I think part of it is because the gap between the skill floor and ceiling is absolutely gargantuan. Unions work best when the skill gap is narrow, and ascension to different levels easily measurable.

The more I think about it, software engineering is almost completely antithetical to the idea of unions. Traditional engineers have so much structure around their fields because the laws of physics govern a large part of their craft. Not so with SE.

You think the laws of physics don't apply to software engineering?

They're not the fundamental constraint in work output differences. IQ/ability gaps matter way more than they do in programming than they do in construction work.

Let's not forget that there are unions for highly skilled labor as well. When I was a classical musician I belonged to a very robust and very helpful musician's union. Everyone I know _always_ had a preference for union gigs as they usually paid better and ensured that you didn't have to deal with all sorts of nonsense from your employer (like rehearsals running overtime, not getting paid in a timely manner, blind auditions, etc).

Professional classical musicians require a great deal more training (and talent) than programmers to get to the level where they can make a living doing it.

Blind auditions are bad? I thought they would be preferred by the musicians.

My mistake, I mis-edited that. Blind auditions are preferable. The musician's union helped ensure that auditions were blind.

Whew. Thanks!

It does, but only at a very low level. Most in the profession are several layers removed from directly worrying about how fast the bits are moving on a CPU, and are more concerned with adhering to sound design and algorithm patterns.

The poster you replied to never said that. He said that the laws of physics matter far more to traditional engineering than software engineering. Unless a software engineer is working on algorithmic complexity, low level hardware/security, or distributed systems, real world physics usually don't matter too much.

I cannot disagree more. I see absolutely nothing in software engineering that is antithetical to unions. Much of what you claim could also be applied to acting, or to professional athletes, who do have unions.

> It is interesting that programmers (as a whole) seem resistant to it.

Mostly because our working conditions are not bad, we are more or less paid fairly, there are a lot of options to move around.

Also it'd be bad if we had other people negotiating on our behalf, for what we probably feel is less pay than we are worth, and the concept of seniority would ruffle and stop a lot of newer grads from getting higher paying jobs over people that have been working already for 25 years in the industry.

> the concept of seniority would ruffle and stop a lot of newer grads from getting higher paying jobs over people that have been working already for 25 years in the industry.

That's not a required part of a union. I think one of the misconceptions people have is that if you have a union it looks and operates exactly like one on a Ford factory floor. If you formed a union it could do exactly what you want it to do, and not do the things you don't want it to do. If you wanted a union to do nothing other than negotiate payment for overtime and a new Macbook every year you could just do that.

I think that's an interesting discussion worth having -- supposing a tech union existed, what would we want it to negotiate for?

Some possibilities I can think of are: better pay, less work hours or paid overtime, better benefits, more vacation time, minimum office size / screen size / cubicle wall height, a cap on the ratio of employee pay to CEO pay, a right to say no to work that violates a professional code of conduct without risk of reprisal, access to training material, pay transparency, prohibitions against overly-broad intellectual property assignments and a right to work on non-competing projects in one's free time, prohibitions against anti-compete clauses, and mandatory prior notification of layoffs.

I imagine most people who work in tech would have a different list, but there would be some overlap.

I used to think that as well. The problem is that if you don't have an arbitrary employment security clause (seniority, aka LIFO), employers can find ways to fire you/lay you off arbitrarily for union activity under the cover of other reasons (e.g. unrealistic performance goals). I don't know how to resolve this problem. But without LIFO, you can be guaranteed that most people who use the union for its intended purpose doesn't have much of a future at the company.

The people with political influence in the union might not be those whose views align with the more technically proficient members of the group. I anticipate a developer union being another vector for leeches to grasp onto productive developers and (indirectly) siphon off their well earned money.

I've seen the types of developers that thrive in political climates. They manage to get paid way too much money to make poor decisions about subjects they read the wikipedia article on just before the meeting. I honestly believe these are the types that will rise through the union ranks and will use their power for harm and personal enrichment.

Union interviews will be all be standardized and will consist of: drawing UML diagrams, naming 24 design patterns in 30 seconds, and white-boarding a blockchain Rubik's CryptoCube solver implementation.

Points will be deducted if the solution is not an abstract OOP design that can extend to n-dimensional Rubik's CryptoCubes.

> Union interviews will be all be standardized and will consist of: drawing UML diagrams, naming 24 design patterns in 30 seconds, and white-boarding a blockchain Rubik's CryptoCube solver implementation.

So, like today's retarded interviewing environment for most SV companies?

Gamedev is the only sub-industry that comes to mind that could see a large benefit from a union. That said burnout is so high and there's so many people beating down the door for a job that its never really materialized.

>> It is interesting that programmers (as a whole) seem resistant to it

Software developers and people in IT are probably two orders of magnitude more likely to be libertarian / anarcho-capitalist and conservative in economic views than your average union worker in another field. That's definitely a large impact as well.

I think this is the gist of it. Most of the arguments I’ve seen against unionization seem to appeal to the inflated egos that a lot of developers possess.

And a lot of "oh God what if people who had been working there for 30 years made more than me"

That's a bit unfair, isn't it? Arguments with regard to dues, easy mobility, necessity, agility, and so forth don't seem at all ego-driven.

Aside from dues: electricians, plumbers, carpenters... all sorts of highly skilled laborers both have unions and are basically freelancers, every bit as mobile as you could want.

Unlike most Americans, software developers feel themselves to be temporarily embarrassed billionaires.

Heh, I'm sympathetic to the libertarian viewpoint in many ways, but I enjoyed this comment all the same.

Unions are romanticized a lot in the current culture, but we shouldn't just pretend that they're purely positive. The union is a middle man between the employee and the employer. Unions can and do extract dues, impose their own rules and stipulations, and add friction and bloat to employment. If you don't like the restrictions or the rates that have been negotiated, you have a lot less freedom to move around and do something about it. If you cross the union, well, good luck.

I'm not trying to argue that unions are wholly bad either, but there's a trade-off to be had here. It's not as simple as "people dislike unions because they're too dumb to realize that they want one".

My feeling is that a lot of knowledge workers look down on unionizing as a "blue collar thing" (ignoring the fact that actors, writers, orchestral musicians, etc. are all often in unions as well).

I think the realistic among us realize that creating a software developer’s union would lead to dramatically increased offshoring. Actors, plumbers, etc.? Can’t offshore those, so the dynamic between workers and management is a little different. Software development, you can offshore the hell out of that. Shoot, look at automobile workers, granted there’s still a sizable amount in this country but nothing like it used to be — and I think unions had a lot to do with that (“we’re paying them how much? Just make em in Mexico”).

Can you truly offshore the hell out of software developers? That was the big fear of the late '90s and '00s, but despite the rise of software salaries (and the knock on effects on the business expenses in Silicon Valley), that didn't seem to come to pass.