[ThrustVectoring]

There are more factors than just supply/demand and use value. There's the sensitivity of productivity and employee turnover with respect to pay, and the replacement of costly performance quantification with a significantly cheaper rank-ordering system (usually informal via promoting your "best" few engineers).

The former leads to efficiency wages, and the latter to tournament theory.

Example of the first: there are two jobs with an identical market-clearing wage and expected net present value of productivity. The first is relatively unskilled labor - you train them for maybe a week, and they do pretty much average performance for however long they stay. The second requires a year of training during which they provide zero value, then stay an average of a year after that during which they provide double the value. A savvy employer would pay the market-clearing wage for the first role, and above that for the second. By doing so, employees of the second type would be unable to find a job that pays as well as what they have now (since the market isn't clearing), so they'll tend to stay longer and provide extra value.

Example of the second: corporations will pay CEOs much more than vice-presidents. The work that both jobs do is largely the same, and the disparity in value added between the two roles is much less than the salary difference. The spread is there to make sure that senior executives work really hard to be seen as a better choice than their competitors - now the board doesn't have to evaluate how well executives did in an absolute sense, but rather need only judge who the best candidate is for the top role.