1. People in unions are fired all the time with cause. 2. Terrible engineers exist with tenure/some other reason that they are not fired. Tech is not unionized right now and there are plenty of horror stories...

On the other hand, I’ve seen great teams who were continuously stymied and stonewalled by incompetent leadership who failed to address the concerns of engineering, who refused to be transparent, who made boneheaded decisions without a check in power.

Tech, particularly Silicon Valley tech startups, have always had rather lofty ideals and conjured visions of employee empowerment, which management then fail to deliver upon. One could imagine a tech union or guild that goes beyond the function of old-style industrial unions but actually serves as a means of protection for a company’s workforce to challenge management decisions if a majority disagree, in terms of strategy. Every engineer has felt like Dilbert working under a pointy-headed boss at some point.

Why do you need a formal Union for that? Europe is full of voluntary workers guilds that provide employee input to leadership. I'm very open to this model in the US. It is less adversarial and does not require employees to be locked into Union rules. As I mentioned above, every employee in the US already has job protections if they strike individually or as a group for improved worker conditions. I think this middle path provides all the upside and none of the downside

I don't think a formal union is necessarily required. However, American business culture has such an antagonistic relationship between management and labor that it is likely such guilds' input would be automatically discarded by many companies' management. Compound that in tech the spirit of worker solidarity or even collaboration is often dismissed, you don't even see engineering "guilds" forming at tech companies.

I think a true middle path would be German-style co-determination, where there is active engagement and cooperation between workers and management as equals, moderated by the government.

https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/business/co-determinatio...

https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/indust...

I mean which do you prefer. Being on a team with terrible engineers, or getting layed off. Take your pick.

It's not really a binary choice either. With unions it just increases the probability of you being on a team of terrible engineers while lowering the probability of you getting layed off.

So the real question is which probability metric is more important to you and other engineers?

One of this scenarios would leave me without job, another one would push me to quit my job. Outcome is the same, but bad team is likely to cause a lot of frustration first.

No, one scenario is slightly better because it gives you the choice to quit. In the other scenario there is no choice.

Times constantly change you won't always be in a situation where you have the finances to just quit just because you're frustrated with a job.

As a high paid SWE we often forget that A job is more then doing something you "like" to do, it is a means of survival. When times change, when hard times come or when some life changing event happens, being allowed to survive is a good thing.

Imagine how terrible it would be to be on a team with a guy who thinks that employers treat all people with due process always.

Union people get fired all the time.

What firms can't usually do to them is fire them without actually demonstrating cause.

I don't have to imagine that I work in it every day, I think it's pretty standard to have a few A students a bunch of C students and a few F students. The problem with the union is the F students don't get fired and if they do they just move them to another open slot assuming they have seniority. On the plus side you're not going to get replaced at 45 by some low-end college grad because they'll work for half the price, is job security worth carrying a little extra load?