A team with "1 yet-more-highly-compensated staff+ engineer" would also have a pipeline of people one step below that for progression. Usually people who are "ye

A team with "1 yet-more-highly-compensated staff+ engineer" would also have a pipeline of people one step below that for progression. Usually people who are "yet-more-highly-compensated" are not easy to poach and don't tend to change their job. You have to develop them internally. E.g. most DEs and Fellows in tech companies rose through the ranks over decades. It's very hard to hire a DE from the job market. The unintuitive thing about software engineering is that low-level implementation and high-level architecture are both equally sensitive to quality of talent (and equally impact your product quality and business outcomes) because every line of code is a business decision. That's a big reason why even entry-level SWE talent costs so much. There is no paralegal-level work in software - it's been automated away.