I take it you've never worked in or around sales with a commission? One big deal can easily quadruple a salesperson's salary for the quarter. When that happens, people will downplay the deal as just being luck and get upset that the salesperson is making so much. However, they don't bat an eye when the salesperson doesn't make their quota a couple quarters in a row and gets fired.

People get jealous and can't handle the truth because a huge chunk of people don't even understand how a business works. Especially from an engineering side, it's really hard to swallow the fact that you have all of the skills and actually created the product, yet you will make 10% of what good salespeople make.

Pretty much. The same people who see salespeople as overpaid schmoozers and order-takers (some are, many aren't) would be utterly horrified at the thought they themselves could be fired without a second thought because of an organizational change or budget cut at a key account.

This happens to engineers often enough.

Well, yes, projects get canceled and people get fired as a result. But there tends to be less of a direct linkage with this quarter's revenue than in the case of sales.

That is because sales people are overrated because you can measure what they bring to the table.

Programmers, not so much.

Value is a subjective thing. What a company values is not necessarily the same thing as what an employee values. So that 250K salary may be due to something the company values at 250k for whatever reason the company has.

This does not of course mean that the coworkers of that 250k salary think the work is worth 250k. That disconnect which can be difficult to fix will often cause bad feelings and poison the atmosphere.

The correct solution of course is for the company to effectively communicate what is sees as valuable so that employees can work toward creating that value and measure correctly. This is harder than it sounds though.

This is an excellent observation and a corrective to the often-seen and simplistic "x employee is more valuable than y employee." The merits a company places on a project or the valorization of said project is also in play.

What's hard: even when Project A is effectively communicated as the most important thing BigCo does, Project B is still essential to BigCo's functioning and BigCo cannot exist without it, so how to counteract Project B employees feeling either devalued or jealous of Project A?

The UK supermarket ASDA is going through a sex discrimination legal case at the moment.

Warehouse employees get paid a bit more than shopfloor employees. Warehouse employees are mostly men. Shop floor employees are mostly women. The jobs are not identical, but they are similar. Shop floor employees include the shelf stackers - they take pallets of boxes of goods and unload these onto shelves. That's very similar to the lifting work that warehouse employees do. (There might be a need for some warehouse workers to have forklift licences, which would explain a small amount of the pay differential).

In this legal case the wages of both group are pretty close to minimum wage.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/24/asda-mass-le...

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/09/sainsburys-f...

I've never worked in the supermarket industry, but I have worked in warehouses and on retail floors- and in my experience, the pace and magnitude of the physical labor is significantly higher in the warehouse. Again, I can't generalize my experience to every company.

One way they might address the allegations would be to transfer some warehouse employees to the sales floor and vice versa, providing a better mix, and a good opportunity for employees to see a different side of the operation. Of course, locations may not allow this easily- and may actually play into the pay disparity.

Sales is not a good example as pay is so variable I once helped some one sort out a disagreement over a 15% cut to bonus

That 15% cut was a lot more than the uk's median wage :-)