There are software engineers with decades of highly specialized knowledge and skill whose day job is writing batch report scripts and tweak templates. They get

There are software engineers with decades of highly specialized knowledge and skill whose day job is writing batch report scripts and tweak templates. They get paid a quarter of a million base. And they could be replaced in a heartbeat with a junior engineer: schlepping database queries into text files has been bread and butter for decades. It's the bugers-and-fries of programming. Salaries don't correlate with value at all. It's a highly political thing.