For the kinds of devs you are referring to, the kind that post on HN, I am skeptical that a union could materially improve the year-over-year wage increases the

For the kinds of devs you are referring to, the kind that post on HN, I am skeptical that a union could materially improve the year-over-year wage increases they already see. At best their compensation trajectory wouldn’t change and unionization often causes wage compression in other industries (read: it would reduce their compensation). If you are one of those highly paid devs, everything about the calculus of unionization is unlikely to produce a positive expected return. Software is manifestly not in a race to the bottom; there are persistently more jobs than devs that can fill them if you are sufficiently skilled. In Europe, businesses encourage labor solidarity among software devs because it suppresses wages in a global environment where software wages are rising rapidly. Exceptional devs are shamed for believing their worth is so far above their peers, even if it is true. I don’t believe most wage gains in software in Europe would be happening if US tech companies weren’t in Europe pushing the wages upward. Unions focus on the compensation of the median ability worker. The issue in the software is that ability has something like a barbell distribution; workers at different ends of that barbell live in different worlds and are not interchangeable. The “median dev” barely exists as a useful abstraction.