| Unions are about digging in and fixing terms between management and labor. Our industry is different than any other. The factory floor we work on is in our editors. The man on the assembly line building cars is a part of the machine. We are the people that builds the machine. We don’t want to lock terms between management and labor, because as we’ve built up our tooling, we’ve changed the game repeatedly. When I got started, I was writing c/c++/assembly. I had to write my own standard library for every project. I was allocating and freeing all my buffers. I had a qa guy, an ops guy, a dba supporting me. Then I was a Java guy. We realized the DBA wasn’t needed anymore. I didn’t have to allocate and free. I could now use other people’s software through packages. I got way more productive. Made more money for the company, and I got paid more for it. Then I was a python guy. We realized all this OO crap was a waste of time. We realized the QA guy could be replaced with better tooling and monitoring. The dev ops and cloud revolutions replaced my ops guy with APIs I could manage. I got way more productive. Made the company more money, and I got well paid for it. Now we stand in front of the AI revolution. I don’t know what my job will look like. But it won’t look like what I’m doing now. I’m using copilot a lot, and I’m way more productive. I can turn around UI for the first time! I’m hoping these new Ai features we’ll make my company a lot of money. I should get some of it. I’ve seen a lot of people age out when the technology changed. I’ve seen a lot of people make good money for their work. What scares me more than the next technology pushing me out, is an industry that stagnates around “the way we do it”. Today we are on the road to infinity. But if we stop moving forward we are on the road to stagnation. |