Nobody is stopping engineers from saying "I'm going to contribute $1.5m to your bottom line this next year, I want you to pay me $1.4m", but they'll be shown the door because there's a guy that's willing to contribute the same $1.5m in exchange for $100k in compensation.
Which is why you should be an owner/competitor versus an employee if you know the business well enough.
In case of financial trouble (very common at startups), who gets to be laid off first, the CEO or the developer?
Also, rank-and-file employees are typically scape-goated in legal proceedings, example: finance people going to jail for rogue/insider trading, even though upper management at least encouraged such behavior.
Which makes it the perfect position to be in to launch and iterate and test and lean startup a good side hustle.
http://www.wbur.org/morningedition/2016/08/02/non-compete-ag...
I think a lot of companies who might have previously hired devs would be better off trying not to anymore, with what devs cost today. This is going to mean all sorts of things, including more off-the-shelf stuff vs. home-rolled for companies, smaller software companies that don't get started because people would rather take the BigCo job that pays $200k base plus stock, etc.
Pretty much any business is about taking stuff and making something out of it that can be sold for more than its inputs. With dev salaries being what they are, a lot of opportunities get ruled out quickly because they just aren't big enough.
No reason for 100s of companies to write the same app.
Agree though, risk vs reward.
Uber just lost a war of attrition with Didi Chuxing after throwing a billion dollars at China's taxi market
How much attrition can you afford?
No, the reason you don't get that salary is because you need to discount for the risk that you don't deliver $1.5m.
Realistically, you just could be full of shit, you could get bogged down in politics, your wife could get cancer, and any number of other things could happen. So the price trends down sharply.
Even assuming that you had an identical prior on the two candidates, the information that one person was willing to do a job for half price would make me doubt his intelligence.
Out of 100 developers 10 might save you 1.5million and getting the correct 2 might save you 3 million.
* I say there is no lower bound because slavery still exists. There are employers who do not pay people at all.
