[Spooky23]

How do you know how valuable you are? Or how much more valuable you are than the receptionist.

My assistant is ridiculously valuable. She's a multiplier for the team. Her presence means invoices get paid, visitor logistics are taken care of, contracts get renewed, the office is in order. I don't control her pay, but every hour she is present easily saves me a quarter hour, and probably saves my direct reports a similar amount of time.

Essentially that role for me is manufacturing an asset that I cannot buy -- time. If I could control her salary, I would double it.

[mistermann]

Because in most cases he could learn to do her job in a few weeks, whereas it would take her years to learn his, if at all. Look what website you're on - people here write software to literally eliminate jobs in many cases, and to do so you have to understand that job even better than the person who does it, and then some. And this doesn't just apply to "menial" jobs - by the time a software developer is done implementing in a highly specialized field, they often fully understand the domain better than the experts.

Look, I understand the value of a really good personal assistant, at times they can be like magic, but let's be serious, all jobs are not equally difficult.

[cheald]

To elaborate a bit on this, the term economists like to use for this is "alternative choices". The minimum price of the assistant is somewhere around how much it would cost to hire and train someone to replace her - that is, her minimum price is set by the price of the alternative choices that the employer has. After all, it is irrational to hire an assistant at $2X who will produce Y output when you could hire an assistant at $X who will produce Y output.

On the other end of the scale, the maximum price is value of her productive output to the company - it is irrational to pay her more than she can generate.

Negotiation is the skill of convincing your employer that you're harder (ie, more expensive) to replace, thus propelling your pay closer to that maximum.