Is it because of something inherent to software development, or is it just that software development became a big job category in an environment that was skeptical of unions?
> Is it because of something inherent to software development, or is it just that software development became a big job category in an environment that was skeptical of unions?
Unions are neither a good nor a bad thing. It's a price cartel, which is rent-seeking in its nature, but so are the employers. Thus effects of unions depend on competitiveness of the particular market. In low-paying markets they are clearly beneficial and counterbalance the monopsony.
Programmers exist in a competitive market tho. Average programmer has a great bargaining abilities and most people know it. If you are a senior you wont get much from union, it's just a hustle. If you are a junior/immigrant unions will harm you by raising the bar.
You reached reductio ad absurdum in two tiny steps. So unions are seeking rent by virtue of legal ownership of the motion physical bodies, just as property owners seek rent by virtue of ownership of real estate.
When life is working out for folks and they make a decent income, they tend not to complain or want to rock the boat so as not to risk things. Can’t think of anything that would risk ones income capability more than being seen by companies as a union organizer - retribution is illegal but can’t be enforced, so it is de facto legal. See: starbucks suddenly closing all the stores that decided to unionize.
People who own companies are not known for being nice but the best way to get the full force and fury of a billion dollars arrayed against you is to suggest unionization.
Unions benefit workers by giving them leverage through collective bargaining. For the US specifically, demand has been so astronomical for developers for the past couple of decades that most wouldn't have gained additional leverage from joining a union. Don't like your working conditions? Just job hop and get a pay increase as a bonus.
That calculus might change if demand for developers cools down as a long term trend but it's not going to be anytime soon.
I do think the high level of autodidacts makes it very different from anything else. It doesn't feel like a "trade", those involve building things with your hands. It's perhaps more similar to a "profession", like the much older ones of lawyers and doctors, but it hasn't developed the professional organization structure to go with it.
Disintermediation also makes a difference. It's possible - very unlikely for any one person, but possible, and keeps happening - to just bootstrap a product out of pure labour and very little capital. At which point they get to keep a lot of the returns. It doesn't at all fit a nineteenth-century economic model, so you can't apply the M word.
The "10x" phenomenon also makes a difference. Whether it's real or not, I think enough programmers believe it's real and want to be part of the 10x and somehow get a 10x reward. This is the exact opposite of a factory line or mass farmworker situation.
(there's lots of interesting business anthropology research on piecework vs hourly rate work, I believe)
It is because software developers are the capital and managerial class and they are the rich guy with the boot that stomps all the lower earning working class schleps , not the other way around.
Software developers _are_ mostly factory workers, it's just that their factories make software.
But titles aside - only some software developers are highly paid; some aren't. And we are not "special people" - that's just company propaganda. There are millions and millions of us around the world. And in most of our companies, there are a lot. And our employment conditions are not "special", they are like the other SW developers, and - guess what? Pretty much like those of most of the other non-manual-labor workers, even if the salaries differ by profession.
Most employers, and the media, do a lot to inculcate us with this belief in distancing ourselves from each other, emphasizing differences and supposed uniqueness, so that our interactions go through them; and that we not think of doing things - professionally and otherwise - by direct coordination and collaboration, but rather through the mediation of management.
But if there's anyone who has the capacity to imagine things operating differently than they do today, surely it must be us SW devs - if we don't limit our critical scrutiny to just the computers we work on but direct it also towards surrounding social structures.
Unions are neither a good nor a bad thing. It's a price cartel, which is rent-seeking in its nature, but so are the employers. Thus effects of unions depend on competitiveness of the particular market. In low-paying markets they are clearly beneficial and counterbalance the monopsony.
Programmers exist in a competitive market tho. Average programmer has a great bargaining abilities and most people know it. If you are a senior you wont get much from union, it's just a hustle. If you are a junior/immigrant unions will harm you by raising the bar.