Obviously finance, doctors, and lawyers went to school for many years. They earned it.
Developers, who can't even explain map/reduce or other important CS concepts, have not.
It's a function of supply and demand and the value that the individual can create.
If you're a Rails dev, yeah you're valuable and you should be getting paid that much.
However, you still have a lot to learn, and if you're asking for telecommuting and you don't even know what a thread is. That's entitlement, because you think that just because you know Rails, anyone will hire you and that you're 'good enough' to work from home.
Developers we'd want to hire don't just know Rails.
They are asking for them out of increased awareness of their market value.
In the end the market will sort this out, and some developers will inevitably be left disapointed.
However, I think it's quite reasonable that techies of all skill levels are pushing for and often achieving the salaries and working conditions that they want.
(I really don't see how asking for telecommuting is entitled by the way. I would love to do it for quality of life and productivity reasons, but that is completely divorced from how well I rate myself etc.)
Do you think you deserve a better quality of life than say, a teacher? a doctor? I fail to see how even comparing yourself to them is not entitlement, especially if you're not a CS major.
The whole productivity bit is crap, I've been on that side and I know it. You may be more productive, but for very selfish reasons. The business is not more productive, and you isolate yourself from everyone else.
Businesses don't generally fail because of bad tech, they fail because they're not nimble enough to adapt and test ideas quickly.
That doesn't mean I'm not a good engineer. It just means I haven't done something before.
I don't know why our own community find this hard to accept?
We're a rare species who can create massive value for ourselves or our employers. We can build great products that many would pay for, or automate away whole departments of people with our code - not that I take any pleasure from the latter.
And yet we tacitly accept that there should be a whole class of people above us who have the right to earn more because they ground it out at school for a few years?
First of all, doctors generally save lives. And they have to go to school for at least 8 years. Lawyers, almost just as long.
How long does it take to learn Rails, HTML, and Javascript? A few months?
Average web developers are not that special. However, great engineers for whom Rails is an afterthought compared to what they know, are indeed comparable.
Most of the topics the parent listed are significantly more complex than "knowing about databases", which implies that "database design" in this context isn't simply drawing an ER diagram and correctly identifying the purpose of a foreign key.
Given that the other topics listed include sockets, parallelism & map reduce, my guess is that "database design" might in this case mean distributed database concepts and/or sharding.
Most people in finance, senior managers, doctors, lawyers, architects, management consultants etc wouldn't get out of bed for less than that, especially in a big city with high cost of living.
I think its great that techies are starting to realise their value and grab a piece of that for themselves.