>A company of people work together, and should share in the returns as they cover each other's deficiencies.
This is not an economically rational way to behave, so it's not sustainable for a company to do this and keep talent for high market-value positions. People are compensated based on the minimum required to get them to join and stay at the company, so their compensation is going to be driven by the market value of people with their skills.
Very small companies may be able to afford to pay every employee the cost of a principle software engineer (or whatever the highest position they have is), but this falls apart extremely quickly if the company needs lots of customer support positions or lots of sales people. They end up having to cut compensation to all of the high-end positions and subsequently lose anyone good enough to get jobs that pay market rate.
The majority of companies don't have the profit margins to throw away an extra $100,000 or whatever it takes per employee annually to pay everyone the top position market rate.
>It's also deeply problematic for me to take home $fat_paycheck
What do you say to people that spend years of their life getting advanced degrees in math/physics/CS/whatever that make them experts in the subject matter the company is working on? "That sounds hard, here's the same paycheck as the undergrad working next to you who knows almost nothing in the field."
You're jumping to conclusions I didn't advocate for...
There's no reason one person who contributes one thing gets to scrape by and one person who contributes another gets to live like a prince. Sales pay the bills of SW devs; SW devs make what Sales sells. Both should be comfortably compensated.
This is not an economically rational way to behave, so it's not sustainable for a company to do this and keep talent for high market-value positions. People are compensated based on the minimum required to get them to join and stay at the company, so their compensation is going to be driven by the market value of people with their skills.
Very small companies may be able to afford to pay every employee the cost of a principle software engineer (or whatever the highest position they have is), but this falls apart extremely quickly if the company needs lots of customer support positions or lots of sales people. They end up having to cut compensation to all of the high-end positions and subsequently lose anyone good enough to get jobs that pay market rate.
The majority of companies don't have the profit margins to throw away an extra $100,000 or whatever it takes per employee annually to pay everyone the top position market rate.
>It's also deeply problematic for me to take home $fat_paycheck
What do you say to people that spend years of their life getting advanced degrees in math/physics/CS/whatever that make them experts in the subject matter the company is working on? "That sounds hard, here's the same paycheck as the undergrad working next to you who knows almost nothing in the field."