It oftentimes feels like you are paid way less than you actually gave to the company – assuming you actually worked hard and cared.

In my country it's like "Well, the company broke all records of profit, we earned 500 million dollars more than last years. Here, have this box of chocolate as a gift. Keep the good work guys"

Maybe this opinion would have more weight if you respected that humans are not perfectly spherical massless money sinks.

No. They are profiting from your labour, and returning a smaller portion of that profit to you.

Your work creates the profit that your salary comes from, the employer takes a cut of that and gives you what they deem they can get away with.

Not to invoke a true scotsman fallacy, but most knowledge/white-collar workers I know aspire to be more than just being a cog on a payroll.

No, they are giving you a tiny fraction of the cake you earn them. The fact is that you are there to make them money.

Maybe this opinion would have more weight if you didn't use a throwaway account to post it.

That, at best, is dehumanizing the employer. There is no corporate structure that exists without humans making the decisions at some point in the chain. The decisions might be abstracted or broken into small chunks, but it's still humans at the bottom.

And humans that replace caring with money are assholes.

I missed this clause in

checks notes

Literally my entire career.