Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs into staying within my guardrails, or something. Whatever it is, it is very much *not programming*.
Obviously unions would be in a position to limit the software engineering wrecking ball that is AI, but I pushed against that and now I have to sleep in the bed I made.
If its any consolation, its the bed we made collectively. It was easy to push back against unionization early on, we were likely better off individually. I too am self taught, although I went the ops route, and enjoyed making more money than I thought I deserved from basically a hobby, and a skill so in demand that I could effectively just go to any company I wanted at any time.
I'm also turning 40 this year, and can look back and wish we all did things differently but the wild west nature of early tech that allowed a self taught college dropout to build a successful career was too good, beneficial. It was one of the rare times that true upward class mobility was possible for anyone with a little bit of tech aptitude, so I think it can be forgiven that we didn't unionize or push for it back then.
I do feel bad for anyone graduating right now or just trying to enter the field though. The ladder has been pulled up.
Traditional blue collar seniority, set wages, and hyper specific job roles simply won't work in knowledge work. So there tend to be higher severance payouts in lieu of seniority promotions, pay bands with equity review instead of pay steps, and very flexible job roles.
I think a lot of folks see unions from their youth working in construction or service work, which have a lot of corrupt "company unions" which mandate hour caps and shit benefits for part timers.
Realistically IT workers with leverage like ourselves need to think of unions as contract insurance. You already have a contract, the collective agreement can be as broad as possible to allow the flexibility to respect individual contributors, while the pooled dues are put towards eventual contract enforcement.
My first IT job gave me quite a surprise when they ripped up my contract and said "so sue us." That's the day I found out how much a labour lawyer hourly rate costs. 10 years later as a union leader I started signing the sizable cheques to our law firms, there's always a bad manager somewhere causing a lawsuit...
Not all unions are the same. There are absolutely unions that are as bad as the naysayers say, but there are also ones that you rarely hear about that just quietly chug along with decent enough relationships with employers.
That being said, the appeal to me is minimal. I like working for small to medium sized companies where I can enjoy the flexibility of what tech stacks I work on. While the idea of some sort of optional trade union that could cover me for benefits, legal fights, contract enforcement, and maybe extra job insurance is appealing, nothing like that exists where I live. I have gotten healthy severances in the past due to knowing the rights I have in my jurisdiction, but that also means having the will and ability to hire a lawyer.
I'm in my mid 40s and rode the wave of a workers market over the last 2 decades. I'm still in demand, too. It's not quite as easy as it was 5+ years ago, but AI hasn't replaced me, though I'm actually "supervising" its work from an experienced angle. From that perspective I'm just a lot more productive.
If you are in a right-to-work state and you don't join the union, then union members know you're benefiting from the union without contributing back. Historically, this leads to an uncomfortable work situation for you.
If you are not in a right-to-work state, and the collectively-bargained contract involves a union membership requirement - which is typical? - then you have to join the union if you want the job.
This is where the gatekeeping concern comes from.
> I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
Unions have dues, so you're giving up part of your salary for membership in the union. If the union salary is equal or less than you would be able to negotiate on your own, it's a disadvantage for you.
There are enough cases of unions protecting bad actors (cops, prison guards) or lazy, tenured individuals that it's easy for a mildly privileged autodidact to decide they don't need the hurdle - or the help.
If you're not white, tech unions are not your friend.
And atleast in my work, everyone is paid more than minimum.
(sure, that could be what the result of negotations is, but it doesn't have to be)
Germany has very strong labor protecting laws.
Replacing line engineers and operators is very difficult.
Volkswagen is firing 100k employees in Germany none the less.
The idea that you can successfully unionize in software..in US..Where you could simply retain a small number of staff key members pay them very well and put them on a mission of outsourcing and milking the IPs..I don't see it.
The best moment to unionize wad 20 years ago.
Now there's not enough leverage by the staff.
> Over the past few years foreign carmakers in China have been flattened by local rivals such as BYD that have fast become world leaders in electric vehicles. As the Chinese market has gone electric, foreign carmakers’ share of it plummeted from 62% in 2020 to 35% last year. VW has lost its position as the top carmaker in the country. Last year it sold 2.9m cars in China, down from 3.9m in 2020. Only around 200,000 were EVs.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/04/to-halt-their-...
> because of banning Russian gas
That is the symptom. The real reason is the lack of diversification from Germany, assuming that hard discount would last forever.
The biggest VW market is china.
Just to point out, in 2020 one every 20 vehicles sold globally was a VW in China. VW sold more than twice of Tesla at its peak in China alone.
And VW has US plants so it's not that impactful, not different than us automakers woes.
Sadly true in the USA. The number of people working in games is dropping like a rock. Maybe in Europe.
I've seen this idea discussed by others, but I don't know any pithy slogans for it. (Unfortunately, it's the ideologies with the catchiest sound-bites which tend to dominate in the "marketplace of ideas".)
Gamedev is different, since even games from 20 years ago (e.g. Half-Life 2) require a higher-spec computer to develop than to target. The games you can make on a 20-year-old potato are limited: for those, I can see how the "means of production" idea might be more applicable.
I don't think myself wise enough to know how to fix this, and given that fact I certainly don't want to rule; but I can at least point out the problem.
Like, it's certainly easy to point out that there are things that aren't being done efficiently, but finding the balance on how to prioritize the right efficiencies is the why society exists.
I don't want to structure everything to support my good ideas: I want to structure everything to support everybody else's good ideas. We can surely do better than the status quo, which is to structure everything to support a few billionaires' bad ideas. (Why are the only business models for the web "gatekeep" and "surveillance advertising"? Why are we burning valuable hydrocarbons when we orbit a star? Why is the pornography industry so abusive? Why are our social lives mediated by the anorexia rectangle – what happened to local third spaces? Why do we even have the anorexia rectangle – what happened to personal computing? When everyone knows what's wrong with the municipal plumbing, including the people whose job it is to work on it, why is nobody permitted to fix it? Why are so many resources being poured into generative AI to solve problems that we already have cheaper solutions to, if only they were permitted to be be implemented? Why war?)
I do not labour under the delusion that I can fix any of these issues, or would be able to fix them if I were "in charge" (whatever that means). But I know that these problems are not intrinsic features of the universe: they can be fixed in principle.
Why do you need a new battery? I usually unplug old batteries in old laptops and just use them with a cord.
The scabs who don't strike?
I'm pro-union and unlike the person you are responding to I'm not sure things are "dead in the water", but I do think software developers had a much better leg to stand on to push for unionization a few years ago than they have now (and, probably, going forward).
Longshoremen literally retired early and were paid pensions out of corporate profits from container related productivity increases.
What comes to mind is whole towns made of dockworkers which disappeared, and some places like Manchester lost their port and their industry died too, and it took them decades to recover.
Of course, some other like Rotterdam flourished.
I do recommend the book, but I think it shows many sides of what happens when a large change happens.
- Someone in the early 19th century
You _can_ do computer-based work anywhere, anytime. People working in software have no leverage at all, between India and AI. Software unions will kick the race to the bottom into overdrive.
"The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), commonly known as the First International [...] was founded in 1864 [...] The preparatory Address of English to French Workmen, drafted by trade union leader George Odger, articulated the need for international cooperation to prevent the importation of foreign workers to break strikes:
A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages [...]"
Software work appearing to be extremely fungible with offshoring and AI is all the more reason to unionize. It doesn't matter to the employer who is doing the work, so the union is the only leverage to truly saying, "hey as the person actually doing the work, I would like to be treated better, and you can't just ignore me, fire me, and replace me".
The race to the bottom already started as soon as companies saw more fungibility where there was less before. Software unions won't kick that into overdrive, they'll slow it down.