Oxide Computer (opens new window) has a very unique compensation model: they pay every employee the same amount. I'm just going to pull some quotes from their two pieces on the matter, but I recommend you read both in their entirety.

From Compensation as a Reflection of Values (opens new window)

We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. The three of us live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Steve and I each have three kids; we knew that the dollar figure that would allow us to live without financial distress – which we put at $175,000 a year – would be at least universally adequate for the team we wanted to build. And we mean everyone literally: as of this writing we have 23 employees, and that's what we all make.

From Oxide's Compensation Model: How is it Going? (opens new window)

It allows people to focus on doing the right thing. In a world of traditional, compensation-tied performance review, the organizational priority is around those things that affect compensation — even at the expense of activity that clearly benefits the company. This leads to all sorts of wild phenomena, and most technology workers will be able to tell stories of doing things that were clearly right for the company, but having to hide it from management that thought only narrowly in terms of their own stated KPIs and MBOs. By contrast, over and over (and over!) again, we have found that people do the right thing at Oxide — even if (especially if?) no one is looking. The beneficiary of that right thing? More often than not, it's our customers, who have uniformly praised the team for going above and beyond.

However in the first post they acknowledge a limitation that I think is a pretty big deal, and deserves an actual change: uniform compensation does tend to exclude people in their career. They have a reasonable justification in their case...

There is truth to this too, but the nature of our problem at Oxide (namely, technically very broad and very deep), the size of our team (very small), and the stage of our company (still pretty early!) already means that engineers at the earliest stages of their career are unlikely to be a fit for us right now. That said, we don't think this is impossible; and if we felt that we had someone much earlier in their career who was a fit – that is, if we saw them contributing to the company as much as anyone else – why wouldn't we reflect that by paying them the same as everyone else?

... but not every organization fits the above description. Other places might want to adopt uniform compensation to get the other values benefits, but don't want to cut off their pipeline of new talent. Most people who are early in their career will never be able to contribute to a company "as much as anyone else", by no fault of their own. That doesn't mean they aren't valuable, at the very very least as a long-term investment and a source of new perspective.

A simple modification of the "uniform compensation" model fixes this problem while still enjoying the same structural and values-based benefits. My hope is that this modification will make it easier for more organizations to adopt uniform compensation.

Fixed length mentored apprenticeships

• An apprentice role has lower compensation than the "full" roles, depending on the company and industry, probably something like 50%. Very importantly, the benefits are just as good!
  • A lower compensation level is reasonable and appropriate even for a values-oriented organization, since people earlier in their career tend to have lower life expenses, can't quite contribute as much yet, and in general are riskier than a fully experienced hire since they might not have figured themselves out yet.
• An apprentice role only lasts for a fixed length of time, probably something like two years. At the end of this time the person automatically moves to the higher "full" level of compensation.
  • This is so that everyone is accountable in both directions. The apprentice has no incentive to play politics and try to game the people around them to promote them early, and everyone else has no justification or mechanism to create a permanent underclass of employees.
• The apprentice is assigned an official mentor who is expected to "pair" with the apprentice for some fraction of the workweek, something like two or three sessions at roughly four hours each.
  • These sessions are intentionally heavily inspired by the software practice of pair programming (opens new window), including the practice of often switching roles between "driver" and "observer". This is to ensure less experienced colleagues are getting time and attention by default, but also have time to work individually and develop those skills.

A possible failure mode is a situation where mentors aren't interested in mentoring or pairing, and so either avoid it or do it poorly to "tick the box". Honestly though, if your organization has large numbers of people who wouldn't be thrilled to mentor a younger/earlier colleague and pair with them on important work, you already screwed up. The organization's hiring practices (opens new window) should select for people who are humble, curious, dedicated, deeply committed to teamwork, and in general excited to teach and learn from everyone around them.

Pairing is fun and deeply meaningful! A full employee who thinks they have nothing to learn from another person, even someone less experienced, probably shouldn't work in an organization whose values drive it to adopt uniform compensation.