RealAlaskan's Journal: Should programmers organize?

Several times recently we've seen the proposal that there should be a union for programmers. Here are some of my thoughts:

It might be a good idea to organize, but let's look at the folks who make the big bucks: MD's and lawyers. They have associations which act as gate keepers (AMA and ABA). If you don't get permission from the AMA, you won't practice medicine. For the state medical exams, and for the state bar exams, the relevant association sets the standards, and they keep them high enough to safeguard the incomes of the ones who've already made it through. This is regulatory capture[1] at its finest. Any ``protection'' which the public gets is is a happy accident.

Even engineers have something like this. In most states, you can't hang out your shingle to provide engineering services unless you are a licensed professional engineer. The professional societies have a lot of influence over what the license requirements are.

This doesn't help the guys who work at Intel, but if you are a civil or mechanical engineer, or if you do power or RF engineering, having that PE gives a bit more job security, and a bit more pay.

Plumbers and electricians have similar deals with state licensing authorities, and are also fairly well paid. The important thing isn't collective bargaining (MD's and lawyers don't have it, plumbers and electricians do), but keeping out the ravening hordes of teenagers and recent college grads who would run the wage down to the subsistance level.

My point? It might be better to avoid the old-fashioned, collective bargaining, union model, and start an AMA/ABA/IEEE-style professional association, and lobby for compulsory state standards, examinations and licensing for professional coders.

When I first posted this little rant, someone pointed out that, if we were successful, it could cause real problems for libre software. One problem with this approach is that, if we are sucessful, Finnish grad students might not be free to make libre software anymore. On the other hand, anyone who got into the coding priesthood would be set for life, just as lawyers and physicians never seem to miss a meal. Would we really want to make sure that there is never another Linux, just to feather our own nests?

One way that a union might fail to keep our incomes up is the American Federation of Teachers way. The AFT is notoriously poor at getting good wages for its members. Notice that the AFT has used both collective bargaining and regulatory capture to try to keep wages high and working conditions good. It seems to me that there are a couple of reasons their double-barreled approach has failed:

First, a self-reporting bias: the union sees a strong incentive to say that its members are underpaid.

Second, most people go into teaching either because they really want to teach, regardless of the money, or because they really can't make any more money elsewhere.

Both of these motives for teaching are perfectly respectable, in their way, but neither is a recipe for high wages.

I think that the fact that almost any idiot can be a poor teacher has a lot to do with the low wages that teachers get. I think that it takes real talent to be a good teacher, but the average school administrator has a budget to stay within, and good teachers are probably more likely to care about the kids, and rock the boat ... it's safer, and cheaper to stick to the barely adequate teachers. So, we see the current situation in which anyone who can make a good living teaching kids could make a better living elsewhere. I think this has an important parallel in programming: any idiot can make a bad coder. I think that a union mght not help us nearly as much as the AMA has helped the physicians.

[1] There doesn't seem to be a really good definition of regulatory capture on the web. The idea that I'm trying to get across is that close relations between the regulated (say, lawyers) and the regulator leads to the regulators identifying with the regulated, and ultimately being controlled by the regulated. The regulators and the regulated share a common language, and their jargon tends to exclude the public. Ultimately, the regulator and regulated talk only to one another, and regulations wind up protecting the industry rather than the public. Another example of this are the public utilities (e.g., phone, water, cable monoplies) and the state public utility boards.