That’s about the sum of it, yeah. At least for myself, every job I’ve had in the past 6 years has been through my network, and the interviews have been short and sweet formalities.
This is a really important point to understand. Any time I hear people talk like the market will never get worse I'm reminded of San Diego in the early 90s. There had been a ton of great jobs there with all of the defense contracting jobs — whole suburbs full of highly-trained engineers who making great incomes because multiple companies were bidding for their skills.
Then the Cold War ended and the entire sector halted. None of those companies were hiring, anyone looking to move was selling a house in a neighborhood where many of their neighbors were doing the same thing, and if they tried to switch fields there was a lot of competition. My first employer had a $15/hour software QA job getting applications from people with engineering MS and PhD degrees who'd been out of work for a long time and were willing to take a huge pay cut just to have a job, only now that education and experience was seen as a negative because it was assumed that they'd leave as soon as the job market improved.
And, yes, the job market did recover but everyone affected still had to eat the cost of significant periods of unemployment or being forced to sell a house because they couldn't make the mortgage payments. IT has some differences in that the skills are more generally in demand but there are also some interesting risks like an entire profession becoming commoditized as e.g. a SaaS offering becomes a viable alternative to hiring staff — especially because the last couple decades have left a lot of tech workers are used to thinking of themselves as having more in common with senior management than we actually do and not everyone understands how quickly most companies would cut them lose if it fit the budget better.
I believe that we are well paid because of the demand and the amount of money a good developer can make a company. If that equation changes, then why shouldn't developers get laid off or lose their jobs?
Currently, supply and demand is working very well for most of us, especially in SV. I would never trade my freedom for a union that, in all instances, become friction and the bureaucracy of the union benefits from my hard work.
And will the teamsters union be able to save all those truck driving jobs? I doubt it, unless they do it through politics...
Also, organizing is not just about protecting one's job. It's about collectively negotiating for stuff like pay, benefits, working conditions, etc. that are extremely difficult to negotiate as a single employee due to the vast power imbalance in the employee/employer relationship. I don't know about you, but my last few jobs offered almost zero room to negotiate anything--like most jobs, when you work in tech you work entirely on your employer's terms.