The thread is extremely useful for people both inside and outside the company.
While it may come across as a bragging, having worked at Amazon in a non tech role I can say that there was extremely little transparency on what someone should be paid at their level. As a result, there was a lot of variability in salaries at any level for a given role. People could be paid as much as 10-20% more purely because they joined a team after some change in salary policy - everyone else in the team would be at a lower salary. MBAs with 2 years work experience would be paid more than people who climbed up the company with 6 years internal experience.
Threads like this level the playing field for employees and would-be employees as they can negotiate with HR and know definitively what they should be paid.
It is not unfair in the slightest. Complaining that you earn 100k rather than 120k is, in my opinion, the height of silicon valley arrogance. You would not have accepted that salary if you did not think it was fair.
The values are irrelevant (although interesting for a nosy person).
Are you telling me that you don't think it's fair that people get paid equally for the same role / level of responsibility? Are you saying you wouldn't be pissed with your company if the guy next to you was earning 20% more than you despite your performance being comparable?
Please stop shaming people for being successful, whether by luck or skill these people are earning a lot of money but that doesn't make them any less human or any less deserving of earning equally amongst their peers.
At the end of the day, who cares what other people make. Whether you earn in the 0.1% bracket or only top 80% bracket, while you still earn a salary from a profit seeking company, you are seeing only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what the company makes. While we squabble over 20k with HR and brand each other "arrogant", the C suite are rolling around in their billions blasting hundreds of millions on moonshots like driverless cars, humanoid cars and quantum computing...
So as employees of companies we should all strive to eke out more from our employees because 99/100 you're getting paid significantly less than what you're adding to the business and they should value all of us better.
We are not all perfectly rational salary-maximizing skilled negotiators with complete information.
I accepted a job offer at Google straight out of college. I didn't do much research on what was fair compensation for a new grad SWE or have any intuition for how to value my skills; I didn't even have other offers to compare, since I hate interviews. I just trusted I would get a nice job and they would pay me something reasonable (defined as "what people similar to me earn" - how am I to know what is reasonable in an absolute sense? There are many jobs in other fields I would find much harder that pay much less.) This thread is useful to verify.