I agreed with you until "[Salary] is the most important thing he has said". For many people salary is not the most important thing in life. If this guy learns a

I agreed with you until "[Salary] is the most important thing he has said". For many people salary is not the most important thing in life. If this guy learns a lot doing what he does, salary considerations could be secondary for him. And I think there is a possibility that he is in a position to learn the hard way (in a way he will not forget what he learnt) some of the nasty parts of software development: code base is awful, touching one thing breaks unrelated parts, doing a simple change takes days because of duplication, PM do not care a shit if code is clean or not and don't want to hear about refactor. All of that is crude reality. Only after having endured such evils can someone really understand why duplication is bad, why hidden dependencies is evil, and, even more importantly: How and when to tell or, more often, to NOT tell a PM that you WILL refactor the code before doing this fix, for everyone's sake.