Yeah, I have been a bit surprised. There is much more skill and knowledge involved here than in churning out ReactJS interfaces. There's a lot of looking down at game developers, I think by "programmers" that tend to try to follow these crazes like "machine learning everywhere" but wouldn't even know basic linear algebra.

Agreed: they are deploying tremendous skill, but not necessarily with the same level of academic achievement and formal traineeship. I say this as someone who has qualified and worked as a lawyer and subsequently cross-trained into and now works as a software developer. I suggest that you can be an accomplished hacker by the time you're 16 without any kind of formal qualification, but you can't be a lawyer (in the UK at least) until you've done yourself the unimaginable harm of forcing yourself to read legal dicta from hundreds of years ago. Part of you dies during legal training.

I don't know much about NY first-year associates, but imagine they fall into the "rockstar" graduate category; perhaps a better salary comparison would be with rockstar (first-year) developers at a Silicon Valley giant?

> They’re working hard and deploying tremendous skill.

The same can be said to folks making furniture. Yet they don't get paid like lawyers, even though their job is highly technical and skilled as well.

Can we stop using only 2 variables to compare how much people should be paid? It's not like the reality is not a little more complex.

> The same can be said to folks making furniture

Certainly not if “skill” is defined within the context of supply and demand, i.e. scarcity. (If it isn’t, it’s identical to “hard work.”)