[BoorishBears]

I used to think this until I actually thought about how much value a developer can generate for a company.

If your 8 hours of bug fixing keeps a system generating 100k revenue an hour, suddenly 90k a year seems almost like a pittance.

Even for much less impressive amounts of revenue the math should checkout otherwise your job isn't really sustainable.

If your 5 man development team creates an application worth 100k in 6 months and you sell it to 10 clients, in half a year you've covered a year's worth of salary. Every additional sale related to further development for the next 6 months will be purely profit.

What worries me is jobs where you can't even come close to seeing how company revenue can (or will) exceed development costs, but I'd still keep in mind not guaranteed for a developer to know every factor involved.