[vostok]

I'm actually ok with discrete pay.

I get that it's culturally difficult to lower salaries so companies don't feel comfortable paying very large salaries as they'll never be able to reduce them in lean years.

Bonuses/RSUs/etc seem like perfectly reasonable ways to pay people what they deserve without paying unsustainable high salaries that are very difficult to ever decrease if times get tough or if high performance is no longer achieved.