Software practitioners could learn a lot career-wise from our counterparts over in medicine. Here's a profession with salaries more consistently high and more commensurate with the value they provide, where they're not as worried about global competition, and where ageism is not a factor. They have strong professional organizations who not only set competence standards and control labor supply. They lobby the government to mitigate competition and legislate who-can-do-what, with results very friendly to M.Ds. This is in stark contrast to the free-for-all race-to-the-bottom that characterizes tech labor.
I'm not sure what an "AMA for software developers" would look like or do, but I'm pretty convinced a strong organization would be overall beneficial.
You are missing a big item in your analysis. Doctors are basically given a territorial monopoly. Just because someone in India does the same procedure for 10% of the price (they do right now), doesn't mean when you have a heart attack you can go fly to India and get it treated.
If you are just a COG in a wheel writing J2EE JavaBeans, it takes almost no work to send it over to a body shop in India.
That is why it would not work well to stamp your foot down and try to get a software union in the US. (Let's not even get into the popular view of unions right now, and assume it would be reasonable to form some kind of software dev guild).
Kinda sorta. I mean yes I hire american devs because it is easier to communicate with them. But if say you told me all american devs cost $1 million dollars (or even 500k) due to a union.. I would make Russan devs work :)
Even things that are not 1:1 replacements still influence the max value of something...
> where they're not as worried about global competition
Because, in general, it's difficult for 99% of customers to drive to another part of the world for care. It does happen, of course, for those with such resources.
> have strong professional organizations who not only set competence standards and control labor supply
That decide who can and can't create simple REST apps and games? That charge huge amounts for certificates that they've lobbied be required even though they'll be universally panned as useless?
> lobby the government to mitigate competition and legislate who-can-do-what, with results very friendly to M.Ds
So, yes. Ban out everyone that was self taught. Or went to the wrong schools. Or in the wrong country. Build huge walls around who is allowed to learn the mysteries of the machines sitting on most desks and in most pockets so that a chosen few can become rich at the expense of all those locked out
> stark contrast to the free-for-all race-to-the-bottom that characterizes tech labor
Goodness forbid you be required to be more useful than other people in order to make a living. It would be a better world, surely, if you could just get your stamp of approval and be set for life, knowing people had no choice but to choose you
I see constant need for developers everywhere. We cannot hope to create all of the programs that need writing right now, and you want to cut out a huge segment of developers for being distasteful in order to pad your pockets.
Don't forget to make users get licensed to use Access and Excel et al while you're at it. Those are pretty program-y applications.
This will never happen as long as we continue to have a broad distrust of academics and fetishize the hacker with no formal training. We don't value ourselves as a profession and so we reflexively reject the idea of forming a professional organization. There's also the fact that a significant portion of software developers have no or sub-par formal training and are insecure about their ability to pass any rigorous standardized testing, and so there's some measure of self-preservation involved in rejecting a formal licensing body.
I’ve been repeatedly denied by gatekeepers disinclined to let me inside
They say stay at the perimeter. Keep to the outer limits. They’re the ultimate limiters. Competitors can’t get in it.
If we can’t even begin, they keep taking the win. We stay thin like we’ve been. They keep raking it in.
Good luck plucking a chicken or an egg from nothing. Success flows to success, and so far I hear no clucking.
I’ve jumped through enough hoops in my lifetime. More exclusion? No thank you. If we take cues from anyone, let it be tradespeople, e.g. apprenticeships.
Main issue is enforcement. Engineering is a good example. Engineers become licensed have guilds etc. Thing is they tend to work on things that are in the physical world and if they break they will cause death and destruction. So the government will force a company to have an engineer stamp that this design doesn't suck and hold them liable when it does. More importantly, most infrastructure projects engineers work on tend to have government involvement to begin with meaning that someone with power to enforce the law will decide that it is appropriate to work with a licensed engineering firm. This becomes much more challenging at a typical software shop that is working on some run of the mill web app that won't really impact anyone's life adversely if things go wrong and generally have an opt in mechanism to begin with (i.e. Facebook or Google). I'd say where it would be very very useful is making it so that license software engineers are the one's who sign off on something like Equifax to prevent security breaches, or basically any software that impacts someone's life directly and can't be reasonably avoided (think banking software, medical software etc.)
* You can't outsource your doctoring from another country easily.
* People can get hurt or die from a bad doctor, but that doesn't apply to the vast majority of software development.
This puts doctors (and many healthcare professionals / companies) in an excellent negotiation position that we don't have.
I also think that doctors aren't the only stakeholders. I think doctor's offices hardly compete with each other and can still have terrible hours, fewer working days, and still make you wait after showing up for an appointment because the supply is so constrained. I wouldn't want "software developed in the US" to be similarly non-competitive.
On the other hand when a doctor has a degree, chances he/she is very competent.
On the software side of things, everyone claims to be the best and disasters happen every day. If there was an "AMA for software developers" Equifax probably wouldn't have happened.
Hiring software people is very hard, recruitment business around hiring software developers is booming. I'm building Cruitie: https://cruitie.com
I think Cruitie would be irrelevant for doctors, the software world is wild.
This guilding is done at the cost of other doctors and at the cost of patients.
Sure, if you ban immigration and dont allow americans to use software from other countries software salaries in the US will surge, at great cost to americans in general.
I'd rather not be in the side that oppresses people.
I'm not sure what an "AMA for software developers" would look like or do, but I'm pretty convinced a strong organization would be overall beneficial.