I and a lot of other skilled talent left a company that was paying enough. The main reason that everyone left was the place was a complete head fk. Just as the article stated the incompetent had become entrenched and created bureaucratic process to stifle work. Since they could not do their jobs they created paperwork process, and made that their job while not getting any real work done. I spent two years trying to unwind the place and trying to inspire people to do their job. I got so frustrated that I offered to do other peoples work with my team if they would just stop the bureaucracy and stay out of my way. That just created political opponents who actively tried to set my team up for failure. After two years I realized that no amount of doing a good job was going to fix the issue and left (I was getting squeezed out by politics as well). The worst part is the few great developers who remained because of loyalty to me where summarily dismissed after my departure. They actually fired the best and the brightest for trying to make things better saying that they where playing politics. That experience taught me that if the environment is junk when you walk in, then walk out no amount of money is worth that headache.
I think Bruce Eckel started a blog about these issues because he had seen them so many times. From what I have seen it seems true more or less everywhere. People are territorial and they see everything relatively. So in general its more important to a manager that a talented employee is held back from contributing value than that the employee deliver the value and possibly end up getting paid more than the manager. Then again there are exceptions. You will often hear very successful business people say "Success is about enabling people". I remember reading an article about one entrepreneur years ago saying that if you can get good people then don't be afraid to pay them more than you pay yourself.
But of course the manager is just an employee where the entrepreneur is an owner. Maybe we should just go to a system with only owners and contractors (another kind of owner) and let the enlightened owners and the talented contractors win.
Indeed it's not just about the money, and the quality of the working environment is at least as important. The best companies I've worked at were were bureaucracy was deliberately kept to the absolute minimum level. It's hard to really innovate if you're simultaneously bogged down by process.
