It's going to end badly, unlike factories where a walkout would but a strain on production. A walkout necessarily doesn't put a strain on tech. Companies are going to embrace distributed teams/remote teams very fast and unionizing will just be a reason to close up shop in that location. That's what I imagine happening, predicting the future is hard tho.
I think it would be comparable, but not equal, to a factory walkout. Without active bug-squashing, DevOps and server maintenance, there is an increased risk of a major outage, which would even affect previous customers as well. Also, most tech companies collect revenue incrementally, via subscriptions, ads and the like, rather than up-front like most factories would. And getting a scab developer up to speed would likely take a lot longer than getting scab factory workers up to speed.
There are some differences as you said. If you're an auto factory that goes on strike, the management is likely still making money—they have all the cars made yesterday and the day before to sell. Of course, the pressure would rise much quicker in a factory vs a tech company; where the latter could presumably float itself for a few weeks, the former would start losing money within days.
A programmer walk-out is way worse. The Bus Factor is a real thing. Hire a new team to replace the old one on a complex project and it'll be months or years before they start doing anything productive. Making things worse, bit-rot is real and threatens existing software with failure if complaints aren't addressed.
If everyone in my department walked out and a new team had to be hired, they'd just be screwed. There's not enough documentation and the system is pretty complicated, with bits of it hiding everywhere and a bunch of ancient code that we never got around to refactoring (especially after they laid off half our department and another half quit afterwards, without replacement).
I'm sure whenever I get a new job and resign they're going to be like 'oh shit', because there's just not anyone left to replace what I do, really (I'm the last person in the department with a good amount of knowledge on their proprietary and stupid complicated phone systems, and they've kept me too swamped to be able to do any knowledge transfer worth a damn).
And in phone systems, there's always something going wrong or down, it seems like, often network related.
>It's going to end badly, unlike factories where a walkout would but a strain on production. A walkout necessarily doesn't put a strain on tech.
Certain types of work-to-rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) would bring most tech companies to their knees in a matter of minutes. It wouldn't just gum up the works as it would in industry, it could literally put systems into failure states.
The amount of crap I've had to do outside of my contract to keep the business running, I totally believe it. People in the right positions doing this and you're going to have swarms of angry clients and customers in minutes.
