Tech Salaries in 2022: Why the Six Figure Pay Makes Techies Feel Underpaid

Maybe in an alternative world, it would... but in my experience, salaries are almost entirely based on market demand and supply, local regulation, and how much money the particular industry you can find jobs on can make, divided by how many people they need to make it happen (which changes how much they pay when they get desperate for experienced workers).

How much value you actually deliver depends not only on your skills, but on the company you're working on actually creating value (which depends on not only the product, but the marketing, sales, local conditions, competition etc.)... and even though that will affect your salary, as I mentioned before, the real driver of salaries is supply (more specifically, how many capable people could do the job besides you, and how much other companies would be willing to pay them)...

For example, we know lots of companies that made billions of dollars while only employing a few dozen engineers... I'm pretty sure those engineers were only getting the minimum possible salary to keep them from leaving for another job... despite them each arguably producing several million dollars of company value every year.

On the other hand, lots of companies make losses for year while still paying good salaries to thousands of people... would you rather see those people getting no salaries until the company turned a profit??

Now that we've established that there's no real correlation between the value an individual salaried employee produces and how much money a company is actually willing to pay them, let's look at the social aspect of the problem as well.

When everyone gets a decent pay (by us increasing the bottom relative to the top), society is fairer in a greater sense, as more people will have the means to have a good life regardless of their education or skills... those with greater skills will always be more highly appreciated and better compensated in a free economy (specially those willling to start their own business - which allows them to extract nearly ALL value they produce at the cost of high risk to themselves... by the way, that's why those who do it are not willing to give their salaried employees ALL the value they deliver). That has great benefits to society as a whole as there is going to be fewer people that resent the "smart asses" making 10x more than themselves, the economy becomes more vibrant as there's more people who can afford to spend money on fun things, and so much more... imagine your son turns out to be a bit dumb (it happens, unfortunately)... should he be doomed to a life of misery?

Finally, you assume you deliver 10x more than someone else but I bet you have zero evidence to back that up. Developers specially are extremely hostile to actually having objective measurements of anything, so we can't really know for sure.

So, that's why I think that no, it's not very fair for anyone to make 10x more than anyone else.

You're seriously not comparing yourself to physicians in level of importance in Society, are you?!

As I said, after COVID we got a real wake up call of who mattered, and Nurses and Physicians deserve every penny that they get, its the system that is broken: see Stanford nurse strike.

Moreover, it's actually not the physician salaries that keep things unaffordable, but the over-pricing of every bloated expense, procedure, medication, drug etc... that keeps it at those levels and simply because they can.

Believe me, I just did 2 MRIs that I put off for several years because of COVID, physicians who I met before COVID who were doing well, and are probably better of financially now then before have been run-down significantly and they all had the same tells of using amphetamines/cocaine that I saw in my undergrad as pre-med students and bio students did the same courses.

The real blame is at the administrative level, and accounting not the physician or nurse level. My MRI required that 2 specialists sign off on it before the Insurance approved it and everyone took a cut, such that by the time I got my MRI it was actually less (in the 1000s) than the 2 specialist visits to get that one MRI. I did this once again for my 2nd one and the same thing.

I also got an EMG in 2019 and had to go for another one, it didn't matter that I had significant atrophy and weakness, not that I was approved for one before when it wasn't as bad as it is now. I had to go through the same process and everyone got their cut.

So, again... no you're embellishing YOUR value if you think you are comparing apples to apples, its simply not the same thing at all.

And none of you were working double shifts in an ER or Urgent care when COVID was at it's peak, or the large amount of attempted or successful suicides as lockdown, so really, get some perspective. You work on computeres, and many of you boast about really only doing 4 hours of work a day, the fact that you're posts counts are as high and still complaining about salary is testament of this very facade.

And no, I don't agree, the 'system' was not based on greed, you chose to make it about greed because so many other have as well and is another matter entirely, because most physicians and some nurses are drowning in debt by the time they get to earning a decent salary. I agree they should optimize for that given those circumstances and many have after COVID and those who haven't are jumping ship or leaving the Industry all together, which is why we should pay them whatever they deserve/ask for (within reason, of course) to retain them.

People aren't even aware of how many nurses are simply over the job entirely and will be quitting in masse.

I'm not saying they don't deserve to get paid well but some doctors earn 10-15 times as much as the nurses they work with, so its not all about "value to society", it's simple market forces. I used the word greed which is very negative but we can simply call it market forces.

Also why do you think family doctors earn half as much as plastic surgeons for instance? Are plastic surgeons bringing 2X the value? If anything family doctors are first in line and responsible for hundreds of lives each year.

For the record I think both nurses and doctors oughta be paid very well, possibly much more than me, as do construction workers and kindergarten teachers. And no, I don't think a doctor should earn one million yearly but that's just my opinion. But anyway the system simply doesn't work like that. The market doesn't care much about who works the hardest or who contributes the most to society.

>"you're not special"

and you replied with

>"they literally begged me to work for them"

>"they just try to make their company look like the best place while apologizing profusely for their limited budget"

Do you not see how your 2 comments here give off the impression that you feel special? Maybe you don't feel special (like you explicitly say), but those two comments especially give a strong impression that you do feel special.

EDIT: I continued reading down this thread and I found a comment chain that perfectly encapsulates the "feeling special" observation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31336614

>"Well said. Working in tech is like writing a book with 50 people instead of 1."