> Alas, that won't happen until tech workers (and white collar workers in general) realize they're workers and not capital owners.
Workers though they may be, it is within reach for most programmers to jump on the real estate ladder, heavily invest, and retire comfortably.
> That's the only way you get some negotiating power.
For the duration of this bull market, Software Jobs have been easy to come by. Negotiating power, while never completely in employees favor, has given most programmers the chance to live _far more comfortable lives than anyone else they know or went to school with_.
> it is within reach for most programmers to jump on the real estate ladder, heavily invest, and retire comfortably.
In Amsterdam, where I currently live, I would say a normal salary for a senior dev would be ~ 80k euros gross. A decent apartment somewhere in the city could be ~ 500k. Unless you can pay a pretty significant deposit you won't qualify for a loan (rule of thumb is you get 5x gross salary = 400k in this case).
Back in the day the same kind of apartment could probably have been bought on a working class salary.
Climbing the real-estate ladder is hard for a dev, impossible for anybody making less than dev salaries.
In Australia the average is over $100k and it tends to be younger people under and people with 10 years experience way over that amount. An average apartment is still $500k which is very affordable. Chuck in a second income and it’s basically cheap.
Unions in general are overly focused on job security and fairness in pay at the expense of other things like total salary. While there may be a place in tech for unions the last place that would want to unionize is a big tech employer. A grift mill that churns through underpaid consultants needs a union.
> Unions in general are overly focused on job security and fairness in pay at the expense of other things like total salary.
Not necessarily true. Pro sports athletes have unions, and their compensation is usually much larger than ours.
But there's almost always a power differential between employers and employees, which is why collective bargaining can be helpful. And it's not just about pay, it's about working conditions. There's a massive controversy nowadays about WFH for example.
> Pro sports athletes have unions, and their compensation is usually much larger than ours.
I would be curious to see an analysis of all professional athletes. Looking at baseball, the sport I'm familiar with, shows that there are huge salary disparities between the major leagues (who have the MLBPA as their union) and the minor leagues (who have no union, this is news to me). Both are still considered pro sports athletes, though I'm sure you meant only MLB athletes by that term.
There are 902 major league players and a conservative estimate of 3,000 to 4,000 minor league players (excluding rookie and international players).
The major leagues have an average salary of $4.17 million, with a median salary of $1.15 million. But compensation is not distributed evenly. 33.4% of all pay goes to the top 50 players. 52.4% goes to the top 100. Of 902 players on opening-day rosters, 417 (62%) had salaries under $1 million, including 316 (35%) under $600,000. Details taken from [1].
Minor league salaries have minimums that are at most $700 per week for AAA players, and lower minimums for the rest of the minor leagues. For a 10 week season that gives $7,000 for the maximum minor league minimum. There are some exceptions with players on the 40 man MLB roster playing in the minors that make a minimum of $46,000 / season [2]. The interesting part of [2] is the comparison with the NBA minor leagues (they have union representation) which has a minimum monthly salary of $7,000, and the AHL (also has union representation) minimum season salary of $52,000.
Another source for athlete salaries is the BLS, which seems to show there are 16,700 athletes and entertainers with a median salary of $77,300 per year [3]. BLS shows higher median salaries for developers.
So, I guess if you include all professional athletes, then the median software developer makes more than the median professional athlete. I have heard of Google giving an employee $100 million in stock to stay at Google, but I'm not sure what the stock options are like for early developers at start ups. I guess that would be the equivalent to the top talent in the professional sports leagues making 10s of millions a season?
Workers though they may be, it is within reach for most programmers to jump on the real estate ladder, heavily invest, and retire comfortably.
> That's the only way you get some negotiating power.
For the duration of this bull market, Software Jobs have been easy to come by. Negotiating power, while never completely in employees favor, has given most programmers the chance to live _far more comfortable lives than anyone else they know or went to school with_.
That's what your message is up against.