This sounds like a variation of the just world fallacy to me: in a just world, talented folk who solve hard problems get paid more, and the less talented ones - who are unable to solve hairy problems - get paid less. In such a world, you can identify the talented ones by how much they are earning. Yet in the real world, geography, and luck/ability to bootstrap to HCOL areas plays a huge part
> Also, a quick look at levels.fyi says salary at IBM (i.e. your median salary dev) for a senior is 192k.
I think you're underestimating how wide the gap is between the bimodal peaks. $192 is too high[2] still; it slots just below Senior executive average ($200k) and right above EM ($180k) in the 2022 StackOverflow salary survey[1] for the US
1. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#work-salary
2. the survey doesn't distinguish between junior & senior engineers, but I'm guessing even the seniors earn less than CxO's.