Ask HN: Is getting highly paid salaries as programmers a bug? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is getting highly paid salaries as programmers a bug?

10 pointsjerawaj74911 comments

Maybe if you get highly paid. If I get highly paid, that's definitely a feature.

Some companies use it as a field-salting strategy to deny a resource needed to enter a business to competitors.

And they sit there getting highly-paid to get scrummed and go through Jiras.

> ...they sit there getting highly-paid to get scrummed and go through Jiras.

After paying their dues and sitting there for several years, they ought to have enough of a pile of their own to go and do something more interesting than Jiras?

if you have low cost of living, maybe

If your cost of living isn't much lower than a programmer salary, the landlords (and shareholders?) are thanking you for financing them.

Or maybe I'm just out of date — that was exactly how it worked back in the XX, anyway.

There's a degree to which (senior enough) programmers still have more leverage than some workers, but the leverage of landlords has been ratcheting steadily toward stronger and has moved considerably in the last few years, and that's on top of a wave of layoffs that's made it considerably harder for many to jump ship from a suboptimal situation, which is the only form of leverage programmers really had over shareholders in the first place, because as a population we've consistently been duped out of building up other kinds of power even as the hiring side of the equation has gradually consolidated more

Yes, because programmers are the cornerstone of the Internet. More money attracts better people to build better things. Imagine if the per capita salary was $10, what kind of people could you attract?

Facebook bought Instagram for $1B with only 13 employees. I can’t think of many other professions where 13 people can scale a company to a $1b valuation.

No??? Turns out that being able to make things that people want/need is a valuable skill. And it's even more valuable when it can scale.

what a bizarre question

highly paid is meaningless without taking into account cost of living

and engineers are not the highest paid people

Who says they are high paid?

its a feature of modern day corpo-capitalism. turns out processing data from billions of users and serving them subconsciousness influencing adds back in a modern day post capitalist techno widget factory requires skills that are in short supply... that is until LLMs make this shareholder's wet dream come true at a fraction of the price. huzzah!

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