I think the right measure of a programmer's worth is "the amount they'd get acqui-hired for if they made a product that caught some large company's attention."

I think the right measure of a programmer's worth is "the amount they'd get acqui-hired for if they made a product that caught some large company's attention." [...] By this measure, even the most crap programmer is worth $500k. To me, this just proves that most programmers are stuck on dead-end make-work (see: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadrant-work/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadra... ) of very low yield. Acq-hires are a sign of advanced trust sparsity. Enough bozos have gotten in (and bozo management is a more common culprit in this regard than bozo engineers) that the company has lost faith in its ability to find talent at the bottom. That might be a problem with its people; more often, it means that the middle-management filter keeps out light both ways. Employees don't know what's worth working on; people at the top don't know who the good employees (if any are still around, and once this happens many have left) are. A mediocre programmer that the company trusts is worth $500,000++ per year. An untrusted programmer is worth zero (actually, I'd argue, negative once they realize that the organization will never trust them) and put on low-yield busy-work or sent on wild goose chases (maintenance projects that won't work, "make it work exactly like the old system, but <X>" projects) and generally loaded with crap work to test reliability. Most companies, because developer salaries are so low in comparison to what we're worth (if trusted), feel like that's an excuse to hire 5x the number of people they actually plan on trusting. The problem is that good people are the first ones to leave when given crappy, obviously evaluative, work.