It's an interesting question to look at job and calculate how much value it would need to create per day or per hour to "outperform" the salary. Certainly it's

It's an interesting question to look at job and calculate how much value it would need to create per day or per hour to "outperform" the salary. Certainly it's a good benchmark in cases like this, where lone engineers are obviously not producing large-multiples of the value of their entire company. At a guess most engineers are getting paid >10% of their value created, and some jobs (a crappy CEO, perhaps?) are getting paid >100% of that value. In fact, I'm not even sure that >100% of value means anything is wrong if someone is undertaking a high-risk job.