I was paid $165k a year by a neobank startup to.....build their bank. It's now responsible for over $200mm a year in revenue. I was the sole engineer on the project.
Yeah when I read takes like the guy you're responding to, I have to wonder: where should the money go if not to the people that built the product? Management? Shareholders? You can say that but those people are doing less work for more money already, so I don't buy it.
Engineers like many people that build useful things, provide orders of magnitude more value than what they get for their labor.
Well...op left the company, so why should he still get a cut of their current revenues ? That does not seem very fair to the current engineers who a currently able to manage the $200 MM. As far as we know, the company really started working well when they were finally able to replace his crappy code with a better implementation.
The money probably goes to management, who stuck during the entire story - which OP didn't. It also goes to current employees who, by their number alone require more money. And of course to stakeholder who paid for OP $165k when the bank was making $0.
Actually no. They replaced me with 9 engineers to do the same amount of work and had to delay the project 6 months because they had me working 100 hours a week and renegged on a raise and a vacation.
Good engineers are worth their weight in gold.