[heyjudy]

No, sorry, you're completely wrong. Doctors and other professionals have the option to be independent businesses whereas a coal miner or firefighter doesn't. Unions compel working conditions and fair pay where individual or government effort to accomplish the same would/did fail. The better alternative to unionization or professionalization are employee-owned co-ops where the workers also have a vested interest in helping the company and tend to earn base pay and bonuses according to their work and the overall success of the venture. And besides, anyone can code, the only situation where Professional/Chartered Engineers are needed is when public safety or large-scale cost are involved. There's no reason to put up BS barriers to exclusify an industry that is growing like mad and will likely be put almost out of existence by self-programming systems that use AI/ML/DL to make what users want thousands of times faster than any human team ever could. And then, at some point, compilers, packages and hardware will be developed by algorithms and gradually replace humans... because there's very little special that a deep learning algorithm couldn't do better than the best human ever in a few weeks.

[simonh]

It seems like employee-owned co-ops are an alternative to traditional company organisation. There's nothing to stop anyone from founding such things right now, in fact some do exist though not sure about in the software space, but I suspect there are so few for good reasons.

Meanwhile a lot of startups do compensate employees with stock and options though, under conventional company structures. That's overall a small segment of the industry, but it is an option. A lot of programmers work for conventional businesses in traditional domains though, where radical corporate structures are just pie in the sky.