You're either an asset or a cost. If you're an asset, you're directly going to generate the company more value than they're paying you by doing your job, whethe

You're either an asset or a cost. If you're an asset, you're directly going to generate the company more value than they're paying you by doing your job, whether that's encompassed by 'raw output' or just 'access to your brain'. If you're a cost, well, someone needs to keep the gears running and occasionally cleaned of the worst bugs, make sure communication lines are clear, etc., and there's a certain market rate for that, so at worst you're just another cost of doing business like the hardware you use. At best the company will repurpose largely idle costs so you can potentially become an asset by coalescing and together creating value worth more than the sum of your individual costs. But some companies don't do that, so they just have these skilled workers loafing around paid for their availability (butt-in-chair) to activate on fixing some random problems as they come up.