Of course the value exceeds the salaries. If you look at a company like Apple right now, they basically have unlimited money to pay salaries based off of procee

Of course the value exceeds the salaries. If you look at a company like Apple right now, they basically have unlimited money to pay salaries based off of proceeds from products that are built by their engineering team. Any budget that a department has at Apple is made up by some executive based on some crazy formula of expected returns. It has nothing to do with what they can afford. That means they could literally double every engineer's salary tomorrow and it wouldn't really change much for their bottom line. In an environment like that where money is not scarce but engineering skills are, how can the salaries not climb and how can small companies even DREAM of competing? Or course the big players don't want to get into a bidding war because they know both sides can afford to pay a lot more. One of my recent jobs was VP of Tech for a small startup. They offered me what they could afford plus equity. The product they were working on was not going to be Facebook size. I think realistically they could have had a 100 million dollar buyout in 5ish years if everything went well. OR they could have gone broke. They gave me 1% of the company in my package which is huge, but that means I'm gambling on the success of this startup for a hopeful payout of 1 million dollars in 5 or so years. At the same time this was happening a few of my friends took jobs at Apple and guess what? They were offered packages that basically meant they would make as much as I did in 5 years if I were to get the million. So, where was my upside? I'm taking on all this risk just to break even with what I could make working at Apple best case. The job market is crazy right now and it stands to get a lot crazier.