If you're < 5 years out of college it does. Useful knowledge is that if you work hard, and don't tie yourself to one job, every job change you get for the rest of your career involves a salary increase. You've set a good base.
I do sometimes feel like it is all a massive fraud perpetrated by HR people who, in exchange for some hip decor and free food, can get engineers to trade raw salary.
All in all I learned that all the external reputation, perks and lime green paint in the world don't matter one whit compared to the competence of your immediate peers and you certainly don't need to go to a namebrand software shop for that.
written on a mobile phone so apologies for any egregious misspellings
Because the fact that your skill set has grown doesn't mean that your employer's needs have grown identically.
Managers set salaries. Guild professions (e.g. lawyers, doctors, accountants) set their prices and uphold the guild with cryptic languages and lengthy vetting processes.
The case where engineers (of either companies, processes, products or technology), instead, are in the position to set compensation (or more specifically, are able to profit by the fruits of their labor), are generally only available to very high ranking manager/engineer hybrids, consultants, and founders. This is probably the closest thing in the modern world, in the literal sense, to the Marxist Socialist ideal of the workers taking control of the means of production.
Other than that: ask yourself the question -- why do the bankers have all of the money?
PS: Some resources.
6% of all US income is now earned by the top 0.01% of the income bracket. This is as high as it's been since at least 1913.
The lowest earning member of thix bracket in 2005 was earning $5.9 million a year.
http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/08/18/the-percent-of-inco...
http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/category/share-of-income...
This isn't the difference between Bob down the street who went to college and Jim who didn't -- or the kid in your class who became a Harvard trained lawyer working in a big firm on wall-street versus the smartest kid in your math class who's now at Lawrence Berkeley labs. This isn't the difference between the kid who's working at some cool post series A company and one that went to Microsoft, or the student body president that went to work for a hedge fund rather than a non-profit.
This is the difference between the founders and partners of the law firm, the founders, investors, or CEO's of the startup, or the CEO's or partners or founders of the hedge fund, and A-list directors/producers/athletes/musicians/actors and nearly everyone else.
"paid what you're worth" is incomplete the the point of being meaningless.
You get paid what you're worth to the company where you work.