I feel that these numbers hide a lot: (1) There is a small percentage that are being paid what I consider to be a fair income. They are being paid in very comp

I feel that these numbers hide a lot: (1) There is a small percentage that are being paid what I consider to be a fair income. They are being paid in very competitive markets. They are getting valued in a HCOL market where demand for engineering talent is higher. (2) There is a large percentage that are being paid something like a "developer status quo". A salary that: - doesn't acknowledge that software developers are _capable_ of generating inordinately large amounts of value (and considered in aggregate, mostly do) - treats all work done by college-educated individual contributors as of roughly equivalent value - cannot be too high because "we can't pay you 2x what $other_person_of_value makes" - cannot be too high because "we can't pay you more than what $your_manager makes" (3) Developer skill levels vary greatly. This means that the average developer is just that: average. Average developers simply do not generate the kind of value that top-end developers do.