[Nerevarine76]

CEOs' decision making has far more impact on the revenue of a company than a single engineer, or many engineers. That's why the market rate is very high for them.

If there were only a handful of qualified engineers available on the market, then they'd get paid CEO-like salaries due to the value they provide and being in high demand. But because there is a whole market of qualified engineers they get paid far less.

It's pretty basic economics and doesn't have much to do with stock buybacks/dividends/etc... Regardless of the value of an individual position, wages will be lower or higher depending on the supply of an occupation. In the big picture engineers are very replaceable at market price compared to executives so their wages are reflective of that.

[Falkon1313]

It may be more demand than supply. Plenty of people would love to be CEOs, and have some ability to run a business and delegate, but you can only have one per company. On the other hand, you can have many engineers. If you could only have one engineer per company, their salaries would likely be much higher.

This would be counter-intuitive, because low demand results in high salary, regardless of supply.