The common complaint is that since unions (at least in a lot of classic union jobs) force pay based on tenure, its difficult or impossible for bright people to succeed and change things.

And I'd agree that such a style of union would be antithetical to a company like Google, but its also not the only kind of union.

Yeah, I just don't see a tech union functioning like that. There's no reason a union would have to enforce strict tenure requirements on salary, especially if most workers in the union don't want that.

>It will likely stifle my salary, and the salaries of a lot of high earning swes.

Yeah, this sounds like more anti-Union FUD than being based in actual data. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though if this can be substantiated through more than just cherry picked examples.

> They generally get higher salaries for their employees, no?

Unions typically (almost always) bargain to improve the compensation of the average employee. Outlier events are flattened by definition, meaning it is harder to be fired, and harder to make outlier money.

I don't think that's correct, but even if it were, it sounds like it'd be a good thing as it'd raise salaries for most developers. Surely we don't all think we're the exceptional ones, right? That's simply not possible.