The CEO can tank a company (in fact they frequently do)
An engineer certainly has more power than average to sink a company (isn't half the star wars story pretty much this?)
Cleaning personnel does not
Of course you may not have had to study as hard, so your quality of life as a young person might have been better, but bartending is not secure income for life either.
Either way, the easiest way to look at it is, do parents tell their kids to aspire to become bartenders?
That sounds incredibly elitist and cringey. If I had a child earning six figures as a bartender I’d be very impressed, and even if they weren’t earning six figures but were enjoying life I’d be happy… And taking it from another perspective, I know people who’s parents would be disappointed their children are ‘lowly software engineers’ too. With that sort of attitude you can rarely win.
It is a rough rubric to gauge an average quality of life for a person who does a certain thing for a living, not that parents or even entire generations of parents are always right about the continued resilience of a given occupations’ quality of life.
At the end of the day, take home pay is one metric we can actually compare, because different people want different things.
> We find evidence that industry and size adjusted CEO pay is negatively related to future shareholder wealth changes for periods up to five years after sorting on pay. For example, firms that pay their CEOs in the top ten percent of pay earn negative abnormal returns over the next five years of approximately -13%. The effect is stronger for CEOs who receive higher incentive pay relative to their peers. Our results are consistent with high-pay induced CEO overconfidence and investor overreaction towards firms with high paid CEOs.
https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/CEOperformanc...
Employee compensation vs Output:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/pdf/understanding-the-...
They're paid in proportion to how much unique value they gatekeep.
Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. They dream of making us more of a commodity, so that as the chief gatekeepers of the tech economic engine, they get to keep a larger slice of the pie we create.
Why is it bad that more people learn to code? I see this as a net benefit to humanity. Why do you want to gate-keep it?
You can argue with that or not but don't pretend you do not understand the capitalist ideal of an excess supply of labour so that salaries and benefits can be driven to legal minimums with desperate people still waiting to be hired no matter the indignity. Creating Labour surpluses to reduce Labour power and enable exploitation is not a "net benefit to humanity", it only benefits capital.
In our shitty world, you are only valued if you are in a position of more demand than the supply. You might get that by being lucky but most only get it by gatekeeping whether it's doctors or delivery drivers or companies buying up their competitors. If you stand idly by, the world will punish you.
Oh please, don't act so 'righteous-than-thou'. With this logic, aren't we all here who got into SW development responsible for increasing the labor supply and decreasing wages?
What's disingenuous, is people in traffic complaining there's traffic. It's sounds like you got "yours" and then you wanna kick down the ladder behind you.
Where does the buck stop? Who gets to decide who's deserving of getting into SW development without also being responsible for diluting wages, and who not?
The problem is that it is a fundamentally unfair game which requires some people to lose. If you want a solution then it's to remove desperation from the labour market. Remove the implicit threat of destitution and ruin if you don't take the work that is offered to you at the minimum cost an employer can get away with. This is what takes people to ideas of basic income and basic services.
Theres an interesting pattern here of us making positive statements and you inferring normative judgements which then make you upset.
It was a positive statement. You're free to make whatever normative judgements about that that you please. I'm not here to stop you praising it.
We studies fairly advanced CS at school, without the 'tech oligarchy' making us (in Europe where this is non-existent anyway) and yet very few of us turned it into a career later in life because not everyone likes to do programing for a living and there's other lucrative jobs out there. Same at university, less than half of those who entered, managed to graduate in CS because it was tougher than people initially thought.
Cook, Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos can't turn you into an productive CS if you don't have what it takes, they can't download CS theory into your brain like in 'The Matrix'. In fact, many of them are responsible for dumbing down the population when it comes to computers, so I guess we can actually "thank" them.
Only the last ~6-10 years saw an insanely large number of people get into the industry without CS background because of the super high demand driven by the mobile revolution, negative interest rates, crypto hype cycles and stuck-at-home pandemic, and not by the 'tech oligarchy'.
But that was potentially an once in a lifetime event which might never come back. The mobile market is now saturated, crypto is done, people are not stuck at home anymore and the negative rates are also over, plus a trade war and an actual war, meaning an industry slow down, but again, not dictated by the 'tech oligarchs' and more people choosing CS careers, but by market, geopolitics and financial circumstances.
It really was to put the prices down and benefit themselves, not to benefit humanity overall. They would never encourage people to learn mental health providing, physical therapy, exercises for their own health, they don't actually care about those.
A glut of coders only is good for the coders if there is enough overall business to keep them actually employed somehow. Otherwise you have a lot of people who don't spend time coding.