Your shock at 600k is understandable, but note that the people pulling those numbers mostly don’t need to exist at smaller or less tech oriented companies. It’

Your shock at 600k is understandable, but note that the people pulling those numbers mostly don’t need to exist at smaller or less tech oriented companies. It’s primarily either senior engineers who consistently have outsized business impact (for instance identifying and building systems that generate tens of millions of new recurring revenue for the company each year), or are significantly beyond senior, such that they’re having a similar business impact as would be expected of the C-suite of a 10-100 million/year company. When you have a tech company with 10 billion/yr revenue, you need hundreds of people that fit into the above scopes. It’s definitely not most employees, but a career path into those positions becomes possible. Whereas in a smaller or less tech focused business there wouldn’t be enough scope for those people to justify their outsized pay.