I was reading Philip Greenspun’s blog and ran across this gem:

Managers of software development projects tend to be so incompetent and lacking in information that they can’t recognize and reward the strong contributors (this results in the best programmers getting paid only 20-30 percent more than the mediocre ones (compared to a 500 percent ratio in most areas of law, for example)).

500 percent? I didn’t realize there was already a blueprint for such significant difference in compensation. Law is comparable to software engineering in many ways, so perhaps we can bring the compensation methodology over too.

Actually, law typically has a much larger “sales” oriented aspect – people who make partner bring in business. So perhaps it’s not so comparable.