You're missing the subtle sarcasm here. OP is implying that companies will deem engineers making $150k+ as making policy decisions in order to continue enforcing the existing non-competes they have most likely signed.

I wish I was being sarcastic! IME the sort of people putting non-competes in contracts will claim things like "programming is simply the act of defining company policy in machine form".

That type of wording reduces programming to a mere policy-translation job, not a policy-making job.