"It's hard for me to imagine that if things were done democratically most engineers would vote for me to make what I do." It sounds like you feel the current system works out very well for a few elite performers, in a way that the majority of workers would not be comfortable with if they had a say in the matter. I'm curious, how do you see the tension/balance between what benefits the majority of engineers vs. what benefits a small number of elite performers such as yourself?

I come down firmly on the side of meritocracy. If you're contributing a lot more value, you deserve to be compensated more. I've spent a decade honing my abilities and it's reflected in my skill level. It'd be unfair if that skill weren't reflected in my salary.

In fact, if anything I think top developers are underpaid in most of the industry. Outside certain organizations and areas, it's hard to break $200k as a developer—even when a senior developer can easily be 2x as effective as a new grad making $100k.

Also, to be clear, the current system is better for probably the whole upper half of engineers. It's not just elite performers who would see cuts if we moved to salary formulas. The problem I see is that humans have a well-documented tendency to hurt themselves if it means they can "punish" others as well: I can people voting for a $100k mandatory salary (while they're making $110k) just to spite me for making $200k.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm confident that well-organized engineers working together could very substantially grow the percentage of company revenues that go to engineers, which would benefit both upper and lower tier performers by growing the pie. As for the way workers might punitively divide up that larger pie, it sounds like knucklesandwhich is more knowledgeable than me about craft unions and the ways they try to mitigate against that. Presumably high-performing engineers would be a powerful bloc within such an organizing effort/union, and could advocate effectively for their interests.

Listen I think the meritocracy fetishization of SV is dumb and unjustifiable (again, if you really think this, propose a measurement or set of measurements that adequately explains salary and can be justified as representing "skill"), but standardizing pay is ultimately not a major interest of mine in forming a union.

You seem to believe there are separate stratifications of tech workers that do not have shared interests. Even though I pretty strongly disagree, you're in luck, a union is still what you want. You want a craft union that recognizes something like "senior engineers" as a collective bargaining unit. As long as you can justify that you constitute a real unit with a shared "community of interest" to the NLRB, you can still collectively bargain only with other senior engineers.