> But I'm the loser of the story here, as those guys are now working for even bigger companies with bigger salaries Another way to look at this is that a lower

> But I'm the loser of the story here, as those guys are now working for even bigger companies with bigger salaries Another way to look at this is that a lower-paid SWE is paying for their mental health and morale. In my books, that's a winner :) With the assumption that those engineers whose high/er salary in big/ger companies is not achived through mastery (Netflix is certainly not going to hire the Jon Schlinkerts), they're likely going to work with, say, "moral peers", which is typically undesirable for mentally healthy people.