While you’re right that how hard someone works doesn’t determine their pay, how much money someone brings in at best loosely correlates to their pay as well. I think a lot of people have dissonance there as well, thinking “well surely if it’s not how hard the work is, it’s how much value they bring in!” But no, all that matters from a business perspective is that the sum of all paychecks is less than is needed to make a profit. It’s all about the cost of replacement, or how much money it would take to hire the next best chef you can find. It’s the supply demand curve of “how many chefs are looking for work” vs “how many people want to hire them”. If there are many more people who want to be chefs than there are slots for chefs, they can easily end up working for many times less than they bring in to the business.
In theory sure, but in practice the internal complexity of organizations leave plenty of room for obfuscating that ideal. Throw in nepotism, favoritism, corruption, and an inflated valuation of upper management roles and you've got plenty of jobs that pay well past what they "bring in", which is itself nebulously defined at best, especially in white collar industries. Hell I know some companies that would've been better off just axing some of their c-level suite.
I totally agree but do think it's true in terms of averages and probably true more often than not that a given individual falls within the range. After all, you can't have an industry-wide average for most roles that's higher than the value they bring in. There's also a myriad of roles that don't produce directly and are either supportive, compliance, or simply unnecessary.
