Could not agree with you more. Best time for our industry to get serious about unionization was probably after the .com bubble burst. We could have leveraged the degree to which our skills were needed in that era and headed off a lot of today’s problems if we had strong unions in place, but sadly it’s still probably one of the lowest density sectors for organized labor. Now would be a good time to start pulling heads out of asses. I think many of our brothers and sisters in tech are starting to wake up to reality now that we’re in our 5th-6th straight year of widespread layoffs for “reasons.”

It can start with honest and direct 1on1 convos in order to thwart groupthink nonsense, and build on things from there. A simple organizing committee is a great first step.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 23 minutes ago* (last edited 10 minutes ago)

I really wish people actually listened to the crazy architect Christopher Alexander when he shat on the entire programming industry in 1996 for not having a value system around the basis for beginning to build architecture and systems in software. He pointed out all the way back then how much power programmers had and now have lost culturally to relinquishing the narrative to AI so heavily around software and programming. He was trying to say "THINK about what your industry is doing, organize, use your power while you have it.". Well, it is mostly too late now, still necessary to do but programming will never be seen as a highly skilled and respected profession again the same way it used to because of how thoroughly programmers did not organize to resist the fundamental capitalist narratives being imposed upon them that have now been set in stone culturally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_QzdKci6OY

If programmers and computer culture had actually organized and treated leftist ideas without an air of superior condescension as if understanding computers and factorio made the need to unionize obsolete... we would be in an entirely different world right now. People believed in the power of computers and programming in a way that gave computer culture the possibility to positively transform the world, but that trust has been irrevocably broken and computers will never have that same transformative potential again because people will never trust the profession of programmers the same way again.

The public trusts engineers to build bridges because even though the public doesn't understand how to build a huge bridge they know at some level engineers would throw a collective massive fit if people started demanding they build bridges in a dangerous way. On the other hand that trust is PERMANENTLY gone in how people look at software engineers and honestly the industry deserves it for being so obsessed about only focusing on the details and never thinking about the broader impact of the architecture being created.

Software engineering has culminated in optimizing software for Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza and it is stain on the entire industry of programming and software engineering.