[VirusNewbie]

You don't make doctors go through 8 years of med school and residency because you want to make them great at treating colds and sewing up stitches, you do it so when the edge case appears they don't accidentally kill someone.

In the same way, even 364 days a year the dev is doing completely boring work that someone making 80k could do, the one day they have the potential to do work that takes down the site for even minutes is worth the $ delta!

[dan-robertson]

This doesn’t ring true to me. Everybody makes mistakes and it seems to me that popular big engineering companies are more likely to try to understand root (technical) causes of outages and mitigate them rather than blaming people for being around when a fragile system fails (which is what it sounds like you are suggesting with the emphasis on not making errors.)

[VirusNewbie]

The point I was trying to make was that even if 99% of the job doesn't involve any algorithmic knowledge and is boring crud work, the one day a year (or even less) where one of those engineers has to recognize how to do optimal graph traversal or memoization makes it all worth it.

When seconds of latency even for hours can be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, hiring to make sure someone is less likely to screw up one day a year is worth it.