"Their "value" is just a function of the job, not a measure of its worth." I think we need to be careful with terminology here. I'm defining value as return on

"Their "value" is just a function of the job, not a measure of its worth." I think we need to be careful with terminology here. I'm defining value as return on investment (and sometimes I'll be using the expected return on investment interchangeably). An employer hires an engineer because they want product x. If the employer thought they could receive $100k selling product x, they'd be silly to pay >= $100k to the engineer. So at the very least, we can agree that the upper bound for salary depends on the value the employee provides. Salespeople in particular are great at capturing the value they produce. It's extremely easy to measure the production of someone in sales. This is why it's common in many industries for the compensation of a salesperson to be an extremely high percentage of the margin on a sale. By virtue of their value being so easily measurable, salespeople are able to capture a much greater amount of their value than many other professions. All I'm saying is that comparatively, software engineers do a poor job of capturing their value.