When I worked for a software company, a fellow computer programmer once lamented that the salespeople earned so much more than the coders, despite the fact that the coders were generally better educated, more intelligent, and more essential to the company's core value: its products. The reason for the disparity is straightforward. Salespeople are closer to the money. It is very difficult for executives to perceive the value good programmers, who represent cogs somewhere deep in the machine, but the value of good salespeople is obvious from their sales numbers. For instance, it is easy to justify paying $200,000 in salary and bonus to a salesperson who makes sales worth $500,000 in annual profits.

My colleague's dismay exhibited the wide gap between "merit value" and "market value." Merit value is an amorphous sense of the worth of an employee based on capability, education, seniority, and hard work. Market value is the perceived monetary worth of an employee. Our economy is primarily based on market value. Insofar, as we reward merit value, it is because of cultural reasons and a loose, indirect relationship between merit value and market value: people generally perceive monetary value in the meritorious qualities of capability, education, seniority, and hard work. Yet while this indirect relationship may hold true within a particular field, it varies widely between fields. Thus, the most capable coders are likely be the top paid programmers, but they are unlikely to be paid as well as the most capable salespeople.

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