You're kidding, right? Programmers are decently paid but should strike for a 40-hour work week.
The few engineers who care to engage in the negotiations which yield their true market value end up making several times that of the average. Yes, some of them are exceptional engineers, but some are not, and the only real distinction is being able to find and negotiate optimal market rates for their work.
If wasn't supporting a whole raft of people who aren't my kids I could get by on 10 hours a week. Most of these people will be self sufficient in the fall. Then we will see I can get fewer hours.
Charge hourly, produce good work(actually work those hours you charge) and spend enough time learning to stay proficient in your niche of the craft. This recipe won't make you a millionaire quickly, and it won't get you a house in the bay area, but it has given me great financial freedom in the Midwest.
Last year I had a consulting gig in a Europe based company, with offices next to a big airport. As summer was slow anyway I'd work 30h weeks (invoicing four 7.5 hour work days) Tuesday - Thursday, and spend the other 4 days at a beach in Ibiza, Bulgaria or Cape Verde (with occasional remote login to take care of emergencies).
That's something a worker's organization would help with, even if I don't feel like I need them in wage negotiation.
Not that I disagree that it was a huge deal, it's hard to gather greater sympathy/empathy from people that tend to make less than half of those aggrieved.
So if you don't want to work 40 hours, don't. I have much less sympathy for a software engineer who has better leverage than a kid who works at McDonalds and couldn't earn a living wage working 60 hours.
The fact that you could strike and not really sacrifice much; and if it failed find another job, puts you in a great position. Unions are good for protecting those that can't afford to protect themselves and are at a disatvantage. SE is not IMO a vocation that needs to organize.
The games industry disproves your theory.
I have read several stories of people leaving game deve for a nice boring job writing insurance software for more money and fewer hours. Many could be doing it the other way around, write software for a lame, but lucrative, insurance company, then make a small lifestyle business writing indie games with a few friends.
First of all, "sub-prime wages" is not a thing I've ever heard of. Absolutely nothing on Google so I'm assuming you mean below market wages, which game industry wages are by definition not.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, paying people what they are willing to earn does not make game studios assholes. Everyone developing software for game studios knows they could make more writing software for a bank or some YC CRUD app.
> I have read several stories of people leaving game deve for a nice boring job writing insurance software for more money and fewer hours.
With the right skills, you can leave any industry and go to any other industry and make more money. Not sure what your point is here.
I agree there is the romantic factor in play as well. You have a lot of supply of devs and a random walk of success stories.
Most people who are super excited to make games are gamers themselves, and it seems to me that most gamers are pretty open minded. In my own research it seems to me that most indie titles that "don't suck" turn at least a modest profit. Don't suck needs to be defined objectively, but not being riddled with bugs (unless that's the point [Goat simulator, Desert Bus]), having a consistent even if primitive art style and being fun to at least some gamers is a reasonable definition.
The breakaway successes like Minecraft and Super Meat Boy should not be examples. Better example are Rovio's 50 games before Angry Birds. They made enough money to live on and make the next title while having a decent but not affluent lifestyle.
The unions also provide other benefits. For example, most of them own summer houses that any member can reserve to go spend a weekend away. You rarely hear the average Icelander on either side of the worker/manager divide complain about them at all. Everyone more or less views them as beneficial.
Once or twice a year they make headlines when one group of workers or another feels aggrieved and it escalates to a brief strike in some small sector of the economy, but on the whole, I don't think many Icelanders would trade their system of employment for ours.
Like so many other areas, I think the problem is that we in the US are just so very much worse at running our society and country than most other comparable countries. Look at health care. No one liked the ACA; no will will like the AHCA or whatever the Republicans pass. The problem isn't that it's impossible to do a decent job at a health care system. The problem is that we specifically suck. Put us in charge of anything, and we'll turn it into something awful that doesn't work, but provides some brief period of outsized shareholder value.
Actually, it's 1000x.
So while the EU plugs away making incremental improvements each year we keep jumping around in fits and spurts forward and backward. There is still a strong belief of American Exceptionalism even in fields where we are clearly inferior. Look at Healthcare Europe figured something out that we didn't and their is cheaper and better.
As you "scale up" in diversity, population, and geographic distribution the set of things people can agree on falls off dramatically.
Iceland has a very divisive political system at the moment. The ruling government has been a coalition of the Progressive and Independence parties, roughly the european versions of the social conservative and pro-business factions of the Republican party respectively. Though it should be said that no one in Iceland really touches quite how regressive American social conservatives are. And, of course, being (sort-of) Scandinavian, there's a massively strong Social Democrat/Pirate/Left-green contingent in the Reykjavik area that can't stand the agenda of the main ruling parties.
Iceland doesn't function because they manage to get people to agree more than Americans do. There are something like 13 political parties in an average election, and they stand in bitter opposition to one another across a huge variety of issues. Iceland functions because they make their government function anyway. Nothing about being small makes it easier for two opposing parties to somehow figure out a way to get the damned bills paid. You could replace the entire American republic with Donald Trump and Barack Obama, and we'd get no more done than we do today, because the government isn't trying to solve problems. They're trying to preserve whatever problem is most plausibly the fault of the other party.
We need new political platforms focused on consensus-based policies. Not distinguishing our groups from "the other"
Go look at the film industry, and the Writers / Directors / Screen Actors Guilds. The WGA doesn't stop screenwriters from negotiating their own terms. Do you think someone like JJ Abrams is getting paid the WGA set fees? That Tom Cruise works SAG and Equity rates? Of course not.
The point of the guilds in these industries is to set minimum standards for pay and benefits. It is designed to stop studios from exploiting people desperate to work in the industry. I majored in film and many of my classmates have gone on to work in Hollywood - I don't know anyone of them who would say their unions aren't a good thing.
Would you say that it works?
My understanding is that these unions make it more difficult for new people "desperate to work in the industry" to actually break into the industry.