Comment by Apocryphon
7 days ago
Perhaps programmers should have organized and enshrined their power a couple years ago when the market favored them. Well, what the market giveth, it taketh away.
7 days ago
Perhaps programmers should have organized and enshrined their power a couple years ago when the market favored them. Well, what the market giveth, it taketh away.
That was never possible. Many (most?) programmers are imported workers from overseas. American programmers organizing wouldn't be effective, because there's always a programmer that will pop up from somewhere in the world and do whatever management asks, and for lower pay, even. Lawyers, doctors, and therapists don't have this problem. You can't outsource these roles to India or Eastern Europe.
They're going to hit diminishing returns through outsourcing eventually, whether code quality, language/cultural differences, or the difficulty in wrangling timezones. Though I've heard that there's been more offshoring to Latin America these days so perhaps that addresses some of the issue.
And maybe if programmers organized they could try to lobby for some of the protections that those other professions enjoy. As it stands now there's absolutely nothing pushing for the profession in any capacity, besides like IEEE/ACM op-eds.