There is a Rockstar Programmer Union already. It basically consists of the programmers who network, are excited about their craft, and start or join companies that do innovative things with software. Wages for programmers in that group are significantly higher than for those who just join any old software development group that they find through Monster.com, and then never talk to anyone outside the company.
I met someone at a fencing club that was a programmer for a health care software company. He was my age, graduated a year earlier, and his salary was half what mine was (we were both on our first jobs out of college). I didn't know programmer salaries could go so low, for college grads. And his skillset was completely ghettoized - the company used a proprietary programming language and involved lots of ___domain specific knowledge. I suspect the difference was that I got my job through a friend of a friend that I'd met on the C2 Wiki, while he took the first available job he could find upon graduation, probably through Craigslist or Monster.
I met someone at a fencing club that was a programmer for a health care software company. He was my age, graduated a year earlier, and his salary was half what mine was (we were both on our first jobs out of college). I didn't know programmer salaries could go so low, for college grads. And his skillset was completely ghettoized - the company used a proprietary programming language and involved lots of ___domain specific knowledge. I suspect the difference was that I got my job through a friend of a friend that I'd met on the C2 Wiki, while he took the first available job he could find upon graduation, probably through Craigslist or Monster.