If forming a team massively benefits the hirer, the bar of hiring will go down thusly, meaning that people being hired also get compensated indirectly.
No. Salaries are relatively inelastic while profit is wildly elastic.
Per engineer, Google, Facebook, Apple make multiple millions of dollars in profit per fiscal year and yet very, very few engineers make $1m+. Even $500k is out of reach of most non-managerial engineers.
So, no if Google made 2x or 4x the profit with the same engineers, they company would pay them the same exact rate if they could. Often times they do.
The only way to really gain serious income is ownership of a technology that you can sell either directly to the market or to another company.
No matter how much you make, as an employee you are always trading lower risk for lower or linear rewards. The company compensates you for your years of experience at a market rate but, retains the fullest share of the profits that they can. They also own the code of your labor after you leave the company so there's that. You work (especially as a developer) makes the company money even after you've left.
If code wasn't so complex and hard to maintain, there would be even lower salaries (compared to profits) at software-based companies.
To put it another way, the only way Google, Apple or Facebook pay an engineer $1M+ is either because of an accu-hire, to stop them from jumping ship to one of their competitors or to stop them from jumping ship to start a startup.
Brilliant programming that creates even billions of dollars of value for one of those companies isn't even going to net the engineer 1% of the value they create.
> I'd really love to see a contribution from a single brilliant programmer that generates a billion in profit.
While I am not answering your question directly, Jeff Dean and Shel Kaphan come to mind, in their key, fundamental roles of building massive scalable systems - information search and retail selling, respectively.
I have detected bugs that where costing several hundred thousands of pounds a week and back in the 80's I and the company accountant fixed a problem that ment we could collect over 3/4 million of uncollected direct debits.
