> Also I am utterly floored at how long programming a web page takes even for these "professionals". Yet another profession that pays way better for way less work than mine (scientist).
Opinion from a web dev who has great respect for scientists: Our work isn't easy, but what you're seeing here is less reflective of the difficulty of the task than the insane variability in web dev pricing. This same body of work from the blog post could've been anywhere from a totally free template (it honestly kinda looks like one) to a $25/hr freelance job to this ripoff $175/hr agency, or even $150k+ if some inexperienced startup in-housed it and gave it months of back-and-forth stakeholder meetings. It's crazy how much variance there is in the cost and pricing of simple web projects. It's pretty much just pulling a number out of thin air and finding someone willing to pay that. It's very much a "what the market will bear" pricing model rather than "how do I recoup my education/training/equipment/etc. costs" model... i.e., it's a speculative bubble pricing with no real relationship to costs that I can see.
Certainly I think my profession deserves a livable wage, like any other. However, while my work is difficult, it's not any more so than a scientist's, or teacher's, or truck driver or park worker or garbage collector or landscaper. But more so than the difficulty, again, is the variability.
Over the last 5 years, some clients were paying me $20/hr, others $35/hr, others $150/hr (I actually had to negotiate that down because I felt like we were ripping off our clients... but my partner wouldn't budge much because it would impact his hourly rate too, sigh). That last job was at an ripoff agency similar to the one in the OP's blog post... I was getting paid that mostly to move pixels up and down a page (adjusting whitespace between paragraphs) on a simple Wordpress theme. Meanwhile, the $35/hr job had me working on everything from SQL to CDNs to in-memory caches to maintaining LAMP and email servers -- skills that were orders of magnitude more difficult than what I was doing for the Wordpress agency. There is no rhyme or rhythm to how anything in this industry is priced beyond "this is what we think customers will pay".
It is, I think, one of the great tragedies of capitalism that so much wealth and labor value is locked away in growth bubbles that invest not in social good but speculative ROI. If our society were saner, teachers, civil servants, vets, etc. would be better off than CEOs and mid-level tech management. But nope, so much wealth goes to people who ultimately contribute little to nothing to society at large. Who cares if Google launches a 7th chat app? It's all just a big ol' worthless bubble of pyramid schemes. What a waste of human potential.
Today I work at a solar manufacturing company because I at least believe in the social good of its output. If I were to switch to tech proper, I'd probably make 2x-3x the money even though my skills would be largely the same. But I don't want to do that because it feels... dirty, like I'm contributing to the overall decline of our ruthless trickle-up society, working on worthless projects that only serve to make venture capitalists richer at the expense of regular working people. When I hear my peers in big tech arguing about total compensation and stock valuation even though they already make like 5x median wage... I don't envy them, I just feel sorry that they're so detached from reality. When this bubble bursts it's going to be a eye-opener for our society, and I hope it causes a moment's pause and forces people to ask, "What the hell were we doing from 1990 to 2020? Why did we spend three decades chasing advertising bubbles while everything was crumbling around us?"