If true, that just makes it worse in my opinion.

Although maybe it’s evidence in my favor? They have to pay people that much to keep doing what they know is wrong…

Or the job is grueling and requires more time commitment/energy. Or it’s a very niche technical problem. Or the person has an outsized impact on the company in other ways like bringing prestige and making it easier to hire more people.

There’s lots of reasons people get paid large sums.

Or simply tech stocks have been crazy thanks to Federal Reserve interest rate policies.

That’s really only L6+ with some good stock growth. Most senior eng are L5. 350-500k is still a lot.