The world is shades of grey, not black and white. My only experience with union work is as a non-union developer brought in to fix the software of union government developers. They were legitimately terrible at their jobs, unable to code anything or be useful outside of QA work. I made significantly more money than their capped government salaries as well. The flip side is their job, healthcare, and families were much more secure than mine.

I’m fine with people being lifted up, but it’s very frustrating when your coworkers carry no burden and do nothing. I have no idea about other industry, but in government it’s so hard to let people go that no one bothers to even start the paperwork, they just hire non-union contractors to do the actual labor. Worst of all worlds.

This is average middle America, not a tech hub in any way. I’m a fairly average dev.