"We could pay anyone $75k to start cranking out lines of code and come in at 9 or 10 and leave at 5. But that’s not what we want,..." The poster keeps assuming

"We could pay anyone $75k to start cranking out lines of code and come in at 9 or 10 and leave at 5. But that’s not what we want,..." The poster keeps assuming that there's an inverse correlation between how much you pay someone and how many hours/how hard that person works. It is entirely possible that you can find someone who gets paid $75K that does the work of two or three people who get paid $40K and perhaps even do it in fewer hours. Or perhaps someone who gets paid $100K is such a great architect that their architecture saves every employee an hour per day for years. By your logic, the heads of hedge funds that get paid millions (if not billions) of dollars per year only show up for work for three seconds each day. Okay, perhaps that's not the best example.