There are people with very specialized skills and experiences that it would cost half a million and years more to replicate. With that in mind, there are certai

There are people with very specialized skills and experiences that it would cost half a million and years more to replicate. With that in mind, there are certainly devs $200k/yr more valuable than others. This becomes even more important when a company is set up to be able to strongly leverage developer quality. When a developer being 10% better means millions more in revenue (or a similar decrease in costs), paying $100k more might make a lot of sense. How much would such an org be willing to pay for someone 30% better, do you think? I know a developer who upon joining a company picked up a problem that had been considered intractable. Another developer had spent months on it before giving it up as impossible. My friend solved the issue, permanently, in three days. That's at least a 10x, and possibly a 30x, difference in productivity for a narrow set of tasks.