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Comment by meiraleal | Hacker News Reader

The devs "boasting" (that is your perspective, not the reality) are probably the ones generating more revenue for those companies wanting "us" back in the office (are you a SWE?). There's a reason the biggest tech companies hire the best (and others who might not be considered the best) for significant sums - they are worth it.

Yes, we are underpaid. Just look at the bank balances of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Software engineers aren't illiterate construction workers. We have the means to build and destroy tech companies that think they can do whatever they want.

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> There's a reason the biggest tech companies hire the best [..] for significant sums - they are worth it.

No. The amount they pay is a function of supply and demand of workers and the necessity of filling the position within the company.

> Software engineers aren't illiterate construction workers.

Construction workers have the ability to build and destroy buildings probably more easily than SWEs can build or destroy companies.

Just like a skyscraper is more than just concrete and steel, a software company is way more than just code.

> No. The amount they pay is a function of supply and demand of workers and the necessity of filling the position within the company.

And juniors are getting paid above 100k usd. Deal with it.

> Construction workers have the ability to build and destroy buildings probably more easily than SWEs can build or destroy companies.

Sure but they would go to jail. The programmers that destroyed companies by creating better open source alternatives not only didn't go to jail but managed to build multi-million dollar businesses. Which then becomes too big at some point and ready to be disrupted again.

> The programmers that destroyed companies by creating better open source alternatives not only didn't go to jail but managed to build multi-million dollar businesses. Which then becomes too big at some point and ready to be disrupted again.

I’m not sure what your point is.

Isn’t this a good thing? Lots of opportunity for you to leverage the full value of your skillset to maximize your earning potential by starting a company, being your own boss, set your own work schedule, etc.

(Re: junior devs, $120k is fine for junior, I was recollecting a thread with people saying $160k is more appropriate for juniors which IMO is absurd.)

$120k USD is triple the median and double the average wage of the highest paying countries in the world. It's not "fine", it's absolutely absurd and puts a junior into the top 20% of earners _globally_. It's grossly overpaid, and people need to appreciate that more.

That, to me, says more about how other professions are underpaid, or perhaps just that software creates a lot of value. The work my team is directly responsible for generates tens of millions of dollars for my company - 120k feels appropriate.

I think the latter more than the former. People forget that software and the internet in whole are a relatively new industry and area.

Throughout most of the world (including most of the US), $120k a year is enough to buy and fully pay off a mortgage on a house in a city in < 10 years - even after tax.

A software engineer can create but can they sell? Can something you create be worth a billion dollars without selling it? Even the highest selling piece of art tops out at a few dozen million dollars...

I fear you may have a very skewed sense of a software engineer's place in the world.

Why do you believe that software engineers can't sell? Many programmers have created billion-dollar companies, more than any other profession.

The world's largest companies today were founded by software engineers. There's no inherent need for a designated "business" person within a tech company.

And we didn't even talk about FOSS and indie development which are both as big as big tech and driven exclusively by programmers.

The original comment seemed to imply that every software engineer is deserving of more by virtue of being a software engineer in a trillion dollar company. That seems very questionable to me which is what I was calling out.

I’m sure there are a handful of Zuckerberg type people (let’s be extravagant and say there at 10k such developer/entrepreneurs who have built unicorns by dint of their software skills) but the software engineering discipline is orders of magnitude bigger than 10k.

Edit - Since the original comment was focused on dollar value created by software engineers, we can discount much of FOSS where value has been captured by the likes of AWS and RedHat, not the FOSS community.

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