[InterimNew]

I see.

I saw somewhere else in the thread that you yourself are a new grad, so I'll chalk this up to lack of experience but on sufficiently large products it is trivial to make incremental changes that will produce more value then your salary. In my own career I saved a big tech company 250k in reoccurring costs with a 9 month project I completed as a junior. Yes, that number is a rounding error for a large company but the value is clear.

Additionally, perhaps you have never built a team before, but the value of a potential employee extends beyond their year-to-year output. If, for example, I have great confidence that a currently junior hire will output ~$1M of value over a four year period than I am willing to overpay that first year as they grow and develop.

This isn't going anywhere interesting and I am uninterested in continuing the conversation further. Have a nice day :)

(There is a certain irony to me about this back and forth. A large portion of my personal time is spent volunteering in an organization that agitates for unions and other forms of direct action aimed at tackling the gross inequity of this society head-on. You're clearly keyed in to a real and present problem, but rather than suggest any solutions you've decided to whinge ineffectively about... developer salaries?)