Right now, software developers have LOTS OF POWER. Companies are constantly courting devs, offering very high salaries, and including incredible perks that simply aren't available in most other industries. Yes, some engineers are exploited, but on average the power lies with the employees.

When you think of all the "union overhead": voting on contracts, complying to work rules, occasionally going on strike, there just isn't enough pain to make that worth it. Yes, I might work too much overtime and go on call at bad hours, but I can also leave and get a new job relatively quickly, and get paid a lot to work in a climate-controlled environment with free drinks and food.

A real software union will arise if and only if it becomes necessary. If somehow everyone is automated out of a job and the few engineers left feel that their very existence is at risk, and the few employers remaining ruthlessly exploit those engineers for minimal pay and benefits, THEN people will fight back (and a union is one possible strategy for this fight). Until then it's a waste of effort.

This is actually not true in my experience. Having a high salary and perks isn't the same as having power. On-call is a perfect example where, AFAIK, it's not the norm to get paid for it (as a developer at least), and if you don't like it, you're free to get a new job. Except the new job will likely have the same policy.

There are other work-life examples: for example, I've tried to find a part-time job, and to get jobs to offer me more vacation time in lieu of higher pay. Both of these are more common in countries with strong unions, but I've never been able to get them here.

My view is that you need to look at the totality of compensation for the totality of responsibilities and decide if the deal is fair or not.

Nonsense. There are a bazillion software companies out there and most look nothing alike. If on-call is a dealbreaker for you, just ask the right questions and be clear up front.

And if you want to work part time, consider contracting.

It’s fun and all, but I’d prefer more vacation time over a ping pong table and free dinner.

The "perks" I see being offered for software developers are essentially free for employers to offer at scale. When you're paying someone a 6-digit salary, "free drinks and food" at work are cute but pointless. Anything of real value, like working conditions, are never up for negotiation. I see lots of people here saying they've never been paid for being on-call (nor have I). Most people I've asked say they'd prefer, and are more productive in, a private office, but no employer in my city offers it. You can't just switch employers to fix this.

"Union overhead" is very low, for what workers get out of it. Strikes are actually quite rare. Boeing machinists are a giant union here, and they haven't been on strike in over a decade. Voting and compliance are strange things to complain about. Either they're already done today, but in different contexts (e.g., one-on-one meetings, if your manager listens to you and has the power to give you what you want), or they're not done today, and it would be a great improvement for workers if it were.

These complaints sound downright bizarre in any other context. I don't hear anyone looking at a modern democratic republic with safety regulations and saying "Well, things like voting and compliance are just more trouble than they're worth".

Only if you ignore the fact union members are giving up power to union leaders, who can force them to give money to support political candidates as a condition of employment and who can, as part of a contract, deny them the ability to participate in labor actions if the union leadership disagrees, probably for some profit motive.

(With how Hollywood is run, you might as well have While Loop Engineers.)

So... we switch hats a lot. In the last six months I've been (a) deep into research, producing basically Beamer slidesets; (b) implementing that research in Python; (c) spearheaded the basic product design process, albeit based on the whole team's insight (my lemma was "I'm basically an anthropologist trying to make sense of what everyone's been saying", although I made significant calls (d) pitching in with front-end programming in Angular when our third party provider pooped out and it got to crunch time and (e) spent deep time writing finance spreadsheets and valuation models.

It's a tight ship and I'm not even the most multi-talented person in the crew.

IMHO the real selling point for a software union would be a union-sponsored tax advantaged retirement plan that is ruthlessly optimized to being employee favored. Lots of startups don't have retirement plans or have shitty ones. Furthermore, lots of companies run into issues with non-discrimination testing for "highly compensated" line engineers. If you get things set up with a multi-employer plan with a pretty lightweight collective bargaining agreement for employers to sign, you can get significant tax advantages.

A few ideas, not in any specific order:

It would kill start-ups, wouldn't it? If you have to obey union rules, you can't have one person who's the DBA and the project lead and the primary programmer and and and because those are all different jobs and require different union employees. Great if you're Microsoft and can afford it, but otherwise...

What would it do to Open Source and Free Software? Can it be Union-Certified if it's made by people who aren't all being paid? If a company has to Look For The Union Label, as the song goes, is it going to be allowed to use software which comes from outside the corporate sphere?

Related to the above, what would happen to hobbyist programming? Would it be regulated out of existence entirely, or merely relegated to people writing software nobody's allowed to use because it was made off-the-clock?

If the union so desires, it could state that no union member may do all the aforementioned jobs at once unless they have at minimum an indelible 5% ownership stake in the company; bear the title of Chief Technical Officer; report only to the CEO, COO, or directly to the board; and have no employee subordinates. It sets the expectations for any company wanting to do that. Any company wishing to ignore it can still hire non-union employees, but the union employees are instructed to embargo any company that does not meet the standards for employment.

Hobby projects are irrelevant. There is no employer. Unions are a cartel for paid labor by employees, where there may be a power imbalance between owners, managers, and laborers. In a hobby project, the worker is always the owner.

FOSS is likely unaffected. Any employer that has FOSS projects is already reined in by the threat of forks. In the extreme case, the union could manage their own forks of FOSS projects, and refuse to merge changes that don't meet union criteria.

It isn't about whether anyone is paid, but about whether everyone is following the cartel rules.

Why would the union rules require separate people for two positions? Why would this be relevant to open source and free software? Why would it be relevant to hobbyists? And so on. I just don't see these problems in other fields. There's unions for actors, and stagehands, and janitors, but I still have a local amateur theatre in my neighborhood, and the lighting director sweeps the floors when that needs doing.

Whenever I say the word "union", all the complaints I hear against them from programmers sound like straw men. That makes me believe that it's the right track.

You refused to understand my post and downvoted to disagree.

Your position is, therefore, refuted by your own dishonesty.