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

devs

Early object oriented programming languages

k00b

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 