Those high salaries aren't the result of individual negotiations, though. FAANMG+ companies pay very well, but salaries for the vast majority of engineers are determined by black box formulas, and in cases where blocs of employees think there's something unfair about their compensation (for instance, people in one location being paid more than people in another) there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. The scale of these companies is such that even senior engineers have an essentially nonexistent negotiating position.
Is it really a black box though? The majority of these companies have spreadsheets where people share their salaries, and from what I've seen, it's a fairly basic formula based on 3 factors: Level, rating and location. Yes, there's maybe a few % of wiggle in there, but generally it's fairly consistent from what I've seen.
You could argue that the way you get a rating, or even the way you get promoted are a black box, but compared to most non-tech companies, it actually tends to be quite a bit better.
I don't mean to imply that it's not predictable—I just think it's relevant to note that it's completely unaccountable. You get a number, and that's your number.
Nor do I mean to imply that it's awful, or worse than X. I know from experience how unfair individual negotiation can be, having been on both ends of massive pay ranges for the same title and responsibilities at the same company. It's not all sunshine and roses in my current job as a software engineer at $BIGCORP, but I do appreciate the relative fairness with regard to pay, and the magnitude doesn't hurt either.
Still, it's worth pointing out that a) unions have done great things for workers across many industries, b) that tech workers usually have no institutionalized collective bargaining power, c) that many tech workers have essentially no individual bargaining power either, and d) that tech work has been following a trend of increasing commodification.
The point is that you have exactly zero say in it. The comp team spits out a number using a formula that changes year over year, then your manager has a little bit of wiggle room to allocate to high performers, and then you get your number. With zero advance warning they can absolutely just say "sorry, your performance review ratings are now worth 50% of what they were last year" and there is nothing you can do about it.
With a union it'd be possible to ensure that the comp formulas are made public ahead of time and that nontrivial changes to the formulas are reviewed by the union.
Other than the formula being public (Which again doesn't make a difference since we already roughly know it), how much wiggle room would you have in a company with 50k+ employees? Would you have any more of a wiggle room than you did before? Is the union going to argue for your personal individual salary?
I think you're inflating an issue that happens when a company is really large, to an issue with lack of union.
I think the point here is that if $BIGCORP makes some unpopular compensation change that affects many employees (e.g. reducing the weighting of performance in the pay formula, reducing base pay relative to RSUs, etc.), a union would give employees a way to push back on those changes and/or negotiate for some other concessions in return.
Actually, I imagine a $BIGCORP workers' union to be much more involved in this kind of negotiation than e.g. in demanding that wages be flat with no room for pay increases based on merit, which is the usual FUD that anti-union folks roll out in these conversations.
> Is the union going to argue for your personal individual salary?
Probably not. But they might be able to prevent the company from suddenly reducing everybody's equity compensation by 20% or whatever. A huge amount of compensation at large tech companies is completely discretionary. Nothing prevents large tech companies from eliminating huge swathes of bonus and equity pay, other than people leaving the company. A union can make it so you have other recourse.
If you call that “collectively organizing”, I guess that proves we don’t need unions. The labor law was all that we needed and it worked as expected. Problem solved!
It's possible I don't understand your point, but it seems fairly obvious to me that doing a little bit of a thing doesn't mean you can't benefit immensely from doing more of it.
Hungry? Eat a cracker and you may be less so—and it may even make a material difference to your survival in an extreme situation—but it won't replace a full meal.
