There's this dynamic of pay tending to be pegged to your job title. An engineer is an engineer is an engineer.
In SF bay area, entry level jobs at big tech are skewing high and experienced roles are skewing low. This doesn't come close to mapping to impact level usually and we just accept that because it's socially easy.
I've worked at startups where there were clearly >10x impact differences between two engineers and at most there was a 2x salary difference. As a startup, it's basically not worth it to hire junior talent anymore because they are not close to being worth the cost in most cases.
This right here. It's frustrating when you learn that someone hired a couple months ago ("the hottest job market" tm) with 2 yoe makes marginally less than you at 10+ yoe, as an example. A higher performing Sr can expect maybe high single digit bumps yearly, but a job hopping Jr can double digit bump and make it to almost the same level in a couple years. While less important and more ego the same thing is happening to titles. It's just hard to get out of the headspace of feeling underpaid when you see that, especially when you are the one holding their hand and helping them gain experience. Totally get it's all "in your head" and we are all very fortunate or that I should just job hop along with them, but overall just hard to escape those thought patterns.
This is known as wage compression. It is occurring (typical in hot job markets) and has many of the problems you noted. Good indicator of a distorted labor market.
In SF bay area, entry level jobs at big tech are skewing high and experienced roles are skewing low. This doesn't come close to mapping to impact level usually and we just accept that because it's socially easy.
I've worked at startups where there were clearly >10x impact differences between two engineers and at most there was a 2x salary difference. As a startup, it's basically not worth it to hire junior talent anymore because they are not close to being worth the cost in most cases.