Negotiations ain't so hard. It's mostly down to BATNA, ie best alternative to negotiated agreement. Why would you want a union?
Do your homework to figure out how much your skills are worth on the market; get multiple companies into the offer stage; then more or less just let them know your demands and let them know that you are more than prepared to walk away if they don't agree.
That's it.
If they decide to call your bluff, then you really just walk away. That's why you want to have multiple companies in the offer stage at the same time, and also want to start interviewing before your old job becomes unbearable.
Same reason anyone wants a union: to reduce structural asymmetry. In this case, the asymmetry in question is information. Think of the hypothetical union as you and your coworkers all pitching in to get a really good lawyer to review your employment contracts and vesting terms.
>figure out how much your skills are worth on the market
The problem is that there isn't a public orderline for compensation. Observing even a single bid takes significant effort, so figuring out where the fair price is with any degree of precision is hard. And it's fundamentally harder for workers than it is for employers.
More importantly, because of the issues with equity, even those scarce observations are fuzzy. Comparing two equity packages from non-public companies is hard, and it's ridiculous (or, depending on your interpretation, cunningly malicious) to put that burden on every single employee individually. You're paid to be an expert in software engineering and a partial domain expert in whatever the company does; having to also be an expert in finance and obscure tax law to even know how much you're getting paid is unreasonable.
> Same reason anyone wants a union: to reduce structural asymmetry. In this case, the asymmetry in question is information. Think of the hypothetical union as you and your coworkers all pitching in to get a really good lawyer to review your employment contracts and vesting terms.
That's fine for those other people. And a common fund for a lawyerly review might be an interesting idea. In general, I don't want to pool my negotiations with other people, though.
> More importantly, because of the issues with equity, even those scarce observations are fuzzy. Comparing two equity packages from non-public companies is hard, and it's ridiculous (or, depending on your interpretation, cunningly malicious) to put that burden on every single employee individually. You're paid to be an expert in software engineering and a partial domain expert in whatever the company does; having to also be an expert in finance and obscure tax law to even know how much you're getting paid is unreasonable.
I resolve that difficulty by valuing all equity (or options etc) of non-public companies at a huge discount when comparing offers.
I don't treat exactly as if they were worth zero, but pretty close.
> In general, I don't want to pool my negotiations with other people, though.
Do you not believe that a hundred people can do more work than one person? That a hundred people have more buying power than one person? That a hundred processors can do more work than one?
“I have as much bargaining power as N people combined, no matter how big N is” is like believing that P=NP.
Donald Knuth believes P=NP. So I would be in rather exalted company. I don't see how it's relevant to the discussion at hand?
> Do you not believe that a hundred people can do more work than one person?
In total, yes. Per person, no.
> That a hundred people have more buying power than one person?
What do you mean by buying power? Googling for the term suggests that it's a synonym for amount of money available to buy stuff ('purchasing power'). But I don't think that's what you mean?
> That a hundred processors can do more work than one?
In total, yes. Per processor, no.
Basically, when I am negotiating as part of a large group a few things happen, amongst them:
(1) The negotiating won't be about anything that makes me special compared to those other people.
(2) The company needs to be much more careful about overpaying. Granting a single high compensation to an outstanding candidate is much easier to get through the bureaucracy than a single high salary.
For comparison, I usually convert everything into a common metric. So eg I might say that 3 dollars of sign-on bonus are worth as much as 1 dollar of base salary to me. Or that I value the stock options at X dollars each (taking into account that they are risky and not liquid).
But that's independent of the technique I outlined in the other comment.
Negotiations ain't so hard. It's mostly down to BATNA, ie best alternative to negotiated agreement. Why would you want a union?
Do your homework to figure out how much your skills are worth on the market; get multiple companies into the offer stage; then more or less just let them know your demands and let them know that you are more than prepared to walk away if they don't agree.
That's it.
If they decide to call your bluff, then you really just walk away. That's why you want to have multiple companies in the offer stage at the same time, and also want to start interviewing before your old job becomes unbearable.