[justinpombrio]

Since when is an employee's salary based on their value to the company? Occasionally that value can be measured, and an employee will be payed by commission, but that seems like a bit of an exception. How do you judge the value of a business's single, extremely necessary, janitor?

I thought employees were generally paid by their market rate, i.e. how much it would cost to replace them, which is not necessarily related to their value to the company.

[icebraining]

Based, not tied. Specifically, the salary is capped to their value to the company.

[jakebaker]

Conceptually, though in reality/over shorter time frames, it's potentially just as tied to political/human considerations vis a vis the person setting the compensation decision. Maybe easier to avoid this in start-ups, but I saw it happen with some frequency in the context of working for a large global bank. At a certain scale, feudalism or liege-lord-vassal models becomes as good of a mechanism for interpreting outcomes at a human level as anything else.