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How the fuck are [salaries] determined?

If you actually want to know, corporations are in a bit of a bind because (in the US) they need to be compliant with discrimination law (pay people somewhat equally for the same work) and pay competitively with other companies, but it is illegal to cooperate with other companies to share salary data (because they could act like a cartel to depress wages if enough companies were in cahoots).

So they need to set salary ranges that they actually follow and make sure similar employees are paid similarly and that any protected class isn't paid too little compared to others, and also pay similarly to other companies- but without getting data from those companies.

So, corporations submit salary data to consultants who anonymize and aggregate the data and send it back out to all the companies who submit data. There are like 4 main data vendors in the industry, and pretty much all Fortune 500 (and many more) use them.

Now, here's the interesting part. Most companies have a strategy whereby they aim to pay at about the 50th percentile for most jobs in most places (with some exceptions, paying more or less for some jobs depending on what the company decides is important - maybe they pay above market average for engineers or sales or whatever if that's important to them making money). So, if most companies are paying at this average rate for most jobs in a given industry, the average for each job gets narrower each year until it converges, and most jobs get paid about the same range at one company as at any other (within the same industry). So it's "basically" a price-fixing/cartel scheme but with extra steps. It does reduce variability, which could be good, but it may also depress wages somewhat, which would be bad.