Good security researchers easily command a $500,000 compensation package per year (cost to companies higher due to benefits like health insurance). When you sho

Good security researchers easily command a $500,000 compensation package per year (cost to companies higher due to benefits like health insurance). When you show the market comp of good cyber security researchers to execs, suddenly they decide that they only have the budget to hire incompetent people. Good cyber security people are expensive because they are highly skilled: they typically need to have been a software engineer to understand software architectures and have intuition about them, have spent significant time sharpening their skills at hacking by participating in CTFs, and have probably also spent significant time doing reverse engineering and have a few CVEs attributed to them. (Why are these skills needed? Because they are the skills needed by the red team. Every company that takes cyber security seriously will have a red team.) Now tell me whether these people are worth $500,000 per year.