there are all kinds of intangibles not mentioned here. what if you have an idea that transforms the company's sales numbers or you dream up a better way of doing the builds that reduces integration bugs. So many ways an employee contributes intangibly.
you're right, pay is basically what your peers make +/-
Yes, particularly in the UK the vestiges of the old class system are that no matter what price the market clears at a blue-collar worker can never be paid more than a white-collar manager.
So if you are in a situation where there is a glut of junior managers and a scarcity of talented engineers, then seemingly inexplicable things start happening to salaries.
I'm fascinated that in the UK, software engineers are not viewed as white-collar professionals. That seems to be a rather big difference between the work culture of the UK and the USA.
Yes, like I say, the class system, and the typical engineer's strongly expressed desire to dress scruffily and generally nonconfom, disregard hierarchy and so on. There's no reason that software professionals shouldn't be on a par with lawyers and accountants, the work is similar enough (describing the current and desired states of complex systems in very precise terms, and creating finely detailed plans for getting from here to there).
> describing the current and desired states of complex systems in very precise terms, and creating finely detailed plans for getting from here to there
What a beautiful and elegant description of software engineering!
What do you think will happen? Will the engineers earn more than the managers, or will the managers salaries go up just because the engineers earn more?
No, you will have managers crying about a talent shortage, and engineers wondering why they get paid so much less than lawyers, accountants and doctors (all of whom count as "white collar").
These "intangibles" can still have a value assigned. Each integration bug eliminated by an improved build process can have a cost assigned to it by using the average time and money cost of previously fixed integration bugs. Example: "Each integration bug costs 1hr of senior dev time at $100/hr fully loaded and 8hrs of junior dev time at $50/hr. The new build process produces X fewer integration bugs per month, for a savings of X*$500 per month."
"Transforming" the sales numbers should also be measurable. Example: "Before, salespeople were closing x% of deals and missing scheduled followup on y% of contacts. Now (x+5)% of deals close and only (y/2)% of contacts are mistakenly dropped."
you're right, pay is basically what your peers make +/-