Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind. I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
I agree, but that's actually one of the strongest arguments for why tech workers should unionize now. Wages are high because employees have leverage due to 10-15 years of demand for skilled workers being higher than supply. If you wait until that leverage is gone to form a union then you've lost a lot of the leverage to negotiate for better conditions as a union.
For the record, I've been in a union in another industry much earlier in my career, and I'm pretty on the fence about a tech workers union, but I think your argument is pretty short sighted.
That's leverage you didn't build and don't control and it's already eroding as the market catches up. Which is why collective bargaining needs to exists, a way to hold onto ground when individual leverage isn't guaranteed.
BTW, it's not like unions had it easy. Even as they were legally recognized (organized labor was treated as a antitrust problem), the judiciary has in the US been dismantling the little foothold it has after it. The US needed 2 new laws to actually get something. And even then, it doesn't enjoy the same flexibilities that other forms of collective arraignment has, such as capital, in the way of "right-to-work" laws, at-will employment and strikes aren't protected as they should. Hell, legal existence and being on equal footing with the other side of the table have never been the same thing.
You wrote "Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind".
How do you know?
And, for the sake of argument, let us say it is the best deal in the history of humankind, does that make it fair that the big tech companies did the following...
As a small rebuttal of sorts, consider
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
You are making less money than what you would have been making if that illegal arrangement had not been made.
Well, if a European dev asked me how I could possibly know if they'd make more in a less regulated environment, I would point to American salaries.
Agree it's hard to know things and that antitrust arrangement was bad. If we're talking policy, we are implicitly accepting counterfactual reasoning (because otherwise why would we change policy).
I do recall some reports that concentrated on just workers that had unions in the United States versus workers in a similar field that did not have unions, and it concluded that unionized workers get paid more.
But, it was not the tech sector, so someone, maybe you, will argue it does not count.
Just very, very difficult to get to the bottom of what is the best way.
I am in the we should unionize camp. My stance is based on, the tech companies have way more leverage than you or I. They do not work in your interest. A union is imperfect but it is better than nothing to get "some" leverage back.
Teaching for instance you know exactly how much money you'll be making over the next 20 years. Add a masters (which may or may not contribute to you being a better teacher) get a bump.
Do you believe there is a direct correlation with how long someone was working there and how productive they are? Would you like to live in this rubric? What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric? It works in some places that are commoditized. A toll collector does the job, and maybe there is some merit to rewarding someone for loyalty. But programming is not that kind of job.
The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit. Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?
This is actually spot on. In my last gig I was working with the kind of people French job security produces. Never again.
Given my experience as someone who is looking for full time work over 3 years later because executives decided that data centers are better to pursue than quality products: yes, and yes.
>What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric?
People who need to worry about rent next month.
>The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit.
And we know from decades of knowledge this is never true. Two equally talented engineers can be paid differently based on where they live. They can end up with much different compensation based on one company lucking out with a deal and another missing a crucial deal and collapsing. Which isn't an engineering factor. We know negotiating gets you paid more, which is a skill orthogonal to engineering.
This illusion of meriocracy will be the collapse of the whole industry.
>Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?
Because you think the job is building things. the 20 years employee understands the systems and how to keep things together. Life isn't all about moving fast and breaking things. Especially in fields like teaching the future generatrions.
It is well recognized that meritocracy is an illusion. A much better determinant of success is the birth lottery. If you're born into a rich family versus a blue-collar one, you have unequal starting points, access to education, better-than-average medical care, and more reliable, higher-quality food. Once you win the birth lottery, you have access to a network full of connections that will hire you based on who you know or who your parents are, rather than your ability (e.g., a Nepo baby). When you are a nepo baby, you are insulated from many of the inequalities built into our financial and education systems.
You'll frequently hear from successful people that they got where they are because they have sufficient morals or good standing in the world, and that if you didn't make it, you're clearly not a good person. This rationalization is mostly bullshit because there are many in the 1% class who are lousy human beings and, by their own justification, should be on the street.
When you buy into meritocracy, you are contributing to keeping the billionaires in place and supporting their destructive behavior, tearing at society.
see: https://www.linkedin.com/videos/the-institute-of-art-and-ide...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2025.2...
https://therowlandfoundation.org/the-myth-of-meritocracy-ref...
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/01/the-myth-of-m...
Thankfully: the Games Industry is in fact not the Tech Industry. Thus, game developers are a lot more receptive to unionizing than general tech. But it's still a bit absurd; I've always had the advice of "move out of games to a more stable tech job if you burn out". Well... those stable tech jobs sure became unstable quickly.
So, software has always been rated for extreme growth. Investors absolutely love software for that reason. They don't like bridges, or planes.
But none of this is set in stone. Software engineers are losing leverage by the day. It's possible our salaries, stability, mobility, and equity will all decline. That does happen to careers sometimes. We're just assuming things will continue as they are, but they're already not, so I don't think that's a safe assumption.
Unions are, ultimately, about balancing leverage. You have to understand that, as an individual worker, you have little to no leverage. As a software engineer you have, arguably, the most leverage of any individual workers, and even then it's incredibly lopsided. You are purely at the behest of the company and the market, for the most part. Your control is an illusion, carefully implanted in your brain through decades of propaganda. Unions do not suddenly give you perfect leverage, but they certainly give you more.
With the layoffs we've seen, how many engineers wanted that? And, what could they have done? Well... a lot of people are now realizing, nothing. They had no control. They are passengers.
Not really. It is all about leverage. When you've got what they want, and they can't get it anywhere else, they pay the price.
Whatever leverage tech workers have, they would have even more if they unionized. Salaries are high? Maybe they could be even higher. These trillion dollar corporations can afford it.
> employees own equity
Why would this be mutually exclusive with unionization?
Or, from an IP-driven industry perspective, the offshoring of Hollywood following the SAG and WGA strikes in the early 2020s.
And if IATSE couldn't stop VFX from being offshored back in the 2000s and 2010s, then tech unions wouldn't be able to either.
Edit: can't reply
> Without film industry unions, might the offshoring have been undertaken even earlier?
Not really. VFX was already largely offshored by the early 2010s despite only starting as an industry in the 1990s.
> Yeah but this is a limited perspective. If the union was truly international (like they _used_ to be) VFX workers could push for high wages wherever they worked.
VFX workers in most countries are not unionized either, and much of the industry has already shifted to ASEAN, China, and India where there is no real unionization to begin with.
And the experience of the VFX industry is probably the best example of what would happen to a heavily unionized software driven industry.
Edit: can't reply
> are you arguing that it’s better to just straight up fire people
Nope, but there is a real risk that what arises is labor immobility and blocking new entrants.
I don't know about the US, but I spent 4.5 months trying to get a new job here in the EU as a senior dev. Everyone tells me that was quick.
We're already doing that without uniuons. Older folk can't afford to retire and new grads cannot get a leg in to start their careers. we're talking something like a quarter of new grads who cannot get any job in their field out of college.
Yes, let's point to examples of intentional union decay as proof that unions do not work.
>VFX was already largely offshored by the early 2010s
And there's still VFXs jobs domestically. For the same reasons offshoring tech in the 2010's didn't work out
> much of the industry has already shifted to ASEAN, China, and India where there is no real unionization to begin with.
Most countries are not "at-will" like the US. those houses cannot just layoff people on whim.
That said, yes. VFX is very much a contractor-driven field. But there's a different between knowing the end of a contract, and waking up one day to realize your key fob doesn't work and you're locked out of your account. You get to plan around the instability.
Edit: But also, this was a pre-profit VC-backed company. If those companies can't lay people off, it's not like you make good money with more job security. Either the company just has less runway (so I still lose my job, just later and with everyone else) or they adapt by hiring fewer people at lower salaries.
Would suck to be in this market as an entry-level engineer, though.
YMMV.
I see you haven't been in the current job market.
How many EU's are migrating to the US?
Most people's solutions in first world countries is not to go through the arduous process of finding work in another country and leaving behind their entire culture and network behind in hopes of a better life. That is not the same decision you make as if you're jumping to another state/province (which in itself is already a big life change).
What Job creation? The last 3 years have only shedded IT roles (what the tech industry falls under) in the jobs report.
I think it's important to note that unions aren't very good tools to avoid layoffs. If there is a company specific hardship, the union can't simply force the company to maintain headcount all the way into bankruptcy. On the other hand if there is a secular change across the industry, the unions can't prevent that change either. Easy example is how Big 3 automakers were 100% unionized in the 1970s and have since shed about 500,0000 American jobs despite producing more automobiles than ever.
Unions tend to be good at bargaining for better pay and benefits, but the current status quo is that most tech workers already have decent pay and benefits anyway.
But what if they could be even better? This is an industry with 75-80% gross margins, quite unlike any other industry in history.
I promise you, management doesn't think that way.
That's the issue. 2/3 of my layoffs were not "financial hardships". One was just a medium sized studio who ran out of projects and didn't want me to continue. The other was a large global company who was about to make big purchases (and eventually, change leadership).
Maybe with job #1 I could have saved it, but I was underpaid and already looking out the door, so it wasn't surprising to me. Job #2 was 100% the kind of place a union would have saved my job from. (and if you care, Job #3 was just classic "startup funding pulled". They shut down a year later. It is what it is, but I guess you don't see the red flags when you get a nice pay boost and a shiny company on your resume).
>Easy example is how Big 3 automakers were 100% unionized in the 1970s and have since shed about 500,0000 American jobs despite producing more automobiles than ever.
yes, almost like they spent the last 50 years working with the federal government to break down union powers. Surely isn't a plethora of literature on that.
>Unions tend to be good at bargaining for better pay and benefits, but the current status quo is that most tech workers already have decent pay and benefits anyway.
You forget stability. Making big money one year and none another year just averages out to "okay".
It's because they outsourced most roles starting in the 90s. They don't need as many people due to efficiency gains, but not "hollow out entire cities" levels of efficiency. Human labor is still necessary, and human labor in other parts of the world will be cheaper than many automation gains for times to come.
That doesn't tell me we got efficiency gains, they just shifted models on how and what to make. And where they make it. If we had true efficiency gains there'd be more cars sold, perhaps at cheaper prices.
The big 3 produced 15.66 million passenger cars in 2025.
Instead, you got a nice paycheck, and made sure to make the world actively worse for everyone. Good job.
> I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
AI is going to kill the goose
Seriously, I wonder if tech workers really even understand how lucky they are being able to sit at a desk instead of, say, toiling away in the mines.