The traditional structure of unions is probably outdated in most or even all industries today but it certainly is inappropriate in tech. This doesn't mean worker organising is unnecessary, as you say. Fortunately, many people are already organising in non-traditional ways. Check out tech workers coalition:

https://techworkerscoalition.org/

On training, in a warehouse you have be fully trained and competent to drive a forklift because your decisions are implemented in real time and you can hurt someone if you mess up. In software you can be given low risk problems to figure out, and your decisions and implementations are (ideally) reviewed before they go live.

Because after 2-3 years you can move for (on the very low end) a $10-20 grand pay increase without much pain at all. A raise you'd be unlikely to get at your original job. I am unsure of how a union could address that problem. It's a sellers market for software developers.

Boredom or better opportunities.

Why does it need to be addressed? Why can't switching employers every few years be seen as a good (or at least normal) thing?

I know many people leave because of pay reasons, and maybe a union could address that.

But I also find my self largely wanting to leave out of a desire for a new challenge, learn something new. It would be way to easy to stay stagnant at a company and than find yourself forced to deal with new technology in a new role, that for everyone else is old technology (and there is a limit to how much you can realistically do that for side projects). Not that it does not happen anyways.

I don't see any way a Union could (or should) address this.

My understanding is that some leave to get out of shitty working conditions, and many others leave because switching jobs every 2-3 years is the most reliable way to increase your salary.

Pretty easy to see how unions could address both of those issues. This might not work in favor of aggressively job-hopping careerists, but would probably work for everyone else in the International Brotherhood of Codeslingers.

Its employee choice. People get bored, they get tired of processes, and there are plenty of companies willing to hire them that will allow them to try something new, do something different, and deal with different processes.

I believe it's the result of the system we've created. Frogs leap from boiling water, and there's no sense in calling that "frog choice": obviously, the water is too hot.

That workplaces are universally intolerable after 2-3--as is accepted industry common knowledge--is not a matter of individual preference, but systemic inadequacy of workplace conditions.

Burnout is not a personal problem, it is an institutional pandemic.

> One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.

-- Carol Hanisch, "The Personal Is Political", in Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation

Good point. Employees are often promised very interesting projects, career growth and salary increases. Very often it turns out to be a bunch of lies and people move on and the cycle continues.

Despite all the claims on HN on how good life is for software engineers, our field has very high burnout rates and it's very ageist.

Not sure where "tying pay to tenure" came up, unless that's how you view what unions do? A union just means a group of employees negotiating as a unit, what changes they ask for isn't dictated in advance.