Pay like other things is something you mentally calibrate to. Once you have then it has only marginal impact on your happiness and mental well-being. Let's say your TC is $120k or $80k or even $250k you're going to adjust your lifestyle to this. So sure, you can drive a nicer car and live in a nicer place for $250k but now you also maybe have to make payments on your nicer car and your nicer house and those things may not make you any happier.

Not everyone in the world is doing it - because not everyone can do it and not everyone is motivated to get to the point where they can do it, even if they could.

I live in the US, and according to what I read online, I am severely underpaid. The thing is, I don't really care. I have almost 9 years of experience, and I haven't even broke $100k yet. I work in government (state level), so it's not known for being high paying in the first place. There are other benefits, of course.

Nonetheless, I would obviously take more money, if offered, but I don't feel the need to frantically run around in the rat-race for it. I seriously cannot imagine what more money would do for me. I already feel like I make plenty just to push buttons on a keyboard.

I got my first software job while I was still in high school and when I started my career I mostly worked jobs that I really enjoyed for a lot less than I could potentially make otherwise. I didn't have a family yet, I didn't have a lot of expenses, I didn't care. Later down the road I joined a "real" startup and started getting paid much better (coincidentally or not around the time I had my first child) and since then I've sort of been in the rat race so to speak. Can't complain though but most of my later jobs were not as fun as my earlier ones.

> High pay is usually a sign the job is compensating for being shitty in other ways.

Or that it requires a set of skills that not everybody has, or that there is a competitive market where employees can select jobs based on pay. Those are two other reasons.

Indeed, I have to question the premise that high pay and shitty jobs go together. I can think of plenty of shitty, low-paid jobs.

> Or that it requires a set of skills that not everybody has

Sure, but its skills easy enough that teenagers self-teaching is considered common. Its much easier than most "professional" jobs, like doctor.

I don't think we should assume that teenagers being able to self-teach something makes those skills "easy".

When we hear stories like those the reaction tends to be "damn that must be a really smart kid".

I don't see any reason why equally smart kids couldn't teach themselves medicine, just as many professional sports players, artists, musicians, mathematicians, etc, tend to start playing from a very young age.

Some external differentiators seem to be "access to learning materials" and "regulation of access to a profession". As an example for that second point: there is absolutely a level of professional and personal maturity I expect from a doctor, that I don't expect the tech industry to screen for. Though I'm also not suggesting the current student -> doctor pipeline is ideal either.

It may be cheaper to learn, but the volume of knowledge you need at your fingertips and the ability to synthesize it to make good decisions is not necessarily less for a highly competent 28 year old tech worker who started coding at 12 than it is for a 28 year old doctor who started medical school at 22.

Self-teaching is also possible and a common route for auto mechanics, who make about as much as tech workers. They know how to do things that both doctors and SWEs are willing to pay for. Can your doctor rebuild his own car engine?

When I explain my job to people, I usually compare it to being an auto mechanic, not a doctor. That is what most software engineering boils down to. And in fact, our paths are converging with mechanics.

I'd say there's a strong inverse correlation. Low-paid jobs are usually terrible in other ways too. Well-paid jobs are usually nice.

High pay means that the person creates a lot of value and that there's low supply relative to demand. High pay is offered because employers want to attract workers. If they're paying well, they're probably going to try other things to attract workers as well, such as offering better working conditions.

Low pay means you don't have to try too hard to get workers. That means you don't have to be nice to them.

It's nice when someone explains capitalism calmly without being overtly pro- or anti-. The world needs more clear explanations of how things work, and fewer opinions.

One thing about software dev is it’s hard to do very well but pretty easy to do good enough. It’s when good enough becomes no longer acceptable all of a sudden that the job gets very hard and people get burned. That’s not always fair though. Another interesting part of software dev is expectations change radically. I’m not in construction but I don’t think a developer can ask a construction team to build a skyscraper in 6 months vs a year or be fired and be taken serious but in software dev that happens all the time.

You're under-estimating how easy it is to do good enough. During the dot com boom many people with academic degrees in various fields tried to move over to software development with very limited success. That's like the top few % of the population to start with. Only some tiny fraction of those were in the good enough to successful range and many were ejected from the market when it crashed to never come back.

Being good at acquiring fancy academic degrees != Being good at programming.

If you ask the top 1% of FAANG engineers, the Jeff Dean's and Ken Thompsons to try to make it as professional ballet dancers, they're probably going to fail pretty hard too.

Granted "academic degrees" and "programming" are probably more similar than "programming" and ballet, but still.

The metaphor "ballet dancer" and "basketball player" or "basketball player" and "gymnast" might be more apt. You can be good at one thing and not good at a related thing, even if both require 'using your brain a lot' or 'using your body a lot'

I was working as a software developer before I got a degree. You're missing my point though.

Academic degrees and programming are a lot more similar than programming and ballet. People who got engineering and science degrees, as a population, are going to be more likely to become software engineers vs. the general population. This seems like a pretty obviously true claim. It's not a claim that people without degrees can't be software engineers. That's a pretty large population and I am a counter-example. My point is even within a population of people who in theory are more likely to become good, and who have had some motivation and invested time, it often does not work.

If anyone could program then we wouldn't be getting paid what we are. The reason why random people aren't all competing for our programming jobs isn't that our jobs are the worst. There are much worse jobs that people are competing over.

EDIT: and by the way, athletes in general do much better than the non-athlete population even in areas very dissimilar to the current sport.