They're set based on negotiations between employers and job seekers/their representatives. The market influences rates, but once negotiations start, every human foible, bias, and shortcoming has a role to play.

These statements are not mutually exclusive. Tech workers deserve higher salaries for the value they provide. And the market is to some extent manipulated, or we wouldn’t see massive layoffs and massive (and growing) profits. The difference is, tech workers don’t have an analog of layoffs at their disposal. Workers control labor supply of 1, when most companies individually control large multiples of the demand side. That doesn’t mean that workers deserve less.

And sometimes market conditions are "people refuse to work for us for less than 150k".

And sometimes you're in a time a place where laborers are expected to take a greater share of the benefits of their labor.

Actually, the word deserve is probably stronger. I think workers deserve to reap almost all of the benefits of their labor, as opposed to capital or leadership benefitting.

> Salaries are set based on market conditions.

This is true, but the long-term market condition has been "There are not enough tech workers to meet the demand."

Honestly, I hate how extortionate the higher education system is in the US, but I benefit from it because it does an amazing job of choking off the supply of labor and keeping wages high. I'd still vote to provide free universal higher education, but the lack of it is what's keeping everyone in the tech sector afloat. Look at what the scourge of affordable tuition has done to European tech workers.

Tech companies are complaining, and have been since at least the dotcom era, that the market is incapable of providing the workers they desire. Two and a half decades later, they're still beating that same drum and demanding that the government dance to it by enacting policies that favor employers over workers and somehow it is still never enough.