They're not paid for the value they generate either. They're paid proportional to the leverage they have to extract money from the business.

In other words, can you run the business into the ground? If yes => $$$$$$$$$$$$$$, if no => $.

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

You are in a world where that can exist if you make international comparisons. There are some fast food workers earning more than some developers.

Bartending at the right bar is a six figure, semi-untaxed salary which is competitive with a jr swe salary.

Not competitive because you still have to account for quality of life, working on site with no remote option, working evenings, nights, and weekends, general riskiness of being around drunk/high people, etc.

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?

> 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.

Using a broad range of parents’ recommendations for what their kids could aim for does not having anything to do with parents being proud or disappointed.

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.

Okay tiger mom. Bartenders don't get fired because they got a cheaper office in Estonia or India to write code. They don't have 9am meetings. Git is an insult you call somebody; What's a JIRA‽ You don't want to work in the nightlife/entertainment industry, which is fine, but it's a $36 billion dollar industry and some people want to do that instead of sitting in front of a screen all day long.

At the end of the day, take home pay is one metric we can actually compare, because different people want different things.

CEO compensation vs returns:

> 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-...

A manager at an In-N-Out burger restaurant makes more than most developers outside of Silicon Valley ($160000) - and tbh I don’t complain about that because I’ve seen the speed those guys put out burgers in Mountain View on a busy day!