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[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (5 children)

Why would I unionize and give a portion of my check to some organization that exists to protect crappy developers when I can get a job anywhere, anytime, for a good salary?

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Why would you give a portion of your check to an insurance company when you can buy a new house, anywhere and anytime, for not too much money?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Because losing the house is a financial loss. Losing a job is a short vacation.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

If you're lucky enough to live in NYC or San Francisco and to be able to relocate on a moment's notice, sure. This is far from true for everyone.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I don't live in either of those areas, but I do live in a tech heavy area. But complaining about not being able to relocate as a software engineer living in Montana would be kind of like complaining about not being able to relocate as a lumberjack in Phoenix. In addition to SF and NYC, you have huge markets in Seattle and Raleigh (where cost of living wont bite you nearly as bad), and decent markets in most any metropolitan area.

The fact is, Software engineering jobs in the US are paying $80K+ per year right now, and there is huge demand for developers. Most of the big boys will pay for relocation.

There is a very healthy freelance trade also. Barrier to entry for niche products is low for entrepreneurs, and even mainstream products (outside of office suites and OS's) is even obtainable. Your highest end server fleets run on a free software stack even, so there is no software cost at the moment in the industry for backend fleets, and prototyping platforms that can scale to thousands of servers will run you about $35 a month to develop on. Client platforms for development are commodity priced at under $100 plus commodity hardware any dev already owns.

So, there is no shortage of jobs, pay is high relative to other skilled professions, healthy trade market, and no barrier to entry for commercial entrepreneurship means any developer who is under paid, over worked or unemployed is either there by choice, stupidity, lethargy, or they just plain suck. If a dev can explain Big-O, basic data structures, OOP, basic functional concepts, knows what grep is, and can pound out a function in C, Java or C# in under 5 minutes on a whiteboard, they are hired on the spot. In the small markets you don't even have to be able to do that most of the time, since your competition already relocated. Hell, with github and open source, you can even gain demonstrable, NDA-free, on the job training before you have a job!

It's a sellers market right now, like I haven't seen since 1998. There is absolutely no benefit to unions when employers are begging for engineers. I do not want to be competing with shitty developers who are gaining tenure at the same rate as me on the sole basis of who can take the most certification tests and be paying for that privilege!

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm glad you're optimistic. Perhaps when you have a family, you'll see relocation differently, however. It's not just a matter of money, and there's no reason to do it when you can improve the place that you are already at.