There's this dynamic of pay tending to be pegged to your job title. An engineer is an engineer is an engineer.

In SF bay area, entry level jobs at big tech are skewing high and experienced roles are skewing low. This doesn't come close to mapping to impact level usually and we just accept that because it's socially easy.

I've worked at startups where there were clearly >10x impact differences between two engineers and at most there was a 2x salary difference. As a startup, it's basically not worth it to hire junior talent anymore because they are not close to being worth the cost in most cases.