What do you care if they get paid more than you? Do you care that they can out bowl you? Do they care that you can out chess them? Life is a marathon, you don't win a marathon by coming first in the race. You win a marathon by beating your last time.

Don't misunderstand, I'm always competing with my last paycheck. I always want to be getting paid more. I just don't care about other people's salary and if our responsibilities are lesser/equal/greater.

For me its all about optimizing the things I can control. I can control my future paycheck, and I can control how much effort I need to be putting in from week to week. I can't control someone else's salary, and it can't negatively effect me, so why expend the energy thinking about it?

Meanwhile: Responsibility != Effort.

For me its all about correcting mistakes with the least effort possible (I'm lazy you see). Also, if I'm paid the same, and I input less effort, then I'm technically being paid more :)

I would way rather put in the minimal effort required to question and correct (i.e. "manage" as you put it) an error upfront while its an idea, whoever's idea that might have been, rather than to put in the effort to correct the error while shit is hitting the fan.

This is just my personal preference. Your milage may vary.

I love your response, and would only want to add: I only care about how much other people make because it helps inform me in terms of what I can work towards for my own paycheck, and it shows me what the organization values.

It's very hard to succeed if your manager fails.

As an ex-manager at a very large gaming company, I assure you, your manager doesn't typically make twice what you do unless you're at the very highest levels (the CTO is, of course, going to make quite a bit more than a mid-level engineering manager, esp. if they've gotten a lot of stock and have been around a while) or at a company with some seriously skewed engineering pay grades.

I regularly managed people that made 20-30% more than I did. That was usually corrected within a raise-cycle or two, but it was by no means unusual. I don't think I ever had a direct report that was paid less than 75% of what I got, let alone 50%.

I'm still not doing your job for any less than your pay.