Here's the thing about payscale: Mathmatically speaking, you're probably not exceptional. That's just how statistics work. Most people are going to be somewhere

Here's the thing about payscale: Mathmatically speaking, you're probably not exceptional. That's just how statistics work. Most people are going to be somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. Yes, there is a minority on either end who are being held back or lifted up by this, but that's just not how these things work. I think that devs are frequently on the higher side of intelligence relative to the population at large and therefor think they're exceptional. Pay scales smooth things out across the company but you could look at it as a greater good as it guarantees a greater benefit to those starting out who are making the least. Even if greed is your sole motivation, the assumption that a meritocracy will exist and you will be rewarded for your hard and above average work isn't always the case. The general idea is that there is always an inherent imbalance between an individual employee and their employer after an organization reaches a certain size (I don't think unions really need to exist in <10 employee situations). As organizations get larger, the loss of a single employee gets less and less painful to the company while staying the same for the employee. To counter the imbalance collective bargaining serves as a maximize the pain on employers for performing actions against their labor. Let's just clear something else up: "Guild" and "Union" do have specific structural nuances, but are also both used to generally describe "labor collectives/organized labor". You say you want a trade guild but think a union is potentially problematic. I say they're basically the same thing. This is a semantics discussion about how best to organize and structure your labor collective.