This seems to be regularly happening in "passion" fields like human space flight, or bleeding edge tech spaces like self driving cars, medical technology, etc. For an example, just look at salaries between places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic where total comp for a software engineer is between ~100-140K vs any FAANG company where equivalent experience will pull in upwards of ~200K TC. The disparity is even larger for non-software roles (EE, HDE, ME). I acknowledge that there are more than likely other forces here, but I highly doubt that the labor supply for these specialized skills is higher than that for general software engineering. Perhaps this is a place where unionization could be helpful.