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Mikael
Mikael

Posted on • Edited on

Should devs unionize?

I recently came across a lot of devs (especially web & mobile developers) that suffer from increasing competition, low barriers to entry and quite frankly amateurism in the industry.

Will it be smart for Devs to start protecting their jobs, expertise and service quality?

Maybe unification behind a standard defining rules to operate in the sphere, or even a union might be beneficial?

When you think about it, devs expose their clients to substantial risks when it comes to data security and plain bad service (money invested that lead to nothing). It might be beneficial for everybody to set a standard for web-mobile dev that is followed across (or part of) the community in order to be able to justify decent levels of income and reassure clients that they actually pay for quality.

What do you think?

Top comments (2)

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cyberhck profile image
Nishchal Gautam

I was doing some research on this, for same job, the skills requirement in tech is very different, at the end of the day, price is set based on demand, for front-end I might be good at react but I might not be able to do vue or angular, unionization of this kind of job seems difficultly, I wouldn't want to get lesser pay, because I know what kind of skills I have, and in it, skills matter a bit lesser than ability to gain skills, if you can research and get the job done, that's better, as there are so many variations of work, one can't be expected to know all

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craignicol profile image
Craig Nicol (he/him)

Yes, unionised devs are a great idea.

Setting standards is for professional bodies who may or may not be aligned to a union (in the UK, medical doctors are aligned but nursing has a professional body and a union).

We need professional bodies to protect those like the workers in VW or Boeing where the work is actively illegal or dangerous. We need unions to protect diversity (such as to protect workers against the Muslim ban) and to provide an ethical safety net for workers who don't want to work with ICE or Facial recognition for non-criminal surveillance.