Does anyone know why tech companies tend to be so hostile to unions? I'm not sure if its due to the large amount of venture capital invested or other reasons.
Because unions could increase wages, stop the scams companies like to pull with options, and push back on under-staffed expectations of the impossible.
Companies benefit by taking as much of the profit for themselves as possible, rather than doing right by their workers. Some of that pressure comes from VCs or shareholders, but even in private companies it takes a rare founder to put a worker's interests ahead of their own.
All for-profit companies are hostile to unions, because unions reduce the amount of economic rent that they can extract from their employees.
Tech companies can afford to be more vocal about it because a significant number - arguably, the majority - of their employees genuinely believe that they would do worse with unions (regardless of whether it's actually true).
I think at least in part this is because much of tech is in US, which has widespread "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" syndrome in general, but especially so in tech.
I get the impression that a lot of Software Devs buy into libertarian philosophies.
I think this is changing though. There’s a lot of people working in tech and with the kind of abuse that’s been reported (ahem, Amazon) we might see that change.
Companies benefit by taking as much of the profit for themselves as possible, rather than doing right by their workers. Some of that pressure comes from VCs or shareholders, but even in private companies it takes a rare founder to put a worker's interests ahead of their own.