Isn’t this almost the same? In both cases, it feels unfair that you are paid the same as someone lesser. In your case, the lesser is a -1X developer, and in the article, I guess the 10Xer compares themselves with a 1Xer. I’m at least thinking that a 10Xer wouldn’t mind a similar bump in pay compared to a 7Xer, but somewhere you draw the line as unfair.

In my opinion, management should cull -1Xers, while also trying to reward top talent, even if it has it’s downsides.

It doesn’t feel unfair to be paid unevenly to me? I guess one upside of the whole prosociopath thing is that I don’t feel cheated by that particular circumstance. I feel cheated when someone is given authority without proper skill and experience, to the degree that I suspect other people do about pay, though. A lot more harm is done by assignment of authority to incompetence (in a non-training context, anyways) than is done by decoupling pay and competence.

However: I’m extremely hostile to overall wages as a fraction of revenue being held artificially low to increase the imbalance of payouts in favor of executives and shareholders. I think it’s appropriate to pay executives more because they bear a higher proportion of legal exposure than non-executives; I do not think it’s appropriate how most executives treat workers raises as a “cost center to be minimized” differently from their own pay as a “profit center to be maximized”. Similarly, I think that there’s a solid argument for paying your company’s long-term strategy cross-functional team according to having to bear the long-term responsibility and awareness of risks and so on. You can’t ask a base wage worker to care about your company; that’s a lot to ask, and requires an additional share of payment than just a day job would.

No disagreement about the harmful-when-present workers, though!