Or at least I sure do see that sentiment in most discussions of unions on HN.
At the very least HN represents the tech worker either genuinely interested or personally invested in their job if not being entirely focused as a place for the top performers to share projects and information in the first place. Since by definition half of people can get more than the average if you apply either the above filters to define the average HN user then most people here probably would be right - they could get significantly more than their average peer.
Median, not average. Salaries are nothing like a normal distribution.
As the saying goes, Jeff Bezos walks into a bar and on average everyone in the bar is a billionaire.
In Europe, businesses encourage labor solidarity among software devs because it suppresses wages in a global environment where software wages are rising rapidly. Exceptional devs are shamed for believing their worth is so far above their peers, even if it is true. I don’t believe most wage gains in software in Europe would be happening if US tech companies weren’t in Europe pushing the wages upward.
Unions focus on the compensation of the median ability worker. The issue in the software is that ability has something like a barbell distribution; workers at different ends of that barbell live in different worlds and are not interchangeable. The “median dev” barely exists as a useful abstraction.
Theory 2: HN commentators correctly identify that a union would make them less money.
The age old clash of collectivists and individualists. I personally think strong union activity is more likely to move tech clusters for America to China than it is to make software engineers more money. Software engineers already seem to be making a lot of money, it is unclear that asking for more will work, even if done loudly.
Software engineers at Amazon, Apple, Uber and others could show solidarity to non-tech colleagues, just like in Hollywood, the Directors Guild barely has any reason to initiate strike action, but doesn't cross the picket line, but instead often supports "lowlier" unions.
That said - money isn't the only thing unions can negotiate: all that industry-wide malfeasance folk like to complain about on HN, e.g. around privacy and advertising: unions could negotiate rules around those.
But in general the solidarity problem is huge. If you look at Europe where we get strikes now and again, there's always a fault line between the group that wants some change and their friends. The third party always has this problem of "do we want to piss off people that we personally are ok with at the moment?". It's understandable too, everyday people don't want to be bothered by some specific issue that causes a general strike.
That is a political minefield, because it implies fairly directly that software engineers should try to leverage their technical knowledge to enforce their social values.
1. Risk of migrating the tech clusters to exotic foreign lands.
2. Some fairly substantial minorities in the tech industry do not support the political morals and values of the majority, and will be truly unhappy about that sort of faux-union.