At one workplace, I and a bunch of others were software leads/managers who rose up through many years hard work, promotions and raises. A new VP of engineering joins and finds out about our salary during the next review. He berates us individually why were are paid so much. What he didn't realize is the team leads did the heavy lifting for development at this company. Many of us said nothing and just looked for new opportunities. From what I heard, projects quickly fell behind schedule, got cancelled. The VP was eventually fired.

And he probably just moved on to a new opportunity.

I've looked him up. He is working on a "startup" idea but I don't think he has gone anywhere with it.

It sounds like the system worked as intended.

Touché.

I guess I never thought about it that way.

"I was a part of a company early in my career where certain people were being paid less than others, only the thing was that the big, BIG, bosses didn't know about it. "

That's pretty weird. Usually the bosses know what everyone is making or can find out. Looking at cost is one of the main duties of a boss.

Not that weird. There are lots of employees and the big bosses tend to only see birds-eye views like project/staffing budgets. They care if a team of 10 costs 2.5m/year. They don't dig into why unless they have a problem with the budget to begin with.

Interesting. In any case, bosses already have salary transparaceny if they care so giving transparency to employees wouldn't change this particular case.

They don't have the need to dig into individual salaries, only once they want to start optimize (read: where to cut down) the salaries. Otherwise, it doesn't help with overall goals.

I worked at place where we did stack ranking, but added a formula that basically divided rank by salary. Anyone making more than about 1.2 times the average of their piers had to constantly justify it.