You're reminding me of the "Spanish Theory of Value" as explained in the book Peopleware (DeMarco & Lister). I highly recommend this book.

From Chapter 3 of the book: "The Spanish Theory...held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people's back."

I think that most folks, once they're a few years into their careers, have seen and understood that this theory of management and value extraction is alive and well in corporate America today.

From the same chapter: "Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference."

So I agree with you. It seems obvious to me as well that companies should pay as much as possible. But they don't think that way, because they're coming from a different value set.

Even the value set of greed should nudge them in that direction—though perhaps not short-term greed.

Again, we agree. But it's that word should that is the delta between how we would like it to work and how it currently actually works.

Said another way, people who work 80hrs a week cut their salaries in half.

I presume you're referring to the value of retaining employees?

I'd be curious to see an economist take a look at what's going on here. The software-development profession continues to incentivise employees to constantly change jobs, despite that employers pay a real 'onboarding penalty' for employee churn.

If someone knows the answer I'd be interested to hear it.

> as much as is consistent with the value the employees deliver

But what does that mean? If an employee delivers $100,000/year of value, how how much should you pay them? Surely the answer (regarding the employer's self-interest) should factor in the odds of them leaving at any given pay-grade. The answer presumably isn't $99,999. The employer is looking to 'capture value', after all.

Feels to me it would be in company's interest only if the salaries were more transparent. Otherwise company will pay as little as they can to keep the person working for them, even if that's well below the value the employee delivers. If the employee doesn't realize that, they'll just stay. And as long as the company doesn't lose good employees, there's no incentive for them to pay people more.

> I suppose I'm naive, but it seems obvious to me that a company should want to pay its employees as much as possible

"As much as possible" is everything. So no.

> that is, as much as is consistent with the value the employees deliver.

If companies paid for the value the employees delivered, the company would have no profit. Companies make money by taking a share of the value employees delivered.

> It just seems obviously in the company's interest.

Maybe in a disneyesque/"it's a wonderful life" fairy tale but not in real life. Obviously it isn't in the company's interest because no company does it your way.

Actually, employees salaries, like rent, fuel costs, supplies, etc are viewed as costs/expenditures for a company. Something all companies want to reduce as it eats into their profits.