On a US national basis it is true. Median weekly earnings for full-time workers is $1,192[1]. Median hourly pay for a software developer is $62.58[2], which, assuming a 40 hour week, is $2,503.20.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

That may not be a fair comparison to the extent that software devs are concentrated in high CoL areas, though, so you don't see a ton of us out in the cheaper and poorer regions. The effect of that is somewhat ameliorated by taking the median instead of the mean, but not fully.

Very often they are making less than a career in a lucrative field would bring but still more or at least equal to a median job. And they have a lot of benefits that are just not very easy to put a price on (freedom to do what you love is priceless for some).

I think there is a distortion coming from the "bottom of the barrel musician" that spends way too much time complaining instead of trying to improve (or moving on to something else if they don't have what it takes). The reality is that the vast majority of music produced/performed is so bad it has absolutely no value commercial or otherwise.

I don't think the software craft is very comparable, it's just not the same incentive and constraints at work...

But you are right if you want it to succeed then you need to chip in. We sell an album for £7 digitally, or £30 for vinyl + digital, but it’s basically just donating to us to say “please keep recording stuff”. We’ve made more off selling a single vinyl than all our combined streaming income

i've taken to terrestrial radio for true discovery and bandcamp for digging into a genre.

But if we are being realistic, if your stuff is truly great and unique, it will blow up. You just need to realize when you are not part of the great that you can do this just for your own pleasure, with no intention of success or anything like that, a hobby like any other...

I don't know the answer, considering I don't want to find room to store CDs or carry around a discman, but that's the problem.

Honestly, I would rather listen on Spotify and Venmo the band $5 towards their next track. Not sure what that looks like in a scaleable way.

Went to see Pete Doherty not long ago, and bought some hand typed (and signed) lyrics sheets/art from him - felt like buying something quite personal.

Agree about the principle though, I try to buy merch at every gig I go to. Makes me feel slightly less bad about using Spotify.

I'm in my own weird state of mind where I prioritize collecting physical over digital to the point of neglecting digital-only releases - digital is always going to have a copy somewhere I can listen to or purchase, but physical is limited and there's no guarantee I'll be able to get a copy later. This is probably an overly materialistic view, though.

Something like an NFC-equipped greeting card (maybe more than just a cover; pages can be inside for fun stuff that used to be in the CD inserts/jackets/etc), that I could set on a stand which would then interface with the card and start playing music. Pull the card, playback stops. You get the idea. I just think something like that would serve both purposes - look and display nicely, while giving a conversation piece and more content from the creators; but not prone to damage causing issues with playback and as durable as you want them to be (could be more like HID Prox cards; plastic instead of cardboard. Or even more "exotic" materials. Lots of room for creativity).

And I understand about the movement to digital - I typically rip the CDs as FLAC files and put them on a hard drive.

Today, I only buy physical media and from Bandcamp. The younger generation seem happy to pay subscriptions for Spotify and Apple Music. I think this has to do with mobile OSes hiding filesystem access and banning P2P apps from the walled garden.

All jobs fulfill something desirable for someone, but they aren't necessarily needed.

By headcount, but I am not sure that tells the whole story. After all, a retiree who owns farmland, but lets another farmer do the work, can still be legally considered a farmer himself. I suspect even the average farmer working in the fields is spending considerably less time there than he would have in the past.

And that's with most farmers not even using the latest and greatest technology. If we imagine a world where only the highest capacity state-of-the-art machines are put to use, a lot of the farmers would struggle to find any work to do.

Completely autonomous farming vehicles have only been a thing for a few years and not been universally adopted yet (partly due to the high cost). I suspect there are still some ways to go here.

Fruit/vegetables as we know today are largely unnecessary and a luxury we have learned to love. In fact, most of the love for it comes from rich people posturing about it because they have both the means to buy them and time to process them. When you look at them objectively, they are extremely bad from an effort to payoff point of view, making them purely pleasure/status driven food.

If you clock back just a hundred years you will realize that most fruits/veggies were not even well known (at least not in their modern form) and not something to worry about.

The pizzas with tomato sauce were created because basically nobody wanted this weird unknown fruit coming from the new world. Brussel sprouts so bitter that most people could not even digest them properly and they were truly disgusting to eat (basically food poisoning).

I could go on and on but the fact is vegetable and fruits are something we do purely for pleasure, we have improved the farming efficiency on many of them but it hardly matters for most of them because more supply doesn't mean the surplus will necessarily get eaten (you need to have people both richer and with more time for that).

In fact, the whole "organic" thing is something related to this fact, it's rich people who wanted to raise the stakes for purchasing veggies because it has become "too cheap" with imports (thanks to low wage cost in exporting countries).

The proper farming that actually feeds the world has already scaled beyond the point where it's reasonable to try and squeeze more out of it. In fact, the problem has become to manage the thing economically because over supplying makes some extremely large operations with big fixed costs a gamble.

A lesson we still struggle with…

I don't know how one can come up with such nonsense as hairdresser being a bullshit job. What's next, cooks?

There are indeed plenty of bullshit jobs, but they are systemically the bureaucratic paper pushers that has all the power in today's society (both in monetary terms and political terms), because they have some sort of diploma (which is mostly a way to show allegiance to the regime). Those people are demonstrably dumber than many of the people doing actually useful jobs (often less paid with none of the advantage of the bureaucrats) but they hold most of the power collectively, and they are not giving it up.

Software is the only industry where the marginal cost of the product is ZERO. All software you use has already been developed, you are presumably paying for updates and future versions - otherwise it's just rent. Something like Reddit is not pure software though, they have infra costs.

This is why Free Software is worthwhile to use and contribute to - it only needs to be written once for everyone to benefit from. Notice I didn't say "Open Source" because a lot of people want to commercialize that. YMMV.

The same is true of anything where all the value is in the bytes -- news, film, music, the written word.

Good point. I consider those "media or content" to be "played", "read", "watched" whereas software is more a thing to be used - or a set of capabilities added to a physical thing. Video games OTOH are software meant to be played so that occupies both of my mental categories. Stop it! You're making me think! ;-)

Think about a restaurant: the food has been bought and will rot if not sold, the cook and the waiter are being paid and so is the rent, so the only truly marginal cost in such a scenario is the cost of the energy needed for the stove or the oven (and only for dishes that get cooked at the last minute and not upfront), which is negligible compared to all of the upfront costs.

This is a good point to raise, though I think we can refine the meaning of "marginal" to preserve a meaningful distinction between, say, restaurant meals and software:

Although the ingredients for making the meals have already been purchased, so there is no direct causative link between an additional customer arriving and additional ingredient cost, there remains a statistical link: Ingredient purchases are done based on a statistical model of what number of customers, with what preferences, are likely to arrive in the near future. I would very roughly characterise this as: There is some duration x such that if n more customers than expected show up during the next x days, n additional portions of ingredients will be purchased sometime later (in anticipation that this increased demand is now "the new normal").

The above could do with improving, but what's important is that software (and media) do not have any such statistical link: If 100 people buy your program this month, 200 the next month, 300 the next month, there is no additional cost outlay for you to make in order to meet the requirements of selling an (estimated) 400 copies the following month.

The only thing that matters IRL is the average cost, and as you point out, it is always monotonically decreasing for software and other IP-based businesses, which isn't the case doe for other kinds of industries.

The problem is that we mostly don't have a correct mechanism to price software in a way that would be fair to both the developer and users.

For example, even if you calculate exactly what it costs to build a particular piece of software (all the devs salaries, plus all the office costs plus all the infrastructure costs) and you arrive at a particular number.

How do you divide that number for customer? The more there are the cheaper, but also if it became "free" after everything has been paid (because the marginal cost of copy is effectively zero) it looks like a better strategy to let others front the money.

It's like plenty of things in life, if people were honest things would be very easy but since they aren't we need to have suboptimal systems in place...

People programming for fun has always skewed its worth in the eye of some, and we also get the old “doing it for the exposure” expectations that is endemic in all creative realms.

But something as simple as the minimal code needed for this particular feature, which is essentially a QoL UX feature, is something that I think should be standard if present, not an added extra charge on top of what is already being paid (this isn't a free service, payment is through letting them sell you to there stalky ad-tech partners). It definitely feels like very deliberate price gouging.

If you don’t want this to happen, use an open source license with more restrictions on commercial use.

If you're developing open source software because you believe in the commons, license it under (A)GPL to ensure the propagation of the commons. If you're developing open source because it looks good on a resume, then you've already been paid for it in reputation. But if you're developing open source because you think you'll get paid for it, I don't know what to tell you except that that is not how the world works.

(Which is, of course, a totally different conversation than whether we wish it were how the world works.)

This is not so simple. Even in the FOSS community, some people are allergic to copyleft licenses. I usually choose a license based on the practice of a community. Also, if you make the choice of copy-left in a world or copy-free is king, you are just isolating yourself from others. Often in big projects, you cannot alone, and the decision of license is a collective one.

I prefer the idea of regulating this mess: enforcing that everyone who has contributed to the success of a project - directly or indirectly - gets paid. It looks more fair and is based on merit - which this society seems to value.

Fair, but in that case your compensation is choosing a license that gets you acceptance in the community that you're working with.

I'm not in favor of regulating that people who put stuff out into the world for free should get paid for that work, unless we're talking straight up UBI for everyone. If you want government to fund open source, it should do so by employing people to work on open source or by funding everyone to work on their hobbies via something like UBI.

And absent government funding, if you want to get paid you need to have a business model that allows for that. The existing practice in portions of the open source community is to put things out with extremely permissive licenses but then throw a fit when people don't pay you for them. This is what's known as a bait and switch.

Shoppers expect shopping carts at a supermarket to be free, but you still have for-profit factories that employ many people to produce shopping carts that they sell for-profit to supermarkets. Do you also struggle to understand how that works?

I don't think consumer expectations matter that much when they don't have a free alternative.

Paying to lease a server or for access it, sure, but software itself? It’s nonsense.

This means a business that sells software solutions can earn high profit margins, which is a necessary component to be able to then pay high prices to labor sellers. A buyer has to be both able and willing to pay a high price for the seller to be able to sell at a high price.

If the labor buyer is only earning 5% profit margin, then the labor seller is going to have a harder time extracting more money. But if a buyer is earning 20%+ margins, and their business is growing to boot, the buyer will be able and willing to part with more, hence higher prices for labor sellers.