Hand-assembled hypercars can go for much more than $200k, but are not priced according to the years of experience, grit, or expertise of the craftsmen who sew the leather seats or molded the carbon-fiber elements. One doesn't have to haggle with Koenigsegg over the provenance of their steel.
Such cars are all roughly interchangeable between themselves (& sometimes between competitors), hence an average price. In certain fields, employees are not similarly interchangeable for a given position.
> In certain fields, employees are not similarly interchangeable for a given position.
In most fields, they are. I'd hazard 99.9% of all workers are interchangeable, albeit with some variance in productivity. If a worker dies today, the vacancy will be up by the next Monday and the position filled within a few weeks.
Speaking of individual productivity, most comments here are overestimating its importance: if you are able to crank out a feature in 2 weeks that your colleagues can manage in 4, how much higher should your salary be? You have double their productivity (sometimes), but if this doesn't move the needle on the release date - it rarely does - how much more valuable are you? The release date is still 2 fiscal quarters away, others will need to integrate your work and make it usable.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. There are salary bands precisely because of this. Also productivity isn't the only metric. A person may get a higher salary for the same position because they bring in more experience or relevant skill set. A good chunk of more senior development work is figuring out which problems are worth solving in the first place. A junior engineer with that talent is far more valuable & senior engineers can differentiate themselves in that way as well.
As for replacements, for more senior positions its not a 2 week process. You typically have someone more interim step in if there's nobody existing on the team that can step in.
