put together the software. We're the lowest level part of the chain. In that way, we're the factory workers of software.

I'm sorry you feel that way about software. I suppose if your bedrock is JavaScript or Python and you've been bashing out CRUD apps it might seem that way.

We've actually been automating away our job since the beginning of software. Compilers have been thing for like 80 years now. We've had auto-complete, static analysis, automated testing tools etc. for decades. What about the poor assembly programmers? What about the people who were bit banging serial protocols for a living?

Yes, we have automated away most of our job, however we are still the bottom of the totem pole.

For example, Amazon warehouse are also mostly automated. Still, workers who move boxes around and scan barcodes are the bottom of the totem pole of the operation. They're the people manually making Amazon work. You can't get any lower, otherwise then you'd become a machine.

> What about the poor assembly programmers? What about the people who were bit banging serial protocols for a living?

Those jobs are mostly obsolesced, so the totem pole has "moved up", but we're still at the bottom.

You have to ask the question, who is manually making the product and putting it together piece by piece? For factories, it's assembly line workers. For McDonald's, it's the burger flippers and the board worker. For software, it's us.

We have a misconception that since we are educated and relatively well-paid we are not like that. In terms of our business function, what we actually do for products and companies, our roles are of the same type. That's not a bad thing - this can serve as a gentle reminder to curb any delusions of grandeur.

I get it now.

Good luck then.

Can't say I have much sympathy for American devs after what they've done with the place.

"One great thing about being a dev in the US, u dont need a degree, learn a lot, can apply and get a great job."

And on the other side, you can have a degree and experience and still not get a job due to the wild criteria and games that get played in various interviews.

I've been working in the tech industry for about twenty years now, and I desperately want unions. Sticking your neck out alone sucks to begin with and only sucks harder the more time goes forward.

Same. Back when I first got into IT, I was surrounded by (similar) nerds whose self-esteem was defined by being the smartest person in the room. Compensation was often higher than other white-collar jobs, so they (we) were happy to overlook the long hours and non or poorly compensated on-call shifts.

Most IT work now, whether dev or admin side, is not rocket science. It’s mostly approachable work and no one should settle for being abused by employers for some outdated, ingrained, cultural baggage.

Why unions? Why not just more protective labor laws? Why bet on some political organisation to protect you, instead of being able to take your employer to court yourself?

labour laws don't happen by themselves…

You trot out all the familiar retorts. None of this is a reason to not organize to better represent the interests of labor.

A retort being familiar does not mean it isn't true or real.

Millions upon millions of ppl at every income level have experienced working in and around unions and not all of them came away with a positive experience.

Do these same criticisms also apply to corporations? I've worked for some absolutely shitty corps that have abused and taken advantage of their labor. Should we abolish corporations?

These criticisms of unions are always pulled out but then never equally applied to corporations.

You can say the same thing about democratic governments, or capitalism, etc. etc.

By itself that's not a meaningful observation.

It didn’t come by itself, it came in the wake of a comment that outlined a process whereby unions have a negative effect on new applicants in the job market.

The disagreement then was “I’ve heard that argument before.” - “ok that doesn’t make it wrong” <— that last sentence is what you’re replying to.

Surely you deserve a nobel prize for having solved economy where everyone else was just doing guesswork?

I just took economics, this is what is taught at any school with a serious economics program. (it's non-serious, though still can be good, if calculus is not a prerequisite)

i also took a few econ classes in college, enjoyed it a lot.

Some other ramblings from me.

Management at companies generally dont want to unionize because it generally makes the company less nimble/competitive (its obvious 99% management doesnt want to pay more for labor so i dont feel need to argue that). So yes, if u are lucky enough to be in the union when it gets created, your benifits/salary is negotiated which is cool, less variability in your future, but youll only get paid if your business manages to continue to out compete competitors.

A union example of this i had was installing robots in factories (most of the factories were unionized) (to replace some transportation of goods inside giant factories). My team and I would work with factory management/engineers to come up with plan to automate some process. Before trying to impliment it, we would need to give our plans to a union rep for approval/feedback (who wasnt an engineer). So that factory's competitors didnt have to wait for an additional approval, we would need to wait for a non technical persons feedback to BEGIN a project, your competitor might be finished with project before union approval is done.

Common story of the american factory. Company unionizes, slowly becomes less competitive, a while later goes out of business. This is why so many companies resist (legally) unionization, as in some industries it means certain death.

The fact that economists disagree all the time is due to economics laws being just opinions.

> As unions mature they protect the employment of their members, not prospective members who are unemployed applying for jobs.

This is true in the same way that it’s true that all democracies turn into the majority oppressing everyone else, or get captured by oligarchs, or vote to raise taxes to fund social until the economy collapses, etc. – which is to say not at all. Unions CAN fail that way but it’s not a given. We shouldn’t give up on a useful tool because it can be failed, we should talk about how to keep it healthy.

For example, I’ve seen the no-degree route you talk about made easier by unions because it forced merit hiring rather than hiring more dudes with social ties from certain colleges. Again, that’s not guaranteed – you’d be forgiven for wondering if the Teamsters were a deep cover operation to discredit the concept of unions – but social institutions aren’t magic: they work to the extent that we make them work.