[sokoloff]

I think a "fair" distribution of pay for software engineers would more unequal than it is currently. (This is the logical financial conclusion of believing in the 3x, if not 10x, engineer, which I do.)

I have people who work on my teams who are absolutely fantastic and, while already well-paid, probably should make more. I have other people on my team, with the same title, same education, same on-paper responsibilities, same city, same years of experience, who might be below the median pay and are still overpaid based on my estimation of their contributions relative to their peers.

You can't look only at a spreadsheet and determine that it's "obvious that you are underpaid", IMO.

[oblio]

That only works the way you think it works if most people agree with you. I doubt that... Plus it's really hard to determine who is actually a 10x contributor, even more so universally (across projects, teams, companies).

[majormajor]

It's really not that hard to see, on a single team, who's contributing twice as much as who else. You don't even have to be a manager - sometimes managers are the last to be sure, actually. Generally people who complain about lazy coworkers end up settling on a lot of the same people... Being a manager just gives you official venues like feedback requests to realize "oh everyone else sees it too."

[crdoconnor]

Managers are usually terrible at knowing who is contributing on a software team and they're the ones who set pay.

This is 100% a red herring as far as pay transparency is concerned anyway. If you're not being unfair you have no reason to hide anything.