>I bet a lot of folks here won't want to hear this, but we really are vastly overpaid for what we do.
Yeah, coz this view is driven largely by the just world fallacy. Either that or the perplexing idea that quality of life is driven by iphone ownership and cheap clothes rather than availability of medical care, education and a roof over your head.
The fact that education, home ownership and medical care are still reasonably priced compared to our incomes but almost nobody else's while wealth inequality has taken off like a rocket suggests that it is most other professions that are underpaid - not us who are overpaid.
The fact that our incomes kept up with productivity while median incomes decoupled in 1981 suggests likewise.
I'm shopping for houses not quite as good as what my teacher parents were 40 years ago and I'm in the top 2% of incomes while they were a bit above average.
Yeah, how dare I have a viewpoint. Goodness gracious.
> The fact that education, home ownership and medical care are reasonably priced compared to our incomes but nobody else's while wealth inequality has taken off like a rocket suggests that it is most other professions that are underpaid - not us who are overpaid.
Both can be true at the same time. In my personal opinion, if a lot of common practices seen in the software industry went away, the cushiness of our jobs would be glaringly obvious. Did you not see that my point is that I witness us creating busywork for ourselves? If it could be measured and validated that my experience matches reality, what would be the argument for being paid this much?
And yes, I know that different parts of the world pay engineers differently. I can only really comment on how engineers in much of the United States are paid.
If I can't call out work for being shoddy and excessive, then that kind of proves my point. Why should I get paid more than other jobs that require more skill despite if my work is garbage?
> The fact that education, home ownership and medical care are reasonably priced compared to our incomes
Come again? I wouldn't call any of those things reasonably priced even at my income.
Whether something is reasonably priced doesn't really have a 1-to-1 relationship with whether you can afford it.
I could certainly afford a home. Would it provide the same value that a home did to my ancestors? Probably not. It wouldn't be a good use of my wealth at this time.
> In the 1950s these things were available on a non-college degree wage.
Yet I am being underpaid? Sure, technically speaking, we are all underpaid if you compare things like workforce participation to wages and CPI. None of that really undermines my point that I don't think we should be paid as much as we are for the quality of work we are producing.
You don't have to like it or agree, but no, I refuse to believe that I'm a bad guy for concluding that there's a racket-like quality to the software industry. In politics there are clubs where political performance has little bearing on the distribution of wealth, so why would any other industry necessarily be different?
>Yet I am being underpaid? Sure, technically speaking, we are all underpaid if you compare things like workforce participation to wages and CPI. None of that really undermines my point that I don't think we should be paid as much as we are for the quality of work we are producing.
Except it does...?
Just saying it doesn't doesn't make it true.
>You don't have to like it or agree, but no, I refuse to believe that I'm a bad guy for concluding that there's a racket-like quality to the software industry.
Software engineering isn't a racket.
The reason we're paid middle class wages (unlike, say, teachers) is because:
A) capital controls the stocks and flows of most society's wealth and because
B) we can potentially trigger large increases to productivity so the ceiling on our value add is very very high.
C) there are not enough experienced programmers to satisfy capital's insatiable demand for automation.
These things are relative to one another. The way you present your case that we are all underpaid is very absolutist and lacks the nuance that someone can be underpaid in the grand scheme but overpaid at a smaller scale.
> The reason we're paid middle class wages (unlike, say, teachers) is because:
I don't really have the time to adequately address every one of those reasons, so all I have to say is that if economics were that straight forward and honest then we'd have a lot more millionaires and billionaires. At best, reason B is true absent any sort of incompetence or meaningful quality-control around production. When you consider how the revenue of many companies is not tightly coupled with productivity and profits, your perspective doesn't seem to add up.
>These things are relative to one another. The way you present your case that we are all underpaid is very absolutist
I didn't really disagree that "underpaid/overpaid is relative", I just used a different default frame of reference to you. One that made you angry I guess?
> and lacks the nuance that someone can be underpaid in the grand scheme but overpaid at a smaller scale.
This point sounds horribly confused to me. Earlier you said we are all vastly overpaid. Now we are both underpaid and overpaid? Depending on the scale of... something?
>I don't really have the time to adequately address every one of those reasons, so all I have to say is that if economics were that straight forward and honest then we'd have a lot more millionaires and billionaires.
I really have no idea what you're getting at here. It doesn't make any sense to me.
> Why should I get paid more than other jobs that require more skill despite if my work is garbage?
it's a mistake to think that degree of skill is or should be the only input to compensation. whether the skill is actually useful to other people is at least as important. there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit in software. even a mediocre engineer who messes up a lot of stuff can still provide a lot of value. I think that's likely to end given enough time, but for now, it's reality.
also as an aside, I think it is easy to forget that software is actually kind of challenging when you're surrounded by other people that do it as a full-time job. it's not rocket science or open-heart surgery, but when I help my friends who are trying to break into software without much tech background, I realize there is a lot of knowledge I take for granted.
Yeah, coz this view is driven largely by the just world fallacy. Either that or the perplexing idea that quality of life is driven by iphone ownership and cheap clothes rather than availability of medical care, education and a roof over your head.
The fact that education, home ownership and medical care are still reasonably priced compared to our incomes but almost nobody else's while wealth inequality has taken off like a rocket suggests that it is most other professions that are underpaid - not us who are overpaid.
The fact that our incomes kept up with productivity while median incomes decoupled in 1981 suggests likewise.
I'm shopping for houses not quite as good as what my teacher parents were 40 years ago and I'm in the top 2% of incomes while they were a bit above average.