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In my mind it's not so much that they're smarter but rather the value they add is more easily measurable. If the trades they make for a hedge fund creates a 10 millions dollars a year profit then it's easy to demand a million dollar bonus. The value of a startup engineer is much harder to determine in a year by year basis.

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I heard some estimate that each software engineer adds $1 million (not necessarily to a start up). But there should be a way to reward based on quantitative performance than evaluation by a manager who have no clue about software development.

That $1mm/engineer estimate is sometimes used for the valuation of a startup, not a yearly rate.

Thats because most startups don't have revenues, so they use that as a heuristics instead of a revenue figure. But since revenues are yearly, the value of a developer is implied to be yearly.

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