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Comment by morphicpro | Hacker News Reader

Go work a week as a landscaper and then let's talk about programmer salaries. Anyone sitting on their ass making over 100k a year is overpaid IMO. Unless you are curing caner lets be honest you are just making the next fart app and no you don't deserve more money than people breaking their back to make your garden look nice.

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Unlike some other replies, I kind of agree with a sentiment (maybe because I did a fair amount of physical labor), but one very important thing to realize is that salaries are not about "what's worth what" and fairness but about supply and demand. Developers get paid more because their productivity allows that and not a lot of people can do what they do. While almost anyone can be a landscaper. And supply and demand in inflexible markets leads either to runaway high or deep bottom price.

Supply and demand needs to go to hell and die in a fire.

For example: Landlords who now own all the land thus control the supply and also inflate demand by reducing supply.

Source: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/reports/fil...

Supply and demand is what gives people incentives to do and produce what is most needed and conserve things that are scarce, for the benefit of everyone. Anytime anyone tried to get rid of them completely it ended in poverty and misery, not a more just system.

Having said that, I sympathize with arguments to nudge things toward more just/equal outcomes recognizing supply&demand can be quite inhumane - after all it's a mechanism, not a goal in itself. Some UBI etc. could be an efficient way to help.

Having said that, western world spends huge amounts of money on public education for everyone, and after all that lots of people can't do anything fancier than tiding up a garden. It's a huge waste of resources. Future manual labor workers could start working after quick and efficient elementary schools, and start building wealth sooner to offset their lower productivity. But boy, no one is going to have conversations like that.

On all sides of all debates there's just bunch of irrational people trying to tweak a system that is too complex for them to understand.

It's not devs who are overpaid but everybody who is underpaid compared to the top. The current economy is a pyramid with honestly a lot of similarities with a ponzi scheme. I'm not saying outright that is one because I'm not sure myself but you could make a lot of parallels for sure.

You are much closer to these lower paid jobs than you realize.

This is like that exercise where people make a scale model of the solar system using a bowling ball for the Sun and a peppercorn for the Earth, and realize that, at that scale, the Earth is 77 feet away from the Sun, the Earth and Moon are only 2.5 inches apart, and Pluto is still half a mile away.

Grandma? Didn't know you had an HN account.

So because some are somewhat overpaid it's okay if Musk is multiple orders of a magnitude more overpaid?

Strange logic.

And even if, start changing from the top not the bottom or the middle

Supply and demand.

I'll work for a week as a landscaper.

The landscaper will work for a week as a software engineer.

Who do you think will fare better at getting close to a decent job well done?

If you don't think people who are physically fit as a requirement to do their job can't think on their own, Well I got news for you once you assume people who generally sit all day and think can inherently have the physical requirement to do manual labor. Most programmers could not probably finish a real days labor job on their feet for 8 hours. They got a standing desk just to try 6 most of the time.

I respect landscaping as a profession but idk what reality you're in that you think a software engineer job is just being able to "think on your own" in a way that even 1% of landscapers can be plopped into it productively immediately.

Of course people who sit all day like many engineers will have problems doing manual labor. The problem is a good amount of them have enough experience with their hands to be a landscaper on demand. You will not find any but the most Einstein level landscapers able to immediately do productive software engineer work.

The % of people able to do it is much lower in software engineering and that reflects its compensation compared to landscaping.

Doing physical labor for a living is a deadend. I luckily learned this early enough in my life.

Sitting at a desk is like a 2 packs of smokes a day.

Then I don't even want to know how many packs back breaking manual labor corresponds to

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