I think this is correct only for the right size of company. There’s also a long tail of businesses out there in the $10m to $100m range where the balance of responsibility between the C-suite and the top technical talent makes it much less clear that the two should diverge in comp quite so much. I suppose it’s ironic that the big tech companies are also the ones that give such big pie slices to their engineers, and the smallest businesses are the ones where the tech ICs are replaceable while the C-levels are uniquely brilliant.

How many businesses have we seen slowly fade away as the tech team ebbs one by one leaving only a remnant core of mostly non tech roles?