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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Lawyers and doctors in the US effectively have union-style control on the supply of lawyers and doctors, via the Bar Association and AMA.

Developers have no such labor association. We also have headwinds like H1-Bs, that push down our wages.

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I think that's true, but the interview process for a SWE is (I think) unusually rigorous. I'm often surprised when I talk to my friends in other fields who get hired after 1-2 hours of get-to-know-you interviews. Meanwhile, almost every SWE job has 4-6 hours of technical evaluation proctored by the incumbents. It's true that if someone has done 12+ years of college, med school, and residency, you can trust a little more on their resume, but I've also turned down SWE candidates with impressive sounding pedigrees after seeing them bomb simple exercises.

Maybe we've figured out how to haze our way to exclusivity without centralized gatekeepers?

It's just a more inefficient way of gatekeeping because instead of doing the Leetcode gauntlet once and you get a license or credential that actually means something, you have to run it at every single company you apply to.

Perhaps eventually developers will organize one.

I don't think big companies will ever allow it. They're floating on bliss from being able to push in federal laws that exclude programmers from overtime pay. Places like Google would pay trillions to keep that going and push down wages more and more.

H-1 is a good point. Where are the H-1 lawyers and doctors?

There are lots of H-1B doctors in the small towns and rural areas that are typically underserved by larger hospitals and networks.

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-...

> Just over one-quarter of doctors in the United States were “foreign-trained” as of 2017, meaning that they received their medical degrees from schools outside of the United States.

This is one of the challenges of the H-1B visa and that tech specialities are dominating the lottery it makes it more difficult for other areas to get doctors willing to work at, well, rural doctor rates.

if it's anything like where I'm from then you can't practice with a foreign license unless you convert it to a local one. the same organization that make a cap on the number of doctors/lawyers is the one that allows or reject the license conversions (permits). so foreign labors as a loophole does not work. when there were attempts to remove this the doctors went on strike. the justifications is removing the cap on number of doctors by allowing foreign labor would increase the variance in quality of the doctors and increase the risks to the patients.

Programming skills are more universal and don't depend on the country. Whereas lawyers and doctors have different standards and laws to operate on. It would be tough for immigrant to justify to spending 4-7 years studying laws of another country just to take a chance with H-1. If you fail to obtain that you virtually unemployable by your country and need to spend more time learning laws of you country

Developer burnout or attrition for various reasons is a real thing.

If salaries drop, even more programmers will leave the industry, so its a natural balancing effect.

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