We don’t do ongoing market negotiations because they necessarily mean that we will be in some degree of competition with each other on rates. The current ‘non-negotiation’ method means we’re effectively never in competition with each other on compensation-- there is not a scenario where raising one of us means preventing the raising of another, or where Xavier (or OpenCraft, if we decide to do some committee-based compensation thing) has to say ‘yes’ to one of us and ‘no’ to another. I went over this in a good bit of detail here.
I would not recommend changing the ‘across-the-board’ raises at OpenCraft, or falling back to individual negotiations. @nizar 's suggestion is something I’d like to try-- allowing for a team member to renegotiate higher at the end of their yearly contract, while retaining the same straightforward ‘no-negotiation’ rules as before.
On reflection, there’d still be (in my opinion) a pretty obvious saavy solution you could have if you were in this situation, deciding to renegotiate. You’d just ask other team members what they’re getting. If they’re game to tell you (which they may not be, but, hey, they might-- and you’d only need the answer of one person rated higher than you to know you can go ‘at least that high’ minus any percentage raises they may have had) you might be able to infer what their rate is and try to get one that’s in line with them. If enough people were game for this, you might have a situation where everyone ends up with the same (or near same) rate anyway, at the higher end of OpenCraft’s bound. I’m not sure how you fix that.
@nizar It may be that there are resources online talking about alternative compensation structures worth exploring. I’d especially look for methods used by organizations which attempt to stay flat. There may be some ideas worth exploring that we haven’t looked at yet.