I am a member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), US-based professional organizations for linguists and computational linguists, respectively. (More precisely, I am usually a member. I think my memberships both lapsed during the pandemic and I renewed once I started going to their respective conferences again.)
I attend LSA meetings when they’re conveniently located (next year’s in Philly and we’re doing a workshop on Logical Phonology), and roughly one ACL-hosted meeting a year as well. As a (relatively) senior scholar I don’t find the former that useful (the scholarship is hit-or-miss and the LSA is the dominated by a pandemonium of anti-generativists who are best just ignored), but the networking can be good. The *CL meetings tend to have more relevant science (or at least they did before prompt engineering…) but they’re expensive and rarely held in the ACELA corridor.
While the LSA and the ACL are called professional organizations, their real purview is mostly to host conferences. The LSA does some other stuff of course: they run Language, the institutes, and occasionally engage in lobbying, etc. But they do not have much to say about the lives of workers in these fields. The LSA doesn’t tell you about the benefits of unionizing your workplace. The ACL doesn’t give you ethics tips about what to do if your boss wants you to spy on protestors. They don’t really help you get jobs in these fields either. They could; they just don’t.
There is an interesting contrast here with another professional organization I was once a member of: the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE, pronounced “aye Tripoli”). Obviously, I am not an electrical engineer, but electrical engineering was historically the home of speech technology research and their ASRU and SLT conferences are quite good in that field. During the year or so I was an IEEE member, I received their monthly magazine. Roughly half of it is in fact just stories of general interest to electrical engineers; one that stuck with me argued that the laws of physics preclude the existence of “directed energy weapons” claimed to cause Havana Syndrome. But the other half were specifically about the professional life of electrical engineers, including stuff about interviewing, the labor market outlook, and working conditions.
Imagine if Language had a quarterly professional column or if the ACL Anthology had a blog-post series…