[Retric]

Google has 1 million in revenue per employee. They could pay everyone 500,000$ / year and still be extremely profitable.

Edit: 1,259,520$ (March 31, 2015) http://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyet.php?code=GOOG

In 2014 Apple had a pretax income of 53.48B and 92,000 employees. It could give them all a 200,000$ / year pay bump and still make 35Billion in profits.

PS: Not that any company thinks this way, but it's not hard to argue that top programmers are underpayed.

[jonas21]

But companies have expenses other than payroll. Google has to buy machines, run datacenters, pay partners, etc. If you look at income per employee, it takes all of this into account. For Google, this is $270K: http://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyeit.php?code=GOO...

So they could presumably pay everyone $250K more than they do now and still be marginally profitable.

[MichaelCrawford]

Contract programmers.

I was one in 1989. So were many of my coworkers. Someone told me that Apple employed so many contractors so that it could inflate the ratio of revenue to employees.

Hiring more contractors doesn't make a company any more money but it does help inflate the stock price in a purely artificial way.