In software at least, the opposite seems to be true.
You can make $500k+, but you have to spend your time building things that are not only useless, but a net negative to the world.
Or you can choose to spend your time building things that actually benefit individuals as well as humanity and large. But if you want to do that, you have to do it for free.
Nobody is getting paid $500k+ to directly build things that are net negatives to the world.
You can claim that a very senior Facebook employee is contributing to a _platform_ or _product_ that is a net negative to society. But at the same time, the work they're doing directly from an engineering perspective is probably technically on the cutting edge, and they're likely mentoring and growing a large number of other engineers at the same time.
Contributing to technical excellence and growing younger engineers is a positive, which is why they do their job. Don't dehumanize the people working at large corporations. They're not the ones steering the products in democracy-breaking directions.
> Nobody is getting paid $500k+ to directly build things that are net negatives to the world.
Yes, they are.
Anyone involved in adtech, tracking, their garbage news feed algorithm is actively and directly harming humanity.
Sure, they're involved in a good project or two as well, like https://www.opencompute.org/. But that represents a tiny minority of Facebook employees. The vast majority are getting paid directly to build things that are net negatives to the world.
> but at the same time, the work they're doing directly from an engineering perspective is probably technically on the cutting edge
I don't even know how to begin to unpack this. "Hey, I've built this new rocket I call the V2. Don't blame me if my employer uses them to bomb civilians in London, even if I knew that was exactly what they were going to do before I started the project. Just celebrate my technical excellence!"
> Contributing to technical excellence and growing younger engineers is a positive
No. Training young engineers to abuse their users for profit is not a positive.
As for technical excellence, that is quite a stretch for a website that can't even support the browser's "Back" button. But that's another discussion altogether.
You can make $500k+, but you have to spend your time building things that are not only useless, but a net negative to the world.
Or you can choose to spend your time building things that actually benefit individuals as well as humanity and large. But if you want to do that, you have to do it for free.