Shedding Bikes

I've stumbled over your blog several times, most recently from reddit on your post about no famous programmers. The comment that amused me most was you getting another sysadmin job offer. Honestly you are right in that we love to code, but end up giving away much of what we do for free without anyone remembering. I mean, come on, it's not like Steve Jobs actually wrote OS X, and everyone knows about Bill Gates little OS purchase resell dance... Point being, fame does come to those in the software community, but it is to those who are leading something, and make a bunch of dough.

Over and over companies go through a hiring process to ramp up a project. Every time, programmers and engineers need to reprove themselves to some ahem douche. But the fault is not theirs, it is ours. We allow ourselves to be controlled and manipulated. We refuse to learn how to negotiate. We scoff at collective bargaining. In the end, we may get pissed off, threaten to go somewhere else, and finally get a raise as the realization of what we actually do sinks into some manager's head somewhere, and they panic and cave on the raise we demand. But really, we gave away our ingenuity, drive, and dedication for years at an undervalued rate.

Where am I going with this? The idea is for the programmer's "internet workshop". In the age of the internet, we can collaborate on projects like the Gnu/Linux OS. But we need to be on the same team as programmers. And we need to get paid. The "internet workshop" would be a place where companies come to get software built. Yeah, a consulting company... kind of... But it would have it's own internal mechanism for programmers from around the internet to work on projects, get paid, and establish reputation, not with clients, but internal to the "workshop community", so that they don't have to interview every time. When a hard problem comes up for a project, a talented programmer can be assigned (or choose to jump on it). When there is some "scut work", a junior programmer can get some of it out of the way, and get an opportunity for feedback from senior programmers. And they can get paid a decent rate...

It would take a lot for something like that to happen. But until it does, we will continue to compete amongst ourselves as programmers, drive our compensation down through competition, and devalue our abilities. Doctors realized this long ago, and created the AMA. Engineers (civil, mechanical) created the PE designation. Even actors created the SAG (but big stars still make millions). It's time for us to do the same as programmers.

Zak

-- Zachary Kuhn IT Manager Advanced Reservation Systems, Inc. 858-300-8600 x622 310-701-3041 cell