[tevon]

This is wild.

And somehow at the end of this he comes to the conclusion that software engineers need a union? We're on of the highest paid, most flexible professions ever.

It seems like the thing missing here is the simple fact that engineers DO have significant bargaining power already, and have CHOSEN to use standardized solutions because they are good, well supported, and have wonderful communities of helpful people.

What happened to this guy? Seems incredibly bitter.

[pdonis]

> engineers DO have significant bargaining power already, and have CHOSEN to use standardized solutions because they are good, well supported, and have wonderful communities of helpful people

How much is this actually true, though? It's probably true in small companies where the engineers might also be the technical managers. But is it true in a large company where management might have little or no technical expertise at all, but still insist on making technical decisions?

[duxup]

I don't even know what the writer thinks a union is going to do.

"No react, that's too much labour arbitrage!" ?

[pdonis]

> I don't even know what the writer thinks a union is going to do.

As I read it, the writer thinks that a union can somehow bargain with management to get different technical tools adopted that will not commoditize developers.

I don't agree with him because the incentives pushing management to commoditize developers are real business incentives. Management doesn't care about technical quality per se; it only cares about technical quality that makes a difference in how much customers will pay. And customers don't care what technologies you use for your app under the hood; they only care about whether it does what they want. If management can make the app do what customers want using interns pulling code from ChatGPT and tweaking it until it stops crashing, at a fraction of the cost of actual expert software developers, that's what management will do.

Developers having a union doesn't change any of that, and if the union succeeds in keeping management in that particular company from using interns and ChatGPT, that just means that company will be out-competed in the market by some other company that doesn't have a developers' union and can give the customer a lower price. The only way for developers to break that cycle is to take on the business risk themselves and start their own developer-owned company that succeeds in the market by leveraging the developers' expertise to provide cheaper solutions to the customers' needs.