[cageface]

I agree. Salaries should correlate more directly with performance but in a lot of companies you steadily collect your yearly raises and after a while they add up. This can be very dangerous for people in tech though. In fact I just left a job after ten years of steady raises because I felt I was stagnating. I'll probably take a considerable pay cut in my next job but I think staying put would have been a lot riskier in the long run.

At least I'm not chained to an S.F. mortgage that means I can't live on < $90k/year.