I’m not sure if you’ve worked with a 100k engineer in the US but I’d almost always rather have one really good 300k engineer than 3 100k engineers. I mean 100k is pretty much entry level and not the cream of the crop for entry level either (which is closer to $150-250k).

When you get to 500+k you’re either talking about stock appreciation, or people in more of a leadership position/having specific technical expertise.

I’ll add that software is not necessarily a quantity thing. If you want things to have tons of features and have highly parallelizable tasks, it is. But if you want localized technical choices to be high quality you’d rather have one good person than three people who don’t know what they’re doing.