Also, you'll notice that there are different starting salaries for staff members who are otherwise identical. There's a good reason for this apart from a desire to make staff unique; if the market behaves rationally, then a lower-salary level-5 staff member will sell for about as much more than a level-5 staff member as the total amount of savings during the time you would keep both on staff (perhaps slightly more, because of a time value of money argument). The reason that very high salary staff exist within a level is that we anticipate that once things settle down, smaller teams will be able to choose these without much of an investment in a signing bonus.