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why is this voted down?


I neither upvoted or downvoted that comment, but this isn't Reddit. Low-effort opinion posts like that aren't the type of thing that people generally want to see here.

As far as unions go, I always support the right of anybody to voluntarily organize, but unions are IMO a horrible fit for programming.

I hate how this sounds, but programmers have a creative job that's not relatively fungible like say a house painter who does a relatively standardized task. The best painter in the world is physically capable of what, painting about 2 or 3 times more square feet per hour than an average painter? I don't know exactly, but I doubt that the best painter in the world is say 100x more effective than an average one.

Programmers vary wildly in the value they produce. Good programmers who want to unionize are going to plant themselves near the lower tier of compensation when they easily provide 10x or 100x of the value that a less skilled programmer brings.


computer scientists are not programmers. programming is a task that might be done as part of what a computer scientist does.

by organizing, further commodization of this very challenging and relatively modestly compensated profession can be prevented.




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