When you say "should", are you making a positive observation or a normative claim? My positive observation is that people get paid whatever amount they can successfully negotiate, and a programmer at the very top of a field with ungodly amounts of cash money flowing around is in a good position to negotiate lots, because their BATNA is "I walk one block out of this office, have coffee with someone, and a week from now I'm making seven figures and you're competing against my algorithms."
It's a positive observation in the sense that one's actual market value is equal to the cost of replacement. The price discovery method (negotiation) is imperfect, causing the discrepancy between the market value and the actual paid price, but the point of the grandparent would still hold.
