In a past life I worked at a nonprofit. In an attempt to woo higher quality engineers we bumped our salaries as high as we possibly could. It worked to an extent, more mission driven people would come from Big Tech to join us. But despite them taking a huge paycut they were still getting paid a lot more than engineers in other areas of our company. And that, as you point out, was still a fantastic wage in the grand scheme of things relative to the rest of the country.