How is this his logic at all? The logic is more similar to a sales person. When a company starts losing money, it doesn't try to claw back commissions from its top sales agents to keep afloat. It might lower %s / do layoffs / something else, but money paid is money gone.

The logic is that programmers tend to produce far more value than they capture -- so that gets captured elsewhere, a lot of it typically by management. Except the value can be hard to quantify when the company is old and so is the software, how much of the value is employee #3701 making fixing a bug that's making the product not work for one customer in one instance vs employees #107, #85, and #150 who in their past team's life created the original version of that system to begin with to make the new customer even consider using it? There's no point to moaning about how much you "should" get paid. Just ask for more if you feel underpaid, but be aware that because of competition and because people usually want to hear what more you'll do to justify it, you're not going to always get it.

No they should quit and find another company.

You can't keep a significant portion of the upside without taking on more risk.

> Privatizing profits and socializing losses refers to the practice of treating firms' earnings as the rightful property of their shareholders, while treating losses as a responsibility that society as a whole must shoulder, for example through taxpayer-funded subsidies or bailouts.

which software businesses have been bailed out by the government?

Not really related to what we're talking about here though?