I think a big part of the problem is how online education and bootcamps/college degrees for web-dev are structured. Often times people are so overwhelmed with the stack they are supposed to learn that quite obvious and important stuff gets lost. People just try things out until it works without understanding the underlying structure. If you come from a simpler MVC framework like Rails or Laravel, it enables you to focus on the really important stuff first, and explore from there. It is also much more rewarding to see some solid results early.
God help us. It's not his fault, to be clear, but God help us.
The problem is the dogmatism of it all. If you point to a simpler and a more obvious solution, your coworkers will ridicule you and turn you into an old man pariah.
For context, he's 40 years old and working in data science after a career switch from another data-heavy field. He's just learning web dev to build internal pages for displaying stuff, so no need to worry :D
It's not just about wage, it's about assigning appropriate work to peoples level and having them progress through the most efficient steps to mastery while also completing billable hours
Normally workers unionize to improve their poor conditions vs an abusive employer, and when they have little to no ability to find another job for similar/better terms. Is that the situation for software devs where you’re at?
That may be common circumstances where a union becomes the only viable option for the workers, but unions have additional benefits that something like it would greatly benefit the software industry.
In particular, it's the assignment of work to the union and then the union is responsible for pairing workers with the assignments which enables the union to create a training funnel where different requirements of the same job can be split among different workers of varying seniority such that apprentices are able to work on the easier items even when there are things beyond their skill involved in the overall work assigned to the union.
Typically a union does primarily exist to create CBAs for wages but this is another function of them which I think would be very helpful for SE and future protection.
So maybe not a traditional union is necessary, but I think there are some functions more or less exclusive to unions right now that would be beneficial to apply to SE. Hopefully that makes sense