Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it hate? Or is it just shock? Tech does have a crazy variance in salary for people who are doing, broadly at least, the same jobs. I don’t see any hate here. Just surprise.
The jobs are massively not the same. It's like saying the IT guy that's in charge of reimaging PCs at your municipal office is broadly doing the same job as the couple that built this lan house. There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.
IT (outside of the USA) typically means Software Engineer, but in the USA the context is as you described.
I don’t know where they are located, but they might be talking about what you would call software engineering.