It absolutely could be! If the employee is capable of generating 60MM a year in savings or additional revenue, that's a pittance.

If a non-founder employee can do that the company is already at Google or FB scale and they're going to be paying accordingly.

And the SDE isn't the only person making the money come in, it's just (usually) very easy to draw a line between new products and revenue, or code changes and lower infra costs. There are a lot of other people - hundreds - contributing to that $60MM but everyone here likes to pretend if the SDE isn't getting 98% of it they're getting screwed by The Suits.

> If a non-founder employee can do that

I never understood why people thought there was a giant leap in value between employee #1 and a founder, in terms of value-add.

Meanwhile, sometimes it is dependent on lots of people. Sometimes it isn't. A programmer is the only person who has the possibility to rewrite some code and make a process take 1% the same amount of time.