I left NCSA (University of Illinois) to join the dot-com boom like everyone else. Curious thing about their pay scale: I made 15% more on day one than any of my friends who had been working 18 months at the same place, which was a giant relief because I did not have the spoons to work as much as they did and still keep up with classes. I got more per hour and working a full 40 hours a week was just assumed, instead of something I had to fight for.

The reason I made more money than them was Marc Andreesen. Someone got wind of how much they had been compensating him not to leave and they put the kibosh on it, but they were smart about it. They sugar coated the change by compressing the pay scale toward the middle, instead of squashing it down. If you weren't Marc Andreesen (and he'd been gone for over a year and the people he had poached gone for ~8 months at this point), then your pay didn't change. If you were new, like me, you were better off with the change.

You can keep top end people by giving them autonomy instead of more money, but I don't know if, in the long term, that's in Intel's best interests either. People generally trust that my heart is in the right place, but I'm human. Some of my decisions are wrong, and some are just so abstruse that they appear wrong, so I get push-back on both. I've worked at places that are 'top-heavy', where enough people have been Peter Principal-ed into MAX_RANK and there's no room in the org chart to dilute them with more promising people. In fact I work at one of these now. To a first order approximation, I'm just collecting the pay while I convince myself what I want to do next, which is proving to be more difficult than it ever has before, so I'm just here.