One way that they may be getting 3-4x the value is in the long term. Although I've only worked as a programmer, I'd expect that the impact of having one negativ

One way that they may be getting 3-4x the value is in the long term. Although I've only worked as a programmer, I'd expect that the impact of having one negatively valued programmer is far larger than having one negatively valued chemist or physicist. Legacy code can often be years old and far outlive the jobs of the people who wrote it.