I am not sure that high salaries equate to excellent programmers and engineers. Perhaps large monopolistic companies have too much spare cash that they have to distribute, or they get accused of monopoly profiteering. There are lots of reasons for paying people highly and not receiving commensurate services. Could that be one of the reasons for the high salaries?

Rothbardian_fanatic

I would assume that Microsoft programmers are considered good because Microsoft offers high salaries. Doesn't mean their products are good but I would have assumed the programmers are skilled and the product issues are more due to incentives at a large org. I don't work in the industry so I wouldn't really know 

SimpleStacker

devs

Early object oriented programming languages

k00b

Really? You consider MicroSloth engineers as good programmers? The only place I would ever use MicroSloth products is in a virtual box after I have acquired them for free. Just don’t trust them.