[namelessoracle]

While its usually pay, sometimes other perks are part of it too. Higher rank = get away with more at most places. If the Staff needs to disappear for a couple of days due to personal reasons everybody wishes them the best. The Junior/Mid will get a lot of questions asked. Thats my professional experience from observation.

When you become low level manager this resets btw, Senior Managers and Directors will want to know where you are, nobody asks why the Director wasn't feeling it for 2 days though.

Other part of it is control. Higher rank means you get to decide which technology and how the problem gets solved and get to play empire building games. Which is fulfilling to some people. Some people want to feel like they are making the decisions, other people like to feel like they have influence on others for self worth. Other people enjoy high level strategic work over doing actual implementation of the work. You pretty much have to get promoted to do strategic style work in tech. My analogy is you enjoy playing a starcraft style RTS where you get joy out of sending the exact right amount of marines to beat that enemy in the most efficient manner, but hate having to do an FPS where you play that marine and have to fight that enemy yourself.