I wonder sometimes whether the good negotiators who make 250-300k/yr realize that some percentage of the premium they're paid is taken out of the hides of the bad negotiators.
That's something you'd expect Snidely Whiplash the Evil Capitalist to tell labor to make them feel bad about negotiating with him, but I don't think it actually works that way. Costs are costs and money is fungible; a dollar extra negotiated doesn't come out of the pockets of another employee any more than a dollar spent on SaaS comes out of the pocket of an employee. Corporations might create internal fictions like e.g. headcount budgets to make this less obvious, but a) fiction and b) Snidely Whiplash.
Here's the acid test: who gets a bonus if your company happens to hire five doormats in a row? Is it the best negotiator on the engineering team?
Who must it necessarily come from bad negotiators?
The market rate for senior software engineers could easily be $250-300k if everyone negotiated aggressively. The ceiling on developer pay is the value they produce, and developers at many/most companies produce well above $300k in value a year. The hiring pool for senior talent is supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. If all developers were paid $250k/yr, I would expect top companies to hire just as aggressively.
Negotiating aggressively could simply be bringing you closer to the perfect-equilibrium market price without implying that you're bringing down the salaries of non-negotiators.
If anything, it's the non-negotiators bringing down salaries for everyone. Their not negotiating allows (some) companies to think the market rate is lower and to avoid paying for the higher negotiated rates.
Like, it clearly must be, right?