Your salary is somebody's lost profit

Having skills that are in demand, and being able to walk into another job whenever you like, is a description of the current market rather than a fact about you.

Try the hypothetical. Somebody builds a system that turns requirements into working code and it actually works. That’s a hard problem and nothing has solved it, and code generation has already shown it isn’t impossible to produce working output from a model. There are hundreds of founders working on this right now, possibly thousands, and one of them might get lucky.

How long are you in demand for after that lands. Years, months, less. Perhaps you’re fine because your value is in defining the requirements rather than typing the build and that’s a really fair position to be in. Perhaps your particular job is one where it can’t reach.

It would take out an enormous amount of the simple CRUD end of the industry though and that’s where the pressure would come from. If there are suddenly more developers than developer jobs, everything that keeps wages up stops working at once and you don’t get a raise when there are twenty people who’d take your role for less. You can’t negotiate terms when leaving means competing with all of them and the act of leaving pushes your own price down.

That’s one vaguely plausible scenario out of many, and I’m not predicting it and the point is what it reveals about the arrangement you’re currently in.

Developers are very well paid right now and it’s worth seeing that clearly for what it is which is an opportunity for disruption. Your salary is partly somebody’s lost profit. Companies do not want to pay what they pay and they pay it because the market makes them and that’s the entire mechanism holding the number where it is. There’s no other force involved.

Follow that through. If a company can cut that cost by lowering wages or lowering headcount, every employer in the industry will move on it at the same time because the incentive is identical across all of them and none of them has a reason to hold back. Founders know this is a large pain point for their customers and they’re working on it. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s the ordinary operation of people looking for something expensive to make cheaper.

Which is the thing worth sitting with when the subject of a union comes up and the answer is that you personally have options. You do, today. So did every worker in every industry that got reshaped, right up until the year they didn’t and the useful moment to have built something collective is always earlier than the moment it becomes obviously necessary.

Technological change reducing how many people you need has been the driving force behind a union in a lot of other industries. The scenario holds up even if the specific version where a machine writes your code turns out to be fanciful because the mechanism doesn’t depend on which technology does it.

None of that means the scenario arrives, and predictions about this have a poor record going back decades. What it means is that the reason you’re paid well is external to you, and anything external can move and the arguments people reach for about their own being safe are the ones every group has made shortly before finding out otherwise.

The part worth acting on is small and boring. Know what you’d do if the market moved, keep the relationships that would matter, and treat the current number as a position rather than an identity. That costs almost nothing while things are good and it’s the only version of this that’s useful before the fact rather than after it.