Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

Don't discount your other abilities that much.

Well, yeah. That's what I'm saying. And so is the original article.

"...so it doesn't matter."

This does not follow. Maybe it does matter, but the market is irrational. For example: maybe there are a lot of highly-paid, under-utilized software engineers sitting around FaceGooAmaSoft, because FaceGooAmaSoft are terrified of what those people might do, if they weren't twiddling their thumbs and enjoying complimentary massages while eating catered lunches.

"There's a limited amount of people that can do programming, but also limited amount of people that can do safety-critical engineering. Perhaps there is some overlap. But can you engineer a bridge that's used by a billion people every day? Probably not, hence the salary differences."

Prove your claim. Most programmers making big salaries are affecting maybe hundreds of thousands of people a day, at best. It's pretty rare to find gigs where you affect even millions of people a day. Even inside GooAmaFaceSoft, those are coveted positions, with lots of cookie-licking and internal politics.

It seems more plausible to me that the market is where it is because of deep pockets and a willingness to engage in defensive spending, more than any kind of individual productivity. But yeah, this isn't an argument that is going to flatter most HN readers.

I said I'm sorry, and I edited the comment. This is, however, a detail - that you are unjustly discriminating, only on a basis other than race, I stand by.

> Homogeneous groups of people

Assuming homogeneity of any group of people is almost certainly wrong.

Why don't you substitute "black" or "Hispanic" or "Jewish" for "offshore" in your arguments and see what happens? Would you be able to leisurely write that, in your opinion, "black programmers are sloppy and only churn code as quickly as possible"?

But that "fair" method isn't independent of demographic. And that's what privilege tries to highlight. It's almost always possible to dress up policies that are de-facto prejudicial as independent of the thing that they're supposedly prejudiced against.

If you want to discriminate against women without making it obvious, you can add an unnecessary height requirement. It's only when you take a look at the correlations between those variables, when you realize that women are inches shorter than men that something seems off. (and to be clear I'm talking about an abstract situation where height doesn't matter for whatever it is we're doing). When you take into account the correlations, the non-discriminatory rules suddenly feel a lot less non-discriminatory.

If you really supported a funding principle that was independent of demographics, you should support a system that grants funding solely based on headcount. Otherwise you're implicitly admitting that rich people deserve better education solely because they are rich, which seems discriminatory to me.

Granted, there are flaws to that system too, but what it doesn't do is further disadvantage the already disadvantaged. Your "fair" system leads to the poorest areas (and the least-white areas, and a few other similar things) getting the worst education. The result of this is that I, as an individual, receive a worse education do to things that are totally out of my control. That doesn't seem particularly fair to me.

(And that's ignoring other arguments that there are probably very compelling reasons to fund the least well off schools more, much like a progressive tax system favors those at the bottom. And as an extension of this, I'm curious if you favor a progressive tax system, or something else).

Another user mentioned this study[1], which unfortunately I can't find the paper for, but the video is still worth watching. I'll quote an important bit:

>As a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement and deservingness...increases.

The crux of this is that while you may disagree, its possible, and even perhaps likely, that your success is less "yours" than you believe, and that your mind is rewriting history, so to speak, to make you feel more in control of your outcomes than you actually were. This is by no means your fault or anything, and there are probably good evolutionary reasons for our brains doing this (I say probably only because I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, I can make some pretty good arguments for why this would be evolutionarily good). And there are times when it's probably a good idea to ignore that fact and feel like you're to blame for your outcomes, but there are also times where it isn't.

In any case, I hope you understand that there's more to it than just fake-victimhood and an attempt to make successful people feel bad. And that while you may disagree with the theory, its at least not total SJW nonsense :P

[1]:https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean