How many years of experience?

I fall almost exactly on the low end of this range: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-aerospace-engineer...

With 15 years of experience.

I'm at the low end of my peers.

Like I said, auctioning off access to your users to advertisers pays better than the European space agency.

No they cannot, unless maybe you have advanced degrees and a couple decades experience.

Realistically, there are plenty of competent people they could hire for any low six figures amount (unless they are directly in the DC area, in which case add 20-30k for cost of living). 500-600k or half of that is a unicorn salary that doesn't apply to those industries or areas and is irrelevant to the discussion. Even if they offered you that salary you wouldn't take it because the work environment would be radically different from working at a bloated web tech firm, or working at a silicon valley startup.

Totally different markets. You wouldn't be interested in that job, and they wouldn't want to hire you even if you were interested. Even the tone of your post makes that obvious.

We should be discussing early to mid career folks from somewhere other than silicon valley startup or big web tech land. Aka "meat and potatoes" tech jobs. That is what's being discussed.

I don't know what their problem is with hiring either and I agree with you that it could be partially compensation related. But not being able to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation is not where I would be going with that argument....I think it's more likely to be related to environment and interview style and notions of what "experience" means. In other words...bad hiring practices...not necessarily raw compensation issues. The compensation for non "big tech" firms can sometimes be quite good in comparison to other career paths especially when located outside of the valley, so being unable to hire talent makes me suspicious of hiring practices more than compensation (assuming they are reasonably large and hit market rate for the area and are in a reasonably large metro).

Just my two cents.