Are you underpaid? Maybe.

Are you worth more? Likely not.

And if that annoyed you and you're gearing up to write a 3000-word reply, pause. Take a sec. Please hear what I have to say.

“Underpaid” is a very comforting story to tell yourself. It lets you believe you’re doing everything right and the world is simply refusing to reward you. But what if I told you you're not underpaid?

What if I told you you're underpositioned?

It's going to piss you off because it implies the world is rewarding you exactly in proportion to how much leverage your work actually has, and that is not what you want to hear.

A lot of you are paid correctly for the kind of work you’re doing. Not because you’re not smart or not hardworking, but because your work doesn’t touch anything that compounds. It doesn’t create an asset. It doesn’t create a flywheel. It doesn’t anchor a number that makes someone’s stomach drop if it goes the wrong way. It keeps things running. It keeps people comfortable. It keeps the mess from spilling out. That is useful work, sometimes even noble work, but it is not the kind of work that gets paid.

What’s actually happening when you say “I’m underpaid” is that you’re trying to price your exhaustion. You’re saying "Look at how much I’m doing, look at how much I’m carrying, look at how much this costs me." And I’m not even mocking that. I get it. But the market doesn’t buy your suffering. It buys leverage. You can be exhausted in a role that resets every morning and still be low-paid, because there’s no mechanism for that exhaustion to translate into outsized outcomes. It’s just labour. Repeatable, substitutable labour.

The funniest part is that under-positioned people are often the ones working the hardest. They’re the “glue.” They’re the adult. They’re the fixer. They’re the person who turns the mess into something presentable. They’re the one the team “can’t live without.” They take pride in being the person everyone depends on, which is exactly how they end up trapped. A system will happily keep a dependable person in the same spot forever, because dependable people make the system run without demanding a rewrite of it. You’ll get compliments. You’ll get more responsibility. You’ll get the privilege of being called “so valuable.” And you’ll keep waiting for it to be rewarded with money, and that moment will never come.

People start getting emotional and telling themselves it’s about fairness. It’s not. It’s about proximity. Proximity to revenue. Proximity to distribution. Proximity to decisions. Proximity to ownership. If you’re not close to any of those, you can be beloved and still be replaceable. You can be respected and still be capped. You can be the backbone of a team and still be paid like you're a vestigial organ. Organizations protect upside for the people who either bring it in or control it.

If you vanished tomorrow, would the company’s outcomes change in a way that shows up on a dashboard?

Not 'people will miss me'. Not 'my clients will ask where I am?' Actual numbers. Revenue, retention, growth, margin, time-to-close, distribution. Something that forces a decision, not a condolence. If the answer is no, you’re not being underpaid. You’re being paid for a role that’s designed to absorb effort, not create leverage. And if you keep trying to solve that with a very polite 'So... about that raise...' conversation, you’re basically asking the system to break its own logic because you’re feeling tired.

The reason some people look “overpaid” is because you’re judging work by visible strain. You’re watching someone do something that looks easy and assuming it must be less valuable than your all-nighters. But what you’re actually seeing is positioning: work placed in a spot where small actions cause large outcomes. What you're seeing is leverage. It looks like ease. It looks like luck. It looks like “must be nice.” It’s often just a shit tonne of work gone into systems you can't even begin to start understanding.

If you’ve been “underpaid” in every job, at some point it stops being an unlucky employer problem and starts being a you problem. You keep choosing the same kind of lane. The lane where you get to feel useful and righteous and indispensable, without taking the risk of being responsible for a number. Where you can be the hero in the day-to-day and lose the decade. Where you’re rewarded with trust and dependency instead of leverage and upside. You keep choosing it because it feels safe to be needed.

If you want to fix this, stop making your identity about being the glue. Start moving your work closer to outcomes that matter. That could mean switching roles, switching teams, switching companies, learning the unsexy parts of the business, taking ownership of a metric, building something that survives you, asking for equity instead of compliments, or leaving even when people keep calling youvaluable because they refuse to treat (or pay you) like you actually are.

Or don’t. Plenty of people choose stability and being liked and being relied on. That’s a valid choice. Just stop calling it “underpaid”. You're exactly where you need to be.