This seems to have provoked a rather angry reaction. The company have stated what they're willing to pay, if that doesn't meet your expectation then look elsew

This seems to have provoked a rather angry reaction. The company have stated what they're willing to pay, if that doesn't meet your expectation then look elsewhere. It's not a personal slight. On the flip side there are plenty of jobs which will pay more, and plenty (no doubt) which pay less. You can laugh at the job adverts and get angry when they won't pay you what you think your market rate is, but does it really matter? If you're that good, then you'll find a job which pays you what aspire to. Note that the OP indicates they were rejected at a screening stage, which implies that there was no wasted time on interviews. I have no idea what the job is/was beyond that it involved statistics. The OP provided no details, although a followup post suggests it's not a small company. I used that as an example of a situation where you might see this sort of salary, and some logical justification for it (the morals are debateable). If it's a big corp then obviously you might expect different standards of pay. I would give you academia as the obvious counter-example to your second argument. There are thousands of talented people, globally, earning peanuts compared to what they could in industry because they enjoy the work they do. I'll admit some compared to the hundreds of thousands of hungry developers, but it's not insignificant. Starting postdoc salary in London is around £35k for instance, with annual progression up the national spine point scale. Academia is one field which has historically had excellent benefits for staff including regular travel, very flexible working hours and freedom to work as independently as you want. You also tend to get more holiday than industry e.g. 30 days is standard. That's a pretty good tradeoff to some folks. Is it a laugh out loud joke? Public sector employees don't earn much more than that initially. To take a fanciful example, SIS/MI6 are currently advertising a software engineering role with a range starting at £32k.