The workers are the industry. The greedy shareholders are the problem.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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No industry in the history of industry has ever wanted a union.
You get people pushing for unions because you deserve unions.
The tech industry is such a shitshow right now they deserve unions.
Hard agree. Every other day a big tech firm will conduct sweeping layoffs of thousands or tens of thousands of employees. These companies are not on the verge of bankrupcy.
The other thing is the management and boards of tech companies are incredibly incestuous. Your board is made up the boards of everyone else, they’re all CEOs competing for the same workers.
You’ve got two or three big investment firms that run the boards of all the major companies, which is anti competitive too. They’ll always push for a product they own to their other companies. They know when their other portfolio companies are doing layoffs, what they’re paying their staff, etc. they even share that with other companies so they can “compete” on salaries.
For an industry that cargo culted anti cargo culting, the management and execs all cargo cult the same over hiring and mass layoffs.
Employees get treated like crap now.
10 years ago I’d work overtime near a big release or when there was an outage. But now you get pinged all the time, there are no boundaries, and there’s an expectation. I’ve had CEOs joke about 9-9-6 work schedules and just openly flaunting how much worse they can make your life.
The terminal rot starts when your company brings in some ex Amazon or Meta execs (C suite, VP, director, whatever). They push for an almost pure numbers perspective. Judgement and morality be damned, think of the metric first.
Numbers are what these people know — these people survived the natural selection process at the most hostile and politicking companies you can think of. They’ll do anything to survive and get ahead.
You cut your support team as a cost centre — support doesn’t scale.
Then before you know it you’re 4 years into “we just have to push extra hard this year guys, the pace will slow down next year, we’ll get headcount too”. The whole time your performance reviews are getting more frequent and become more invasive — we’re adding an AI use component, make sure to list your growth areas and the impact (metrics!) of everything you’ve shipped. Remember, you’re competing with everyone we could hire, so how did you get better than them this quarter?
This field used to be good. And no, it wasn’t free lunches that made it good. It was having teams that gave a shit about the customer, it was putting the customer above all else, and it was going home feeling like you worked on something useful and good. You worked hard, you delivered value, and you got paid well.
It was good when it was new and growing and adding to innovation. Once the bean counters figured out the grey beards' magic it got corrupted.
I grew up with stories of kids my age literally changing the world with new technologies and standards for the tech world. All the way into college, those people were innovating and developing things and having ethical back bones.
We were a generation of Nikola Teslas, but we didnt see the Edisons that were hiding in the wings.
Depends on how you define "the industry." The tech workers are the ones driving the actual production of goods and services, so it's pretty reasonable to say that the workers are the industry.
Obviously this headline assumes that CEOs, managers, and investors are "the industry" in question, but I don't necessarily agree.
Perhaps the majority of workers in the industry should have better say as opposed to the corpo parasites who want to suck the workforce dry of their net worth
THE CEOS DONT
FTFY
My union made my healthcare much better and is the reason behind my raise. Its great!
I have always found it odd that tech/IT is not more unionized and supervised by some sort of professional order.
Doctors, nurses, construction workers, airline pilots etc are all deemed important trades and professions that require some form of professional order to supervise and attest the competency of the labor.
But for some reason IT is all like "you watched some Youtube videos, got certified by Cisco 15 years ago? All set to configure the security of our healthcare network". I am exaggerating obviously but still... IT is so intertwined in everything some sort of professional order would make sense. And union definitely.
Forming new professional bodies takes time, administration, and some kind of governance structure. There aren't a lot of grey-beards that have a bunch of spare time for organizing that. Also, historically, most IT people have seen themselves as "lone wolf frontiersmen" and the rate at which the industry has changed has made any kind of professional certification obsolete very quickly. Legal statutes, the frontiers of medicine, the best practices and techniques for pipe joining and bricklaying, etc. advance very slowly by comparison. Mature industries are much easier to unionize on average. IT is spectacularly immature (in multiple ways) by comparison so it's very hard to create a professional body to represent tech workers.
Would it be good if we had something like that? Yes. Is it going to be easy to build, hell no. A better model might be the development of independent tech co-operatives, with distributed ownership. If a bunch of senior software engineers with some spare cash to pool creating a bunch of major tech competitors with a co-operative ownership model might actually serve the industry much better than the centralized corporate model we find ourselves subject to, AND provide a basis for developing industry unions, but the closest the industry has to something like that at a large scale is... well Valve, and even that's not a true co-operative.
Also other than a few outliers (gaming) IT and development jobs have been pretty good in recent history. There hasn't been much push for change until the circumstances shifted.
UNIONIZE
The industry never wants it.
They should have unionized 20 years ago when it was easy instead of crowing about how useless the humanities were.