this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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Time to unionize.
Too many dudes who think their special and irreplaceable sadly.
if we unionize I may not get raises!
Employees are more threatened by the prospect of offshoring and H-1B replacement labor than by their egos. Unlike cops or plumbers who can't be easily replaced by remote teams abroad, tech workers face the real risk of being replaced. Strong unions exist across many industries precisely because workers naturally form them to protect their interests and to preserve their way of life.
The 'tech bro' mentality is no different from ego in any other profession. Unionization isn't about eliminating individual personalities, but about collective worker protection.
Having spent much of my career working alongside H1-B holders, an employer would have to be delusional to think that the quality of education of the average H1-B holder is comparable to that of someone from a good US or European university. There's not even much assurance that the H1-B holder actually took the exams for the degree they purport to hold. And many of the universities are little better than trade schools.
Also, disempowered workers temporarily enslaved to their employers are never going to innovate like free people. They're forced to be yes-(wo)men in order to survive and pay off the corrupt middlemen who got them their jobs. Megalomaniac CEOs might be OK with that, but that's not how you get the Next Big Thing. That's how you milk the idea your founders had two decades ago.
It's bullshit for companies to lay people off and retain H1Bs. The government shouldn't approve any new H1Bs for development positions until companies stop the layoffs and the amount of developers searching for work goes down significantly.
The whole purpose of the H1-B program is to deter American tech workers from unionizing and to undercut their legitimate demands for a slice of the pie. It should be shut down. Those tech bosses constantly yap about how much they believe in markets, let them deal with real market forces without the government giving them this huge subsidy at the expense of their staff.
Since unions are about common interest and ideally orthogonal to ideology, I'll add that my subjective interest, as someone living in Russia, is that US tech workers were offshored and/or replaced by immigrants. Because that will long-term weaken the US as an aggressive nation, by losing qualifications.
At the same time if US tech unionized, that could mean weakening the incentive for that aggressive behavior, and weakening big companies.
Hard to decide really. Basically the only bad variant is if it's half-done, enough unionization to stabilize, but also not too much so that they'd still have enormous foreign labor resources. That would mean very powerful corporations and no change in politics.
I couldn't disagree more. Ideology and economic relations go hand in hand.
Unions' power is in being inclusive. Ideology makes divisions.