I’m all for taking action. I just don’t know what action best suits my needs, other than finding a new job or starting my own business and hoping I don’t become one of the greedy ones too.
Tech workers shouldn't punch down against unions. We should be pro-union in general.
While you could argue "too many tech workers think they are some kind of top 50% of tech workers" and be correct, that is very different than claiming unions help everyone but the top 1%.
Unionized employees make more than their non-unionized counterparts [0]. Even if the top earners to bottom earners gap shrank in relative terms, in absolute terms both would likely be higher.
[0]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/weekly-earnings-of-nonunio...
If I'm one of many types of service worker, sure I very well might join a union because I'm pretty replaceable and my income has little to do with my individual performance. I'll do better by forcing my employer to collectively bargain on terms that are relatively favorable to me by law.
That doesn't mean that all tech workers should support unions entering their field.
They’re saying too many erroneously believe they are part of the top 1% of their field. They’re thinking they’re better than they actually are. And so, mistakenly, it follows that unions are of no use to these top performers.
You’re right of course, that super high performers don’t always benefit from a union. But the rest of us do when those folks have a sense of obligation to others.
I build community/commons/etc. in my personal time (which also includes some overlap since I do have some social relationships with work colleagues).
The amount of money I make at my job allows me dedicate more resources to those efforts, rather than intentionally docking my own pay to benefit some random person who happens to be performing a similar job to me much less effectively and would stand to benefit from being in a union.
Unions basically buy job security for a fixed duration of time for their members by offering concessions related to compensation. Competent workers in a non-declining field (i.e. pretty much all of tech) already have job security via their skills, and don't need to explicitly guarantee it by giving up some compensation to offset that risk for the employer.
It makes even less sense for software development since it can be moved overseas so easily in most cases.
I am paid very well. But my employer makes so much in profit that any loss to other engineers would be vastly outweighed by the amount won from the bosses.
Unions are not just about job security. They can fight for compensation and benefits. And job security is not some meaningless thing, even for competent workers. Getting laid off still sucks even if you can find another job. If you are here on a work visa that's going to be stressful as all hell even if you are a massively in-demand engineer. We can also see what happens when there are coordinated layoffs by the bosses. It is definitely not the case that all competent engineers are having fast turnarounds to get another job right now.
However, unions in practice enforce mediocrity while also becoming an institution that exists to support itself (aka its leaders) rather than its members once it reaches a large enough size (which is not unique to unions at all).
Unions makes no sense for a top performer in a field where an individual can outperform other workers performing similar tasks by orders of magnitude. Software development is one of those fields.
What part of that do you take issue with?
now your employer holds you hostage via health care & if one spouse loses a job the other is not able to quickly replace part of that income
Tech companies used to hire all the brilliant engineers because they were worried about startups eating their lunch.
Without antitrust enforcement, they've grown large enough that they can essentially bleed money in any of their non-core markets for decades without it impacting them. So this clearly isn't the case anymore.
We need to:
(1) get the DOJ/FTC/EU/ASEAN/etc. to slap the FAANG / Mag 7 hard. Bust them up into many companies. It would probably even result in greater market value being created as these companies are inefficiently sitting on gold mountains that they do not monetize and also making insane malinvestments that simply waste millennia of human engineering in stupid ways that have absolutely no potential of succeeding. But more than anything, this oxygenates the field for competition and provides greater upside to the financial / labor / innovation capital that are actually doing the work.
(2) start lots of startups that erode the key money makers of these companies. They're quite vulnerable right now. And they've laid off a lot of highly skilled labor.
Google should be four or five companies, at minimum. And it's time that the governments of the world demand it.