This post strikes a chord. Personal experience below, economics first.
It seems best for the species that wages be allocated to where they have the highest marginal impact on the final value of goods produced or services rendered. If a great employee happens to be too squeamish to ask for a raise, but he will still go on adding steady value to the widget, it strikes me as a societal waste to initiate a pay raise for him. However, there is this HUGE possibility of negative externalities from chronic under compensation (resentment of firm, shame of cowardice for not asking for more, laziness, obstinance, etc). This makes the problem of wages extremely difficult. Factor in the complexity that "market prices" based on outside offers are inflated to cover switching cost to the employee and it gets even harder to determine the RIGHT wage. Without quantifying these externalities, the best answer to what the right wage is, from the firm (and probably system) perspective, is the least amount of money you will take to perform the work. If this sounds un appealing to you as an employee, its probably good you're reading hacker news! THE PAIN of salary management comes from finding that "lowest amount" you're willing to take. Spending energy negotiating just to get to your scenario of indifference is slow torture. The winners in the whole process are probably below average people for whom salary reverts to the mean.
I left 100k USD in the midwest to become a west coast entrepreneur. In Chicago I got my salary raised three times in three years, first unsolicited for performance, second to counter a threat to leave, and third as a promotion. The threat to leave tied the promotion in dollar amount, but was highest in percntage terms at the time. The unsolicited raise for performance was so small that it set me down a destructive path of engineering larger pay raises which i thought i deserved and didn't receive.
What I Learned -Money feels VERY important when you hate your job -Big company jobs are comparitively more valuable to people with children and houses -While the employee-led raise environment is painfull to experience, it seems to produce an appropriate allocation of LABOR eventually
Hopefully one of us will someday solve the puzzle of quantifying the value of individual labor inputs to finished goods. This would have two amazing effects. 1) workers would be fairly compensated, 2) all workers would have empirical info on how to improve their value add.