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Comment by dbatten | Hacker News Reader

Obvious corollary: if you're lucky enough to love doing something useful that most people would hate, you're likely well situated to get paid a lot for doing that thing.

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Dirty Jobs is full of great examples of people who've found their niche in this category of jobs, and are probably quite well compensated for it.

Maybe the best advice this article could have given would be to look for those careers. Taking the job with the most money is reasonable, taking the job job you love most is reasonable, but if we're talking economics then the comparative advantage is in finding the job you like most relative to everyone else.

On which note, I don't think it's an accident that some subdomains of programming have really happy people making good money. Sure, it's work they love, but optimizing compilers or whatever else appeals to few enough people that it's a great fit for anyone who does like it.

In general, in engineering, getting very good at some obscure specialty (which is highly valued and you like well enough) is pretty good advice in general. Of course, pick wrong--or don't be flexible enough--and you're the world's performance expert in some computer architecture that's now obsolete or the Y2K expert in 2001.

I'd say this is true for a lot of jobs like CEO of a big company, corporate lawyer or even being politician (who would want to go through the grueling campaigning necessary to run for president?). Most people don't want to put in the hard work to of these jobs. Myself included.

I am not saying that this justifies the crazy high pay of CEOs but it's a tough job.

Most CEOs also don’t get crazy high pay, only the ones you hear about.

[[citation needed]]

Please define "crazy high pay."

http://time.com/money/4790237/ceo-pay-salary-compensation-in...

> American CEOs got an 8.5-percent raise last year, taking in a median of $11.5 million in salary, stock, and other compensation.

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