Not all programmers have high comp, and high comp are extremely dependent on market conditions and skills. And a programmer career can be rather short too due to ageism. Doctors have a much more stable and predictable compensation.

this is due to increasing productivity of the market.

lower tier productivity engineers are being filtered out continuously, and being replaced by higher productivity new grads with chatGPT types.

same as professional atheletes (like olympic athletes) retire rather quickly and do something else (coaching, brand advertising, etc).

Dependent on skills is a good thing.

The AMA is functionally similar to a union for Doctors.

AMA does not negotiate paying wage though.

it only limits as a Cartel to limit the supply of new doctors (and keep foreign licensed doctors away from the market) - this is typical cartel behavior, not union

Not even close to comparable. Becoming a doctor takes many more years than becoming a programmer. They have legal ramifications if they make mistakes instead of “teehee oopsie all our data leaked sorry”. The vast majority of programmers have a bachelor’s degree or lower. It is actually laughable to me that you would compare programmers to doctors.

In any case, we should aspire to follow the model of unions and not cartels.

becoming a good engineer takes a lot of years too. your average 4 year college degree does not guarantee you become an engineer, plenty of new grads are without jobs.

the best engineers I know have been coding since middle school and by the college graduation have 10+ experience coding at internationally competitive level.

this is comparable to medical profession.

if you ever meet an exceptionally good engineer - just ask him for how many years has he been coding? plenty will say at least high school if not earlier - all the way till their PhD that makes it two decades of learning+coding+improving.

as for model: I am anti union and anti-cartel. Just free market as it works in the silicon valley. The competition is actually good, even from offshore workers - because it forces productivity to increase and constantly filters out the bottom ranks of the profession - they leave coding to something they are more capable of: people management, product management, program management, etc etc

The best tradespeople I know have worked their trade since high school.

Has anyone studied career satisfaction among licensed doctors versus unlicensed software developers? It seems very common for doctors to feel locked into a choice they now regret. In equilibrium a barrier to entry benefits the marginal successful entrant not at all.

these are people who go to medical profession for money and prestige.

same regrets exists among engineers who go to CS for money and faang jobs, and then realize how miserable they have become in the process of chasing the gold