Thread by @scotthannen

Here's a random, half-baked musing. It will go nowhere useful.
Suppose developers united and decided that if code didn't meet certain standards, we would refuse to work on it.
I'll use unit tests as an example of such a standard.

If your code has been committed past some cutoff date, no member of the United Federation of Excellent Developers will work on it.

Sorry, you'll have to find developers from the ever-shrinking pool of non-Federation developers to work on your code. They probably won't do very good work, but so what? You didn't care about that in the first place.

You are marked, cursed. You can either start over with higher standards or suffer the consequences forever.
What would be the motivation?

Businesses have a short-sighted practice of throwing together shoddy applications as fast as they can, and a year later trying to fix them when they start to realize what a mess they've made.

As a result developers who could have prevented the mess and done a better job are stuck in the depressing mire of someone else's awful code while whoever made the last mess is busy making the next one. It's backwards.

I'd love to put some fear into their hearts. It's for their own good.
"Did you hear what happened to company XYZ? They weren't careful about who built their site and now no one will touch it.

They can't get rid of the people who built it because everyone knows that no one else will work on it. They've been trying to fill positions for months but no one will even go in for an interview because everyone knows they have the mark.

Let's do a much better job and make sure that doesn't happen to us."

The industry can't seem to find the motivation to change their practices, so we create that motivation for them.

There are a million things that could go wrong with it, and plenty of ways to improve on it.
Perhaps instead of refusing to touch it we charge higher rates or require that they pay for expensive remediation.

Perhaps as the Federation grows we start raising the rates to work on anything we didn't develop.

Accreditation for developers has been problematic and it could be even worse if it meant something. But perhaps that's where it leads. We spontaneously form our own accreditation out of nothing. Is that possible?

Anyway, that's my fantasy. Developers, unite! Make it suck less. It's good for our customers too in the long run.

Of course, step one might be that the Federation is very small and everyone who joins is immediately blackballed to prevent its growth. Throw that on the big pile of problems to solve.

Flash forward to 2032 - my dream has come true but I'm leaving in sadness and anger because I hate what it's become. The Federation has become evil and splintered.
That doesn't have to happen, does it?

Maybe the whole thing should start with an expiration date.