Is getting highly paid salaries as programmers a bug?

Maybe if you get highly paid. If I get highly paid, that's definitely a feature.

Some companies use it as a field-salting strategy to deny a resource needed to enter a business to competitors.

And they sit there getting highly-paid to get scrummed and go through Jiras.

Yes, because programmers are the cornerstone of the Internet. More money attracts better people to build better things. Imagine if the per capita salary was $10, what kind of people could you attract?

Facebook bought Instagram for $1B with only 13 employees. I can’t think of many other professions where 13 people can scale a company to a $1b valuation.

No??? Turns out that being able to make things that people want/need is a valuable skill. And it's even more valuable when it can scale.

what a bizarre question

highly paid is meaningless without taking into account cost of living

and engineers are not the highest paid people

Who says they are high paid?

its a feature of modern day corpo-capitalism. turns out processing data from billions of users and serving them subconsciousness influencing adds back in a modern day post capitalist techno widget factory requires skills that are in short supply... that is until LLMs make this shareholder's wet dream come true at a fraction of the price. huzzah!