Yes and no.

Yes because this is why there is a massive body of leftist academic, philosophical and political writing on the topic... yes because this is why organizing is a skill and unions can be good or bad. It is hard and you are gonna need all the help and tactics you can get.

No because there is or at least was a prevalent belief in US tech culture circles that being an expert in programming by extension made you an expert or a soon to be expert on everthing else. An expert on education, an expert on health care... just the damage from those two categories alone to the wellbeing of US citizens....

Far from me to say there isn't a basic beauty to aspects to programming that speak to logic and math.. but no... the world is full of a million different kinds of craftspeople because every form of genius has its own peculiarities. Unfortunately however this delusion reached a degree of popularity that I think undermined the ability of tech work culture in the US to establish a fertile substrate for effective organizing and unionizing to grow from.

I am not saying that this is unique to tech workers, simply that the demographic reached a critical point of naivety that corporations were able to solidfy their power.

It could have happened to Plumbers or Electricians (I mean they tend to be decent jobs in the US I think), the only thing unique to US programmers/tech workers is that for a brief moment they were existentially valuable to the empire and thus it had to suffer decent working conditions for programmers/tech workers. Though, in this respect programmers/tech workers aren't that unique in the story of the US empire, the obvious reference here being New Bedford and the way the whaling industry briefly centered the nexus of power there to abandon it just as abruptly for another city... Silicon Valley for awhile but how much longer?.

https://www.whalingmuseum.org/

https://www.nps.gov/nebe/learn/historyculture/whalingheritage.htm

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2022/03/huge-architecture-mills-of-new-bedford.html?m=1

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Many tenants in New Bedford have been forced to spend more of their income on housing, Census data shows. In 2021, nearly half of New Bedford’s renter households were considered “cost-burdened,” which means they spent more than 30% of their income on rent.

https://newbedfordlight.org/barely-making-it-in-new-bedford/

The amazing scifi TV show Severance can be seen as a sort of Tech Culture Gothic that attempts to reconcile with the futility of experiencing late stage capitalism as a tech worker in 2020s US. Severance can be seen as a gothic work that is grappling with the growing realization that the fall of tech workers from the bourgeoise petit class or whatever you want to call it has been cemented by the torpor of US tech culture towards organizing to protect the future of their careers from the ruling class. Scifi and fiction like Severance will be interpreted by future academic analysis as a touchstone to begin an analysis of why US culture in general was so blind to the obvious systematic violence of tech corporations that reached an unsustainable peak in the 2020s.

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An echo of a decrepit shuttered massive brick mill building in New Bedford Massachusetts, a strange monolithic monument to a power long gone. Towering mill window aclove after alcove filled with cinderblocks for want of unshattered glass echoed by empty floors of office cubicles and an insect like ghostly parking lot extending radially around The Holmdel Complex like a carapace.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Holmdel_Complex

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_(TV_series)