Managers are paid more because they are higher in the hierarchy of an organization than engineers, and therefore they know how much engineers on their team are

Managers are paid more because they are higher in the hierarchy of an organization than engineers, and therefore they know how much engineers on their team are paid. If you paid them less than the engineers they would be emotionally unable to do their job. The cost of paying them more is lower than the trouble that would be caused if you paid them according to how much you would need to pay someone to do that job given the supply of talent available. Most managers in software organizations aren't very good software engineers, and they aren't better managers than managers you find in other related fields. The idea that a mediocre to poor software engineer who is in a management role should be paid 3x what an equivalent level manager who manages mechanical engineers is paid is an absurdity, since the reason software engineers are paid so much is that there is far more demand compared to the supply. They aren't better at managing projects or teams than a random manager from another engineering discipline, yet they command much higher salaries (but don't really contribute significant domain specific knowledge which might justify such a situation). This is sufficient demonstration of my point, I think. If engineers had access to the pay information of other engineers the average pay of engineers at most companies would go up 50% to 100% (the lower paid engineers would see a 50% to 100% increase in pay, the actual average across all engineers would go up something like 20% to 50%), since that is approximately the differential from the lowest to highest paid engineer at the same level with the same experience and skill within the same organization. I'm bringing up the pay differential of engineers to demonstrate how valuable the knowledge of other's pay is when negotiating your own.