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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

Most tech workers I have met with parent commenters opinion have been laid off at various times in their career.

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.

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A friend of mine at Amazon got laid off during their big stupid AI push last year and yeah, being paid like $150k a year sounds nice until you realize that only covers basic living expenses in, say, Manhattan. Now was Amazon right to fire so many people for basically no reason? No, but software on its own is no longer marketable. One person can generate a hundred times more code than before the advent of LLMs, so you only need one person to do the job of a hundred. Now, it takes some skill, that takes years to develop, to use LLMs effectively in the workplace, so Amazon was incredibly short sighted to believe it was just some magical box that fixed everything automatically. But that doesn’t mean companies won’t be making similar moves, in the aggregate, in 10 years, when leaner competitors come to rip a chunk out of their profits. Do you see the capex of major tech companies now? They are _scared_, they have every right to be. You have to be just as nearsighted as those Amazon bosses to believe that things will continue as they always have, that this is just a short dip in a long term regression to the mean.

>If there is a company specific hardship

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".

The big 3 don't employ half a million fewer because they weakened unions. It's because manufacturing needs fewer people now. The UAW can't simply force them to retain half a million people sitting around doing nothing, and they can only do so much to ban the implementation of automated manufacturing systems.

> It's because manufacturing needs fewer people now.

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.

Big 3 global workforce headcount today is far far below what it was in 1970. The outsourcing explanation doesn't make sense.

And they all sell less cars than on the 70's too. But their profits still stay relatively high and revenue is steadily rising.

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 6.47 million passenger cars in 1970.

The big 3 produced 15.66 million passenger cars in 2025.

One would think the true efficiency gains are better quality cars that last longer and require less replacement

Are your numbers (which I haven't seen) include the headcount of the makers of their outsourced parts?

> most tech workers don't have bad pay or 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.

But despite those margins, it's also an industry with a LOT of unprofitable businesses, unlike any other industry in history. From many people's perspective, if they already earn well, why rock the boat in a high effort high risk way so that the union can negotiate an 8% raise instead of a 4% raise. I don't need the money. And the bad to worst case outcomes could give me serious irreversible buyers remorse.

> I don't need the money.

I promise you, management doesn't think that way.

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