I agree wholeheartedly that collective action is how we stop balancing poor management on the backs of engineers, but good luck getting other engineers to see it that way. There's heaps of propaganda out there telling engineers that if they join a union their high salary will go away, even though unions have never been shown to reduce wages.

I've worked places that refuse to fire low performers and its hard for it to not be toxic. I'm not saying this outcome is a forgone conclusion of unions, but my union experience is that poor performers take even longer to get rid of and I'm not sure I would be interested in that sort of environment again. This is more of an implementation problem than philosophical, but theoretically good and practically bad is still just bad.

I don't like unions because one bad hire can destroy a whole team, and the option to remove that hire is worth more than any benefit a union can give me.

I also think people here misunderstand what unions do. Unions are inherently conservative (small c) institutions that aim to protect the status quo. Improving processes is not a fundamental goal to unions. We saw this with the ILA that fought to essentially ban automation in the ports that would drastically increase efficiency because of the belief that this would reduce union jobs. It's foolish to think software unions wouldn't end up becoming like this.

My hunch is that software engineers are averse to unions because they correctly perceive that unions are a wide angle away from the type of professional organization that would be most beneficial to them. The industry is sufficiently different that the normal union model is just not very good and has a 'square leg round hole' feeling.

For instance by and large the role of organizing to not to get more money but rather to reduce indignities... Wasted work, lack of forethought, bad management, arbitrary layoffs, etc. So it is much more about governing management with good practices than about keeping wages up; at least for now wages are generally high anyway.

there are also reasons to dedend jobs/wages in the face of e.g. outsourcing... But it's almost like a separate problem. Maybe there needs to be both a union and a uncoupled professional standard or something?

Guess that's why gamedev is the one region where this is really starting to gain momentum. High salaries were already not a thing, and tend to mean nothing if you're laid off after 3 years of development for the release of a new game.

Though I think Gen Z in general will be making waves in the coming years. They can't even get a foot in the door, so why should they care about "high salaries"?

People aren't going to try to wrest control from management because some project is going off the rails. No one has any particular faith their coworkers will run anything better, and the pay checks show up regardless.

I don't think unions are the right thing here, you just need to get together as a team and talk with your higher ups, that's a far smaller scope than where unions normally come in.

But I totally agree, I think people are too compliant and fear banding together to have influence on higher ups. I'd argue in most places the engineers have far more power than they realize since they are in high demand due to shortages of qualified personnel. (at least in many countries in Europe)

There are tons of factors in play though that I believe contribute to this like some employees being friends with their higher ups not wanting to hurt their careers, not wanting the tough discussions, the repercussions if management says "no" etc..

A union might help improve wages and working conditions in some organizations (although I personally wouldn't want one). But there is zero chance that a union could ever achieve widespread improvement in software architecture, methodologies, or project management. We don't have much consensus on the right way to do things, and what worked well in one circumstance often causes disaster in another.

How about licensure and liability instead? That’s the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of the rest of the engineering world. Sure it’s a guild system with a new name, but if the bridge collapses, somebody is going to be in a courtroom.