Woah, what. I was completely on the side that expecting reasonable hours and time off is not "entitlement", but yours strikes me as the exact attitude OP is railing against.

The exploitation people complain about re: Wal-Mart cannot be measured in profit-per-employee, because that's not how exploitation is commonly understood (though you are, of course, free to define that term however you see fit).

People complain about Wal-Mart because they routinely use socially unacceptable ways to curb employee costs - keeping a vast number of people in contract roles, even if their jobs are actually full-time, in order to deny them benefits, and more. This isn't about profit per employee, it's about taking advantage of unskilled labor and their relative lack of choice to treat them in ways that most of society finds reprehensible.

As compared to your standard MSFT, GOOG, and AAPL engineer who rides to work in a cushy bus with leather seats, WiFi, catered food, a 6-figure salary, a big house in a good school zone, exceptional health, dental, and vision benefits? You can say these guys are getting an unfair deal in that they generate exceptional profits relative to their compensation - but exploitation? Get real.

It's a free market, and software engineers have exceptional mobility (unlike, say, your Wal-Mart greeter). You are free to demand a $285,714 salary from Google (so that they still get their 5% cut). If you are exceptional enough I'm sure they'll agree, but otherwise... good luck!

"a big house in a good school zone"

A low end "six figure salary" in the bay area probably isn't enough to buy a big house in a good school zone. Two workers who earn this salary would have access to that kind of real estate though.

This is silly. You're only able to make 200-300k/year for the company because of the infrastructure and audience they've built for you and all the other engineers to use as leverage. It is orders of magnitude harder to make that much on your own, regardless of how good a coder you are.

Also - we need more consumption? Wealth comes from production, everything else is just shuffling money around. People in the US are complaining about decreased wages and underemployment, not that they need more vacation.

200,000-300,000 gross isn't that much really. ~150.00 an hour with 40 billable hours per week ~60 actual work hours if you're freelancing. Most good programmers should be able to hit that.

As to providing infrastructure/etc, they aren't providing anything odesk and some research could provide. If someone talented set off on the own they should be able to put together similar marketing/framework/teams within a few years.

The reason we don't is because honestly we make six figures, it's easy, it's reliable, etc. and it more than enough to pay our bills.

When I say infrastructure/audience, I'm talking about the many millions of users in the ecosystem which your code will be used by, and the marketing machine to push it out there. The same code that's used by 10k people if you set out by yourself has a 100x impact if it's used by a million Google users. That's why Google has such a high revenue per engineer number, and you're not going to replicate that without a lot of brand building and marketing, which is hard, expensive, and takes a long time and a good amount of luck.

I don't know many freelancers that make 150/hr and have 40 hours of solid work a week every week at that rate - you'd spend a lot of time lining up that work. Sure it's possible, but it's much harder than if you're just working at a large successful company. I believe total compensation at Google is roughly around there for a good programmer anyway, without all the hustling for work or risk.

>As to providing infrastructure/etc, they aren't providing anything odesk and some research could provide. If someone talented set off on the own they should be able to put together similar marketing/framework/teams within a few years.

Not without a huge amount of investment, you're underestimating even just the technical infrastructure at the SV giants.

I work at a SV giant. I'm aware of the infrastructure we have in place. This infrastructure is primarily here to combat the increased complexity brought on by having x employees running around. Configuring something like github, automated deployments, change management policies, marketing/advertising campaigns is significantly easier with fewer employers.

Further provided you're targeting niche markets where the economies of scale don't matter nearly as much as meeting the needs of the market you can see decent returns per developer with out pushing your wares out to millions of users.