If you think professional sports leagues and the movie business base opportunities and compensation on seniority I don't know what to tell you. Those fields are almost completely unionized. There's no obvious reason to think that the market for high skilled technical workers would be substantially different.
Why would an SWE union be forced to follow the trends set by other unions? I thought tech was supposed to march to the beat of its own drum. Think different.
The difference is between commodity labor and creative, talent-driven, or IP based production, and it seems clear which is a better metaphor for software engineers.
