If society was a meritocracy this might be true, but I’ve seen plenty of engineers paid significantly more than peers that were far better than them. At the end of the day compensation is really about politics and not performance.

Exactly. There's a difference between an difficult and awkward conversation that goes "Sorry B, A is better than you at writing code", but that's different from "Sorry B, A is honestly a worse coder than you across the board, but they negotiated a bit better at the start, so we pay them more."

In the job market, it’s mostly a matter of labor supply. If you really need people, and they demand $[x], you pay it or you don’t get an employee.

This only works for the people with the awareness and confidence to know what they’re worth. Even selecting for that small subset of the population, it’s still sometimes difficult to ascertain what the optimal salary is in any given environment. The issue is, the labor supply and its cost is known by the employer, but is largely hidden to the laborer.

Yeah, this explains a lot of it. Lots of people think it's unfair that Jim or Pam makes more than they do, but noone ever is blunt with them that "you're making less because you're not as good as them". Even worse are where they've never been told "you're lucky you still even have a job because I was close to firing you for poor performance".

To be fair, there are also the interesting niche cases where someone is equally capable as Jim/Pam, but they're just not as good at selling themselves. Both cases usually more applicable to larger companies.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, I think that last example "Not good at selling themselves" is also bad management. While everyone loves flattery, managers who aren't comfortable being objective with comparing work productivity are bad managers. I cannot count the number of times I wished there was something like codeacademy.com for learning management skills.

One thing that impressed me about IBM, during my brief tenure there after the Blekko acquisition, was that they had a very deep catalog of online self paced training material for developing manager skills. I don't know how many people availed themselves of that resource but since that time I have really wished I could have pointed people who were struggling at some of the courses they had.

if youre one of the employees that found out youre being paid significantly less than your team how do you convince your manager to increase your pay? Knowing youre high performing

If there is a reason that they are perceived as higher performing, maybe you can figure out why. What you might think is important might be different from what your boss think is important as a complete package.

Also a lot of people get really defensive and go into denial mode. Or are really full of themselves. People have a really hard time getting the straight out evaluation, or get despondent, and your manager is trying to give the feedback to the capacity level you have shown.

That's not gaslighting. It's just lying.

Fair enough.

For context, and again I don't disagree here, I was using it in the sense of saying something that may be technically 'true' (didn't get the raise I hoped for) & (went to bat for you) but in context would give the opposite impression than the one you got.

Consider a company that has a 'mandatory fire the bottom 10%' and a manager who doesn't want to go through the effort to hire someone and so argues that they should be allowed to keep employee A even though they are their lowest rated employee (that would be 'going to bat for you') and it would easy to imagine the manager wasn't happy with their own raise, and "it's been a tough year" ? How? Tough to get stuff done with under performing employees or tough for the company?

So lying? Yes, all by omission. And of course some particularly bad managers just straight up make things up.