[sargun]

Yeah, I don’t understand why pay is so depressed. Often times, junior engineers get paid like 60-120k.

I would say senior engineers usually output double, if not more, than a junior engineer. Why doesn’t pay scale with productivity?

Like, maybe I'm seriously missing something. Maybe Junior engineers at other orgs are ridiculously productivity? Maybe the expectation for senior engineers is ridiculously undproductive. Maybe the risk-reward of hiring senior engineers (and them getting hit by a bus) levels it out?

If the efficiency / dollar doesn't scale, then what's wrong?

[sidlls]

What you're missing is that pay is not based entirely on merit, productivity or any objective measure. A significant fraction of pay is based on social status in the org, and programmers are on the lowest bar as far as that goes.

[dasmoth]

It’s called wage compression and is seen in many fields. I agree it’s somewhat perplexing, though.