> They (well, we) are not underpaid.

Can a family of 4 purchase a home within walking distance of the office? Is the CEO of the company making 1000X more than those at the bottom? How much equity do the execs have and how much is it worth?

Devs are very underpaid, it's just so much value is captured by those at the top that we're all used to fighting for the scraps that happen to fall off the real dinner table.

You could argue that devs are being paid the money that is being extracted from lower-class workers, too. Companies get to underpay for physical production labor, construction labor, etc., and some of that gets fed into developer salaries.

More gets fed into their profits and the executive salaries, but I think you get the idea.

I don’t think you can make the argument that devs are extracting money from lower paid employees when:

1. Exec pay is 100-1000x that of dev pay. I’d also include huge war chests of cash and stock buy backs as evidence that devs aren’t the problem.

2. The vast majority of “high paying” dev roles don’t pay enough money to buy a house in the real estate market that their office is in. A metric that I’d consider bare minimum to call someone adequately paid.

I guess my point is more that devs are a symptom, not the problem. We get the runoff from their exorbitant hoards, which are derived from whole swaths of people getting hosed.

I think if you account for inflation, devs are basically one of the only roles that have been treading water to keep a middle class lifestyle while everything else has dropped through the floor. I do think it's debatable that even developer pay gives you a middle class lifestyle if you can't afford housing.

I do agree that the entire system is broken and devs are mostly working on things that add negative value to humanity but effectively hoover up capital from the masses and deposit it in the accounts of the wealthy.

I have a question about overpaid execs. If execs are overpaid, why don't companies just hire less-expensive execs?

Because the capital market is opaque and corrupt. Execs aren't selected based on their ability to perform, they're selected based on how acceptable they are to the upper classes that control the capital. Even for those (few) who work their way up the ranks, jumping up levels will be based on politics and ability to be perceived as upper class and not based on performance (which is basically impossible to measure in a managerial role unless you want to give all of the credit of the worker's output to the manager).

So shareholders are dumb and execs are overpaid because they are good at duping them out of their money? Wouldn't a company that does NOT overpay their execs outcompete a company that does?

Shareholders are not dumb, but they have created a rigged game of castles in the sky paid for by greater fools. They look for execs that will successfully con the next bag holder, not people who create innovation, great products, healthy teams...

There's a lot of backscratching going on at that level as well. As an example, more often than you would think, VCs will invest in the parasitic children of potential LPs despite their terrible startup idea because they know it will make raising their own funds easier.

So the CEO is the face of the company, and companies are willing to pay a lot for a face that projects a certain image? If that's the case, then couldn't you argue that it's worth a lot for the company to pay to improve its brand image?

It's worth a lot to the shareholders to manipulate the stock price upwards, that's of no benefit to the customers though. Quite the contrary, choosing executives based on how well they sell equity opposed to how well they can operate a company produces worse results for the market (of goods/services, not of capital -- that's the distinction).

The shareholders are the ones paying the CEOs, though, so it sounds like they are worth it.

You're confusing the market for equity with the market for the goods and services produced by the company. The shareholders are optimizing for the former at the expense of the latter.

Is there enough homes within walking distance of the office for all the developers?

Well, all developers should be WFH so that shouldn't be an issue. For those companies backward enough to force their devs onsite, if there aren't enough homes to house the workforce local to the office, then the office is in the incorrect location.

If people need supervision from someone so extraordinary they will be paid half a million a year, in order to stop them from working against each other, maybe they're not really la "creme de la creme", and maybe organizations should be picky about the right things when selecting their workforce.

Or maybe developers are being overpaid compared to most workers, but underpaid compared to most "decision-makers" (most workers being so vastly underpaid it's not even funny anymore). Overpaid / underpaid is relative.

There's this ridiculous idea that management is partially responsible for the productivity of every developer, which means their salary should be increased commensurately.

You could just as easily argue the reverse: every developer is partially responsible for the productivity of management (whose productivity is zero if the devs get nothing done), so the devs' salary should be increased commensurately.

A hierarchy based on promotion and with increasing salaries isn't based in ironclad logic.

(In fact, you can see this in (in my opinion) two of the most important roles on a development team: the agile lead and product manager! Neither of them are hierarchal managers, yet both influence the direction of the team in critical ways. It works really well; far better than if either or both of those roles is filled by a hierarchal manager.)

This is like pure corporate propaganda, "of course execs do much harder work than devs so they of course they deserve 10x the paycheck!"

It's completely silly, if the average employee at google is generating $1.5M in revenue per year but only gets paid $250k then there is a massive delta in value missing in that equation that is going to Sergey Brin or Sundar Pichai instead or some other Stanford MBA in the massive web of "totally useful and productive" middle management at Google. Surplus value 101.

Isn't most of the surplus value supposed to go to capital, i.e. the shareholders?