[knucklesandwich]

Listen I think the meritocracy fetishization of SV is dumb and unjustifiable (again, if you really think this, propose a measurement or set of measurements that adequately explains salary and can be justified as representing "skill"), but standardizing pay is ultimately not a major interest of mine in forming a union.

You seem to believe there are separate stratifications of tech workers that do not have shared interests. Even though I pretty strongly disagree, you're in luck, a union is still what you want. You want a craft union that recognizes something like "senior engineers" as a collective bargaining unit. As long as you can justify that you constitute a real unit with a shared "community of interest" to the NLRB, you can still collectively bargain only with other senior engineers.