Work assignment does not equal ability.
A phd can be assigned lowly management work, lets say tracking stuff, creating excel sheets and powerpoint presentations. That decision is made by the company and department.
Does that mean they should not be compensated for the skills they posess? Surely not.
Lets not even start with the metrics used to gauge someone's results. If they even exist, they are consistently useless.
Ability doesn't equal value to the company. If you have Einstein in and all he does is sweep your floors, you pay him a floor sweeper's wage. You pay for value.
No I agree, but if you hire Einstein for Physics lectures, but for whatever reason let him mop the floors, you still take into account his abilities.
Fellow floor moppers might say "Einstein mops slower and worse then me, I want more than his salary", but that would not attribute abilities and that it is not his first choice to mop floors, the company made that strange decision.
Ability and opportunity also doesn't equal output - There are plenty of 'high ability' people that will do the bare minimum, and plenty of 'lower ability' people that will push, work hard and deliver more.
Agreed. Yet it seems insanely hard to measure output...
If the bare minimum gets the job done the same as the overachiever grinding as if their life depended on it, fair judgement would rate the output the same, right?
Absolutely, assuming the inputs were the same (ie that you don’t have to chase the ‘bare minimum employee and don’t have to give more support to the ‘grinding’ one).
Personally i’ll take the grinding person any day though, they tend to be much easier to manage.
There is a ceiling - the company pays what it thinks it can get away with, you accept pay according to what you can get. It's almost never according to the monetary value you provide.
Lets not even start with the metrics used to gauge someone's results. If they even exist, they are consistently useless.