Do you honestly believe that every penny a company makes ought to be given to its employees?
If not, then why should employees expect to make more than the market rate for the labor they provide?
I didn't suggest anything of the sort. I said that maybe companies are paying their employees much less than they could, and that maybe employees aren't getting a good deal despite wages being high relative to other industries. I didn't say that all of the value an employee generates should go to that employee - just maybe it could be more than does right now.
If not, then why should employees expect to make more than the market rate for the labor they provide?
"Market rate" is basically the median negotiated salary for similar roles. There's an assumption that a salary is like a price, and supply and demand will drive that price up for in-demand skills. This is the part I'm challenging. I don't know if price theory works for salaries where one side of the market (employers) has far more information and leverage than the other side (developers). If most developers are bad negotiators then getting a "market rate" salary means you, as an individual, are being paid the same as the other bad negotiators, and you actually lost out on getting a higher salary.
It could be that using the market rate to derive the appropriate salary for a job actually keeps developer wages lower than they could otherwise be.
At this point this is all just futile speculation though, and no one is going to change anything so we might as well just accept it.
Ok, then most FAANG engineers are far above the market rate. If they unionized they would probably lose money when the union tries to level everyone out.
We all know people at companies that give devs 'lesser' titles (and lower wages) and then expect the person to do the work of the higher title role.
If I have to split $2,000,000 between you and me, but you don't know how much money there is, then you might be happy with me giving you $400,000. That's $400,000 you didn't have before. Hell yeah, $400k! That's loads. The fact we're both going away happy doesn't make it right though. There's a big disparity there. If you found out that I'd kept 4* what you got you'd have every reason to be pissed about it.
That's what I'm suggesting FAANG companies might be doing - giving developers $400k, which makes them very happy, while keeping a far greater amount for themselves that could have been distributed between the workers at the company had those workers negotiated better by having greater knowledge of the system.
I don't even know if that's really a bad thing if that's what's going on. The line that I originally quoted ("Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power") just made me wonder if it's actually true that demand for tech workers has really driven wages to a natural equilibrium, or whether we just think that's true because $400k sounds like a lot.