Even if you're in your 50s, you have to acknowledge that eventually you're going to tire out just by how our biological mechanisms wear out. Hopefully, you have a nest egg of sorts by then. And if you don't, well you can't do the job and according to your standards, be kicked/compensated less.

> If you can (and will) do the job, you should be welcomed, respected, and rewarded without regard to age, race, gender, degree, veteran status, parenthood, height, weight, or any of 100 other irrelevant characteristics.

I used to think in this way, that everything should be pure merit. Unfortunately reality doesn't work that way, inputs and rewards are hard to quantify, and the pareto principle exists. Eg. Your work powering millions, yet you're only paid a month's salary and have to meet next month's expense. Furthermore, if things are left to pure meritocracy you'd have more and more in-groups and imbalance. So in some sense you'll be doing society a favor by uplifting others that are not part of the in-group of meritocracy purists.

Let’s imagine it’s performance review time at our company and everyone agrees (or perhaps an infallible oracle tells us) that @like-oreally is contributing meaningfully more than @sokoloff to the company success.

But the wrinkle is @sokoloff is mid/late-50s and @like-oreally is mid/late-30s. Who should earn more pay? Who should be promoted to lead the next major initiative to drive the company forward?

Deciding to pay me the same or more for less value certainly makes things better and more convenient/comfortable for me. It does exactly the opposite for @like-oreally. Should they continue to over-contribute relative to their compensation in hopes that they’ll one day be in a position to receive more for contributing less? Does that provide the right incentives?

Does promoting me to lead that major new initiative put the company in the best position to succeed in the market and, via that success, continue to provide income for all employees?

It all depends. Has @sokoloff contributed the same in the past? What is the value that age/experience has brought him in the things he does do and does not do? Performance reviews will always omit some aspect of the value the reviewed person brings.

> Deciding to pay me the same or more for less value certainly makes things better and more convenient/comfortable for me.

Of course it's going to feel better just looking at the numbers. But then we get back to the same old problem - how do you define value and contributions and say A goes over B?

Sure, I'll admit that it doesn't create the best incentives for people who want to optimize their paycheck and standing, ie. ambitious people. However, this is fine in some circumstances when you're aiming to create a self-sustaining team.

> Does promoting me to lead that major new initiative put the company in the best position to succeed in the market and, via that success, continue to provide income for all employees?

'Best' is an ill defined, extremist term. For many tasks at hand, there are checkboxes that they have to tick, and for all you know, they might need not to be the best, but just at sufficient level to check those boxes. And that is enough.

Take an example where a dungeon boss needs a certain amount of damage dealt to it within a certain period of time to beat him. There are many class specialties, some doing more damage than others, but these are rare, and all of them meet the requirements. Are you going to spend extra time trying to grab that rare class specialty or take one of the abundant ones? Of course not.