[hnriot]

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 +/-

[gaius]

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.

[wyclif]

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.

[Luyt]

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?

[nitrogen]

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."