The tech industry is a class-, gender-, and race-biased inter-generational wealth transfer scheme masquerading as an industry. Past a post of base-level competency, and excluding strategy-level technical roles, employment and compensation is based on identity and not proficiency.
It's the same as with industry labor in the last half of the 20th century. Every person who retired with a pension was not an unequivocal value-add to their employer; there was a need to support and enable the consumptive lifestyles of the public (but only the "right people"), lest the entire system implode.
No one wants to admit that they're mere cogs, compensated for not gumming up the money machine. They want to believe that they have value. And they do, but it's implicit in their identity, not necessarily their productivity. If you don't believe it, ask how much your colleagues in India make.
My colleagues in India, on average, make less than me. My Indian colleagues in the US (who grew up and went to school in India) make about the same as me.
I dont see what point this thought exercise was supposed to illustrate, aside from demonstrating that labor markets in different countries are different, and so is the cost of living.
While that could be a factor I think the situation is primarily the result of simple economic considerations. Companies compete for employees, which drives platform commonalities and group think across business lines. It is cheaper to hire a ready to work developer from a competing employer than it is train an employee over time regardless of the fact that incoming employee still has to relearn the new company's business and internal processes. So, there are financial incentives to be impatient and make bad decisions even though there is ramp up time regardless. Even though finding qualified employment candidates generally costs as much as training somebody to be qualified it is generally preferred for its lower overhead and convenience.
In many other white-color industries employees are accountable for their work. A substantial enough violation of that accountability can result in loss of career (from any employer), fines, and even prison time depending on the violation of negligence. Because of that there are conventions in place to define qualification:
* An agent/broker relationship ensures that all employees are essentially practicing interns operating under the guidance of a broker. The poor performance of an agent negatively influences the reputation of the broker so guidance and mentoring are provided as a required effect. Very few employers in software provide anything close to that. If you want that you have to go get it on your own outside of work, which is why so many excellent developers are largely self-taught and have some time in on some sort of extraordinary product before it became well known.
* Licensing ensures that candidates meet some minimal, uniform, standard level of qualification. Usually licensing standards are run as industry specific charities to influence the standards of practice and ethical norms. Software doesn't have this either. Nobody can provide a standard definition of competence in software. In most other industries this one factor drives the direction of education and training more than just about everything else combined.
It's the same as with industry labor in the last half of the 20th century. Every person who retired with a pension was not an unequivocal value-add to their employer; there was a need to support and enable the consumptive lifestyles of the public (but only the "right people"), lest the entire system implode.
No one wants to admit that they're mere cogs, compensated for not gumming up the money machine. They want to believe that they have value. And they do, but it's implicit in their identity, not necessarily their productivity. If you don't believe it, ask how much your colleagues in India make.