Unionization of software development will never work. For one, simply put, unlike other industries for which a product really needs to a large team to produce (like auto industry), the cost of something like doing a software product is really low (only a few people)…
Plus as an independent who one days hopes his own software business takes off, any idea of unionization would just kill my business. And frankly, at that point, I would simply rather move things offshore…Not that I really would want to, since it can be a PITA…but because it just wouldn’t be cost effective if geeks started to charge based on lines of code they wrote, or QA started to charge based on the number of bugs they filled. Unlike building a physical product, software has millions of ways of doing the same thing. The only way to gauge work is “can you get this done with this level of quality by a certain amount of time”…The other aspect is you can’t unionize creativity, which is really what a software product usually is.
I’m sorry, like I said, engineering isn’t the highest paid profession. In fact, folks that sell software make a heck of lot more than people that created it….Just look at Oracle. I sort of laugh when I hear of technical folks that want to go work for Oracle. I thought the bane of engineers is to work for someone that is non-technical and is in sales. Larry is all about sales. In fact, he was in sales and was so shrewd, he kicked out all of the original founders out of oracle. And anyone who says something to the affect of the difference between “God and Me is God doesn’t run Oracle” is some cocky dude.(personally I think he’s the antichrist, but that’s a separate discussion).
If you are doing engineering/techie shit only for the money to pay the bills, I suggest you find another line of work. Because when you get older, and you have some 19-20year working next to you, you better have drive to keep up, and at that point the dollar carrot is definitely going to look like a much smaller carrot. That’s reality, and that’s how this industry or most tech industries work. Reality #2, in a world where everything else goes up in price due to inflation,, technology has fallen in absolute dollars. I paid $3k for my first Mac about 10 years ago that had a whopping 4megs of ram 80mb hd….I’d be surprised to find anyone for practical purposes spend the same amount on a computer these days. Think about it. You’re working in probably the only industry which things need to be done faster and cheaper each month. You sort of need to be insane to work in this industry under these conditions, unless you really like technology. You’ll never be highly paid relative to other professions if you just do the bare minimum. If you’re not one of those people that can help innovate or do things differently and/or have interest in it, you’re not going to enjoy staying in this industry and it’s just a matter of time.
The other alternative is for you to use whatever your dollars you make from your relatively decent income in your early years, and squander as much of it as possible and do something with the relative good pay (like invest or something like that). That way, by the time you get into your 40ies/50ies, you sort of can give the middle finger if it comes to that. BUT, at the same times enginerds aren’t always the best money managers, sometimes they are nerdy enough and think they can calculate their way into wealth, but if there is anything that has been proven, enginerd aren’t necessarily the best money managers.
The other thing is, short of inherited wealth or something close to winning the lottery, I don’t think there really is such a thing as “making easy money”. If it truely were easy, everyone would eventually be doing it, and competition in doing that would drive down income/wages/etc, and eventually make that thing not-so-easy-money anymore when things are in equalibrium. “Easy money” is a transitory state, for which occurs when someone discovers something for the first time that no one else is doing and there is no other competition for doing it. This applies to any profession. There’s “hard earned money”, which is state for which there are big barriers to entry, that weed out most poeple from doing it….I think that’s why doctors are one of the higher paid professions, because of the enormous amount of time and school and training one goes through (and all the malpractice insurance they need to pay for). Lawyers are another high paid profession, IF you are from a top school. I have friends that graduated from crappy law schools and frankly don’t do as well as I thought they would.
I hope i don’t make anyone depressed that you end up quitting the next work day…though you’d be foolish to in the economy if you still depend on a paycheck…
Not sure what to tell folks…There is tech work that is “labor” and there’s coming up with a product. The labor that goes into the latter hopefully is a fixed amount of time, for which the output provides a stream of income requiring significantly less “labor” to sustain. People buy cars and often pay a price based on what they want. People find the cheapest mechanic to fix the car…It’s as simple as that.
