Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek

To your point everyone who has ever worked a reasonable length of time in restaurants has had the experience of their work environment permeating their nightmares and dealt with stress about work outside of it. It's perfectly normal in every industry to have a constant stream of thought going about work.

However, in many engineering and scientific fields, that constant stream of thought is frequently productive due to the nature of the work being based in problem solving - and solving problems while physically checked out happens a lot.

That's not to say other positions don't do productive work outside the office, I'm only emphasizing that with engineering and science the phenomena of productive offline time is more frequent.

--- There are a lot of ways to look at wages and job titles in order to justify both higher and lower wages, but at the end of the day pay scale is determined by the market.

Software developers/engineers generally make more money than a lot of other careers. It's hard work. It's stressful. It takes a good deal of training/education. And it takes a particular kind of mind in order to both manage doing it long term and do it will long term.

They don't get paid well for any of those reasons. They get paid well because the industry is relatively young, tasks related to software are deemed important, and there is a constant shortage of people who do it well.

Not all people get paid exceedingly well. There are sub-industries that pay very poorly for essentially the same level of work. If you look at a senior software engineer at Netflix and compare salary to a senior software engineer at Infosys working a project in small town Tenessee, you'll find one person who is in the top 1% of earners globally, and one who doesn't hope to save a down payment on a house anytime soon. Same job title, very similar work, enormous discrepancy in pay.

If you look at the Bay Area specifically, salaries are high, but cost of living is also high. While there are many jobs available, at the higher salary levels companies are not just looking for good software people, they are looking for good software people with experience in very specific areas - shrinking the available pool of potential workers significantly and increasing the amount of training and education that's required to attain one of those positions.

Apologies. I've gone off on a long tangent here mostly directed at the general discussion in this thread and not to your points.

That would be their manager's problem. Go home at end-of-business. If they fire people for, um, working during working hours, they'll be going under from the churn in short order anyway. It's not like there's an oversupply of developer capacity - obviously, seeing as how they keep scheduling 60+ hours of work every week!

Looking at people who seem "more impressive" in their work is not a way to gauge your worth. It's really as simple as that. Surgeons appear (and have the social capita) of being the utmost important, but salaries have little to do with that. In the digital age, where dotcom millionaires and billionaires can easily be minted...everyone should strive to take what is rightfully theirs. Because capitalism.

i've been working a 30h/week job, 6 hours a day, with flex hours (without overtime pay but comp time) for the last couple of years and i absolutely love it.

last job i worked at had 42 hours and after 2 years i've been totally burnt out; now i'm motivated, usually well rested and concentrated. when my concentration drops i go home for the day, if i'm working on a hard problem that occupies my mind i'll stay a couple of hours more (but only if i want to, which i usually do). i haven't had to do crunch time for several years and when that was the case they asked if you wanted to volunteer and if you said no that was ok.

also if my project lead tells me there's not much work to do right now and if i want to take off time now would be a good time to do so i'll usually do it.

additionally, if you want to it's possible to work from home if there aren't any reasons speaking against it (meetings) - many colleagues work one fixed day a week from home (i don't because i love the quiet conditions and free, potent coffee).

in my opinion this benefits both me and my employer. i'm motivated, concentrated, productive and loyal - currently i can't imagine working somewhere else full time, even for higher pay. i do regard my employer as fair and really want the company to succeed, not only because of my workplace security but also because i think they're doing it right and that's how it should be done. there's no us-vs-them mentality.

pay is good but i'm probably not going to become a fabled startup millionaire here; quality of life is, in my opinion, unbeatable. currently i don't know any people who lead a more comfortable life than i.

Cool, perhaps that's why I was required to work more and be oncall all the time, have meetings after 18:00, have no life, have high blood pressure.