Nothing amazing about. CEO retain lawyers to draft custom contracts with a company before taking offer. This is mutually agreed negotiation and neither company nor job seeker is obliged to agree to such negotiation.

No one is stopping you from trying it.

Sure, and the next time a tech ceo goes whining to Congress about a shortage of workers I hope my congressman tells him that no one is stopping him from mutually agreed negotiations with candidates.

That too is fine. Congressman is listening to lot of constituents. Nothing wrong in taking your message at higher precedence than CEOs.

Too many of them think they are doing us a favor by allowing us to work for them at glorious random company rather than realizing that glorious random company would has no value outside of its employees.

Too many workers think the same.

It's amazing the reactions I get from people when I tell them the simple truth that nobody is doing you a favor by hiring you. It's a business deal, nothing more and nothing less, and if you aren't thinking of it in that way, you're going to be taken advantage of.

There's truly a different set of rules & norms, once you're high enough up the social-status ladder.

That used to include the so-called "professional class" but the story of the intersection between social status and work for the last few decades has been MBA types pushing those positions downward‚and preventing them from ever rising, in the software world. They may not be doing it consciously, but a lot of stuff about work-life for software folks sure looks like what you'd do if you wanted to squash the social status of a cohort that earns enough money that they'd otherwise be on their way to solid membership in the upper-middle, like micro-managy "methodologies", avoiding giving us personal offices, widespread and oft-expressed but IME rarely-accurate stereotypes about software folks necessarily being bad at everything except fiddly computer shit, and the way interviews are run.

Professors and doctors were two big groups that held high status and had a fair amount of freedom and trust to run their own affairs, once they'd paid their dues, but both those worlds have been invaded by MBAs who've taken over running everything and brought the same contempt for "mere" workers that we see in the rest of the business world. AFAIK lawyers have held them off, so far, but I may just not be aware of MBA-ification there.

Law firms, in most states, are forbidden to have ownership in the hands of non-lawyers (there’s some minor exceptions dealing with inheritance.)

> Law firms, in most states, are forbidden to have ownership in the hands of non-lawyers

Good. The rest of us are idiots

Looks like the lawyers were able to defend themselves because they, well, write the laws.

What you're calling "MBA-ification" sounds more like private equity infiltration.

its a package deal

CEOs play checkers with people. Every piece is identical and thus very easy to dehumanize. I'd bet the best direct managers you ever had were playing chess, actually trying to understand the difference between people and how to best apply them. This difference is both required, because of scale, and inexcusable at the same time.