How is it any different than a sports player getting millions of fans to glue to their TV screens watching them play? How about a highly paid actor convincing billions of people to glue themselves to the silver screen?

They're all forms of widespread entertainment and are valuable enough to pay good money for.

Theres a difference. A top athlete is the highest form of human physical endurance. A top actor is the highest form of human self expression.

A top clickbait maker is really one of the highest forms of addiction producer.

Clickbait companies are really no different from porn or nicotine companies and top engineers today are producing said goods.

It depends on what they build exactly. Some things spark imagination. Some things are direct dopamine hits, no better than cocaine.

Sports and good TV are often in the former; they're addictive because they jog the mind. Even wrestling. Microtransaction games and social media often fall in the latter.

My father was a grade school janitor. He labored harder in an hour than I do in a week. Most of my extended family are educators, with the academic requirements, stress, and emotional rollercoaster that goes with it. Any of these folks deserve more than me probably, but I can string letters together to make computers do things, so apparently that's highly valuable.

As a former high school math teacher in an inner city, I absolutely worked more and longer and harder as a school teacher than I ever have in software development. I also get paid like 4x. And get more usable vacation. I was regularly 60-80 hours a week as a teacher. As a developer, I'm seldom over 40-50 hours.

And I work a full-time job as well as running a startup on the side which amounts to another near full-time job and a ton of stress, what do I deserve?

Truth is is that I deserve precisely nothing. I get what I get and not because the heavens above postulated thus but because my work had value to someone who was willing to give me money for it.

if only social service and society impact was measured for the pay, me, my other friends and may be you would have been homeless