Fair points, although I think you may be reading my points as more concrete than intended. When I'm talking about pay I'm thinking location-agnostic, i.e. low

Fair points, although I think you may be reading my points as more concrete than intended. When I'm talking about pay I'm thinking location-agnostic, i.e. low to high pay within a comparable region. For every engineer in London earning £100k there's many earning £26k doing more basic work. And when I say "basic" I don't just mean working with low level systems, I mean working with systems that are un-automated. Working with processes where someone has made the judgement call that it's cheaper to throw large numbers of cheap engineers at the problem rather than fewer highly paid engineers to automate it all away. That's not to say that highly paid engineers don't need to get into the basics, they definitely do, but that digging into the depths of an automated deployment system is not the same as running repetitive manual tasks.