[mattydoincode]

Author here! I'm not arguing that software engineers should necessarily be paid in proportion to the end economic result of their employment. Although that's an interesting point for another article perhaps! Rather simply that companies tend to undervalue domain specific knowledge and forget how costly and time consuming it is to hire and retrain new team members. This should be taken into account when considering compensation structures to retain your top talent when considering the open market is always available to them.

[shagie]

Consider the question of "could you get into a bidding war with Apple or Netflix for a tenured developer?" Is there a point where another company can pay more than the economic product of the developer at the original company?

Yes, hiring and training is expensive... and the loss of domain knowledge is costly too.

There are a lot of places that aren't making that much money to be able to get to "market rate".

I'd also like to put forth that the idea of a market rate for developers across all industries is one of the things making it hard to find developers. There are more than a few new grads out there that are discounting any job that pays less than $100k/y because they believe that the market rate is that and anything less is being underpaid regardless of industry, company maturity, or locale.

[SauciestGNU]

Similarly, there are plenty of companies here in the Midwest who think it's ok to pay devs 50k/yr, and I want to say in the strongest possible terms fuck that. Employers who won't pay an equitable wage for devs don't deserve to hire them.