The most devastating value destruction (aside from the rare intern deleting the prod db) that I’ve seen consistently is with senior/rockstars who introduce new tech, takes credit, moves on. There’s a reason for the term resume driven development. Think about what a negative force multiplier can do for an org.
Maybe it varies per company.
But that’s the entire point you’re missing. The pay is not proportional to contribution or technical skill. It’s proportional to market forces and negotiation skill.
Negative force multipliers are easily remedied: just make sure you have an even number of them.
We had a guy who would argue about everything that knew the CTO so we had to tolerate him.
Then we hired a second one and they just argued with each other all the time and the rest of the team could finally make progress.
It was awesome.
In the former case, we basically had to demand management raise his salary to the low end of his market value, over the cause of six months, until they finally gave in. It was just so disgusting to us we couldn't let it go.
The reason comes down to a skill bias - it's a different skill set to navigate other people into getting yourself a good salary, versus navigating the ins and outs of coding. The skills don't overlap, so time spent on one detracts from another.
In the end he finally got the message we kept ramming in to his head, applied to work at a brand-name tech company, and instantly more than doubled his salary. He could've done so years earlier.
This stuff is the norm. I've been a manager having eyes on salaries while also having eyes on people's performance (although unfortunately not much of a lever on the former), and rest assured it is often a very jarring experience. Like "that person should be let go immediately / that person should job hop immediately".
So it's not true, then?
The GP claims this is universally true. All I need to do is post a counterexample, and I did. Yes, there are shitty companies that try to keep salaries as low as possible, not realizing that that will lose them their best people. Don't work for those!
This particular case sounds like someone got incorrectly hired as a junior. Maybe they didn't have enough "real world" corporate experience and that is why they weren't offered a senior position?
A good junior will write a hundred lines of code in a day. A good senior will delete a hundred because they realize the user dictated a solution instead of detailing their problem, asked them, and figured out that they can solve that problem by changing a config variable somewhere.