>That is a really simplistic take IMO Yes and it also comes across that the comment author hasn't spent much time trying to hire for "engineering" roles. If i

>That is a really simplistic take IMO Yes and it also comes across that the comment author hasn't spent much time trying to hire for "engineering" roles. If it only it were so easy to throw up a post for $engineeringRole promising some multiple of six-figures and expecting a deluge of competent, qualified people to show up. I've worked for one of $FAANGco, and helped run multiple hiring loops. The roles weren't quite in the 500k vicinity, but they were a fair bit more than 100k. Finding competent, qualified, honest people amongst a sea of resumes was a non-trivial investment. I'm not talking about finding some 10x'er who can run circles around leetcode problems and tell me the most efficient way to fill a 737 with ping pong balls flying upside down on the planet Mars. I'm talking about people who actually understood and had experience with the technologies they had listed on their resume. People who had baseline competency with the basic skills required to merely survive at the job. I generally consider myself a pragmatist, and would allow some variance in detail if they communicated an overall "big-picture" understanding. Nope. People who had listed "fluent with Linux" who didn't know basic directory structure. People who listed years with a programming language that couldn't write a for loop. People who explicitly described a multi-technology cloud-stack project they worked on, only to say in the interview that the project was entirely handled by a different department. I estimate my success rate at this stage was maybe 10% in finding solid people. Slide the pay scale up to 500k? An entirely different set of problems. People that can ask for 500k up front with a straight face know exactly why they can ask for 500k up front with a straight face, and so does everyone else who wants to hire them. If you make all jobs, regardless of technology/competency/seniority pay 500k, then you've got a pretty sizable inflationary problem anyways. Either the really skilled people now will ask for 1 million, or the skillset has become commoditized, and the talent is moving to a problem domain that is more lucrative.