As a salesperson at a large SaaS firm, I wouldn't want to work for an organization that doesn't have wide variability in compensation. My team had one rep who earned around $180k, and another who earned more than $400k, even though they have the exact same job title and responsibilities, which is how it should be.

I’m guessing the difference in pay was because of commissions? Sales is about the only role with fairly crystal clear performance metrics that can be evaluated unbiased (ie how much they made in sales).

For most other roles, compensation is largely based upon negotiation (which is not a core job skill for a random engineer), and variability in salary tends to be more inequitable — if they have he same job title and responsibilities, metrics on performance are not going to be clear cut like sales numbers, but be more subjective and interpreted by management.

Most of the laws which require public disclosure of compensation in job postings apply only to base salary, not to total compensation. What you describe makes sense for performance-based portions of a compensation package like commissions or performance-driven bonuses, but not for base salary.

Do you really think a wide base salary range makes sense for the same job title and responsibilities, aside from maybe any location-based differentials? I don’t.

In what role, other than sales, does that make sense? Same exact job title - I'm aware of jr / normal / sr / lead, etc role differences.

I worked at a hedge fund where almost everyone was "Member of Technical Staff". That could be a 21 year old college graduate or a 50 year-old ex-staff engineer. I'm pretty sure the ratio of highest to lowest paid was 3:1 and likely even greater.

Netflix lists jobs on LinkedIn with a range of $100-700k

Netflix notoriously doesn't pay out equity and tells employees to buy the stock with their (larger pile of) cash if they want it.

the only alternative for a lot of positions then, is administering a separate job for every single person. no thanks.

This is kind of what happens in practice though isn't it?

Maybe not every single person, but certainly outliers who are making way more than their peers get a new job, or the same job title with "principal" or "executive" slapped on front.

MLB pitcher. NFL quarterback. Movie actor. Book author. Quant trader. Mutual fund analyst. Commodities trader. Salesperson. Lawyer. Head coach. CEO. CTO.

IMO, software engineer is also among the jobs where a wide range of performance is evidenced from among the people who are qualified to hold the position.

"IMO, software engineer is also among the jobs where a wide range of performance is evidenced from among the people who are qualified to hold the position."

Including those of us who hold the position but are not qualified.

Bill Belichick suggests rent seekers propped up by an entire organization is the norm. Good players wanted to play with Brady, not for Belichick.

None of those titles exist if the individuals are spending their days growing their food.

Capitalism only exists as a socialized meme there’s a communal upside to capitalism. What’s the communal value to propagating Bezos and Belichick types specifically deserve special privileges if they’re so dependent?

New idea; if Musk can survive in the wilds of Alaska for a month he can stay rich. Let them prove it’s not just propagation of memes via media that keeps us talking about how great they are.

> None of those titles exist if the individuals are spending their days growing their food.

Cumulative productivity gains from valuable inventions and systems are the reason that we aren't all spending our days growing food to survive. IMO, that's a very, very good thing and society should support those advances to be created.

Your generalization leaves a lot of wiggle room for how society ought to support cumulative gains.

Because we have accumulated less need for data entry and content jobs thanks to AI office workers could do more of the real work to provide for their real needs to afford manual labor class time to focus on the abstract.

The god father of capitalism, Adam Smith, is said to have written that division of labor taken to the extreme will result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.

Kind of feels as if, while we ride career escalators, externalization of all our other work, is fostering a prisoners dilemma society finds itself in as the number of have nots rapidly outpaces the haves. The majority are all “this is all I know, I can’t get off the debt service tread mill.”

Put some of the real work of keeping themselves alive on billionaires and they’re too busy to spend all their time propagating their Ponzi schemes.

Are you imagining some change in the overall system that would serve to increase the amount of manual work done by humans in a way that would disproportionately hit the billionaire class?

Why?