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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

It never was and never will be. We like to pretend that employees are so fairly compensated, and yet I had to fight tooth and nail to get a mere 2% equity. The thought of an equity stake closer to 10% was almost unheard of. But you bet I'd have had an impact large enough to justify those returns, in the sense of http://paulgraham.com/equity.html

Except... It's not quite that simple. Most people don't care. The vast majority of programmers simply do not care enough to band together and force employers to give you a higher stake.

I'm not even insinuating that a union would be a good idea. I'm saying, in a free market society, you can't be surprised to find out you just aren't worth making rich.

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I'm soon moving into management and I still think unions would be a fantastic idea all across the tech sector.

The whole of a business is already a collectively organized unit, by its nature. When each of us, each individual technician, goes into negotiations, we're already up against the entirety of the business. Banding together is literally the only way to balance that scale.

The Screen Actors Guild would be a good model for a tech union--they obviously reward top box office draws richly, but the low end of the scale is still well cared for.

Or you could try to start your own company. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

True, one option for everyone who thinks equity distribution is out of whack, is to start their own company. They can then create an imbalance in their own favor, allocating the lion's share for themselves. Then they can work to convince eager candidates to join their noble mission in exchange for a (razor-thin, shhh) piece of the pie.

Another route would be for founders to expand option pools from the typical 8-12%, so that their own holding didn't exceed that of every employee combined. But of course, why would any founder choose to do that? It's hard to become a billionaire if you let your employees have too much!

That's not always true. It may look easy to start a company and make it at least a moderate success in Silicon Valley today, perhaps due to the easy availability of money and helping mentality from peer companies who would jump into trying your product and even paying for that because they themselves got easy money from cash rich, aggressive investors.

But it is not the case in traditional markets other countries where you have to put lot of time, effort, our own money and mental stress into creating even a moderately successful business.. On the other hand employees get relatively less strain and a stable income and an option to leave the company anytime and move to better higher paying jobs.

If you start your own company you can distribute equity as you see fit

Equity is not important for me for the most part. I have to exercise by paying when I leave. I rather get free shares and I’d stay longer. Otherwise, joining a company like FB would be wise if you want stready return on top of your base compensation.

Business owners form all sort cahoots and lobby for themselves so it's not a free market. Its just sold to us that ways.

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