It works great for the Screen Actor’s Guild and the rest of the film industry. They set minimum wages and use their market power to radically restrict entry so that there’s less competition from outsiders, by not working with firms that employ non-members and expelling members that do.
Any Software Professionals Guild could do the same, reduce the supply of competitors and punish people who employed any entry level workers who didn’t have the connections to get in.
One benefit, for current members, is that you can increase the cost of membership for new members. So you start off letting boot camp graduates work, then restrict it to Bachelor’s holders, (who must be taught by members of course), then to a Master’s.
You see the ever increasing credentialism in physiotherapy in the US, where you’re now required to have a “professional doctorate”. Pure waste given that it’s an apprenticeship in Germany and a Bachelor’s everywhere else.
Indeed. A successful US Programmers Guild would probably look more like the American Medical Association. It would restrict training places and increase entrance standards over time, doing everything in its power to prevent people who do the same job in other countries from having their qualifications recognized in the US. US physicians earn well over double the average of their UK counterparts, never mind Malaysian or Indian ones. If the AMA didn’t do its best to stop doctors from these countries practicing that kind of differential would be untenable.
You’d also probably get some kind of “not a programmer, honest” like nurses in the medical field. In the current climate you can move from being the one who knows pivot table to business intelligence to data analyst to data scientist but with licensing and “professional ethics” there’s always an attempt to maintain a bright line between professionals and “the help”, whether they be paralegals, nurses or draftsmen, compared to lawyers, doctors or engineers.
Most of the motion picture and television world, which is also responsible for producing digital content, and also has wide disparities in talent between people with similar titles, is unionized.
The film industry is the best example of why the software industry should be unionized.
A critical purpose of film industry unions is taking a responsibility for their talent. The software industry hiring practices need this very bad.
With the film industry, it is hard to get into the unions. It takes a lot of work and networking, and proving one’s self worthy, but considering the hiring hell that the software industry is experiencing, the film industry union structure would be a blessing.
