absolutely. Google generates $1.5M/employee/year in a high margin business. Considering that the engineers is the main revenue producing asset it is not surprising that Google pays $600K+/year to the best engineers they can get to continue generate those $1.5M.

>Is it unfortunate that firms that are unable to generate that much value suddenly can’t hire developers? Must be for those firms.

yep. Our BigCo generates paltry $350K/employee/year. Looking at our salaries - we're relatively cheap engineers, and the company wastes our time in a myriad ways, and it is no wonder that we can't hire anybody here really - one can say we do experience the shortage of engineers. In SV we regularly lose people (who get 2-3X increases at new places, and only morons like me (even when i got an offer from Google it was just L5 and a very low one, basically just a match of what i have here) are still sitting here), and we're able to hire only in cheap remote locations.