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.

From what I’ve seen it starts with a few people who abuse the niceties, or the first downturn, or both, and suddenly they’ve got an excuse to strip it all back.

It’s always one or the other that starts it. You have an office game console and someone brings their kids who spill pop on it or they take the games home. You get that guy who takes a box of snacks home and the CEO complains for like 2 years about it. You get someone who orders pay per view on a business trip. Etc.

Once you get to like 300 employees this threshold starts getting reliably exceeded.

Those soulless people who have no live off the craft drive me nuts, and a lot got in the field like 2017-2023 when everyone was trying to grow headcount as fast as possible.

Those people drive me mad.

I find it difficult to be the code mill I’m expected to be, especially when getting work done quickly is prioritized over getting it done correctly.

Same. Half the time the code base is an indicipherable, spaghetti filled dumpster fire. More often than that, the business plan is either non existent or just plain idiotic. Management can't even answer basic questions like, "who is going to pay for this?" The last three projects I worked on were DOA because there was no clear path to profitability.
This was at large, well established corporations.

I'm still trying to figure out how it's possible to graduate with an MBA without understanding the inherent need for revenue to exceed expenses.

Every year I tell my CS/CE/Info students that the market is saturated and that jobs are hard to find. I then tell them that they have to figure what motivates them: a paycheck or service. I then suggest that public service is generally stable while private enterprise can be volatile. I finish by telling them that they have to decide what among this fits them best.

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.

Just be prepared to integrate with 40 year old equipment and add new features in to a PLC that should have been decommissioned a decade ago and the program is a mangled Frankenstein piece of shit made by 50 different people, many with no real understanding of programming or how to structure things...oh, and various "temporary" hacks upon hacks to keep production running with minimal downtime.

You’ve nailed it. 15 years of experience here.

Scrum messed everything up too - lots of less-technical people needed jobs in software and that’s where they tend to slot in.

We would do better to think one level of hierarchy higher than the context we’re in more of the time. Doesn’t seem to be much appreciation for holism and design patterns (your mileage with the latter can vary of course).

Elegance is down and writing your own shitty code instead of using decent opinionated frameworks is up. Because people hate reading code.

If I’m frustrated I write code outside of work.

I tend to look for roles where there is serious, vertically integrated ownership of the code over time.

Spaghetti (or lasagna) is common and I can deal with it, unless the team worships the “clever” maniac who wrote it.

The one specific thing that will cause me to leave is micromanagement.

Thinking about moving closer to bare metal where there is less room for cruft and genuine tradeoffs have to be considered.

Those things happen, but if they're the norm for you, seek different employment.