Teaching for instance you know exactly how much money you'll be making over the next 20 years. Add a masters (which may or may not contribute to you being a better teacher) get a bump.

Do you believe there is a direct correlation with how long someone was working there and how productive they are? Would you like to live in this rubric? What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric? It works in some places that are commoditized. A toll collector does the job, and maybe there is some merit to rewarding someone for loyalty. But programming is not that kind of job.

The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit. Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?

Well, if a European dev asked me how I could possibly know if they'd make more in a less regulated environment, I would point to American salaries.

Agree it's hard to know things and that antitrust arrangement was bad. If we're talking policy, we are implicitly accepting counterfactual reasoning (because otherwise why would we change policy).

Edit: But also, this was a pre-profit VC-backed company. If those companies can't lay people off, it's not like you make good money with more job security. Either the company just has less runway (so I still lose my job, just later and with everyone else) or they adapt by hiring fewer people at lower salaries.

I think it's important to note that unions aren't very good tools to avoid layoffs. If there is a company specific hardship, the union can't simply force the company to maintain headcount all the way into bankruptcy. On the other hand if there is a secular change across the industry, the unions can't prevent that change either. Easy example is how Big 3 automakers were 100% unionized in the 1970s and have since shed about 500,0000 American jobs despite producing more automobiles than ever.

Unions tend to be good at bargaining for better pay and benefits, but the current status quo is that most tech workers already have decent pay and benefits anyway.

Or, from an IP-driven industry perspective, the offshoring of Hollywood following the SAG and WGA strikes.

If IATSE couldn't stop VFX from being offshored, then tech unions wouldn't be able to either.

Edit: can't reply

> Without film industry unions, might the offshoring have been undertaken even earlier?

Not really. VFX was already largely offshored by the early 2010s despite only starting as an industry in the 1990s.

Seriously, I wonder if tech workers really even understand how lucky they are being able to sit at a desk instead of, say, toiling away in the mines.