Don't overwhelm your ego here, the guy who prepared my lunch today is working harder than me. And since that job doesn't pay enough to survive, he has two of them.

You get paid more, not because you "worked hard" or "studied harder"... its because you have a line of work that both creates a shit ton of value, and the supply and demand for people with our skill sets works out in our favor.

You're correct in that how hard someone works doesn't result in how much they earn. However, I got into the industry I'm in through hard work. Going back to my main point, people don't want to see that - they just want to see the success which fits into their narrative where anyone with any success got it because they exploited someone else.

People who succeed tend to assume the credit, and people who fail tend to blame others. Both are wrong.

...and this is why I love the tech community. I'm guessing (guessing because that is just the impression I get) that such a humbling observation on one's profession would not be given by, say, a banker.

But maybe, that's just my impression...

Bankers tend be less humble, but they also work the hours of illegal immigrants with two jobs.

This is a great counterpoint. And as someone who has done incredibly difficult physical labor (former US Marine with multiple deployments) I can tell you that what has been much harder for me has been the CompSci courses I've taken, thousands of hours of pouring over API documentation, and countless late nights coding. Just because we aren't sweating in some warehouse somewhere doesn't mean that the work isn't incredibly complex and difficult. I'd argue that we work quite harder than guys who makes sandwiches, and we are paid for it accordingly. Working in tech takes a lot of sacrifices early on.

I would like to believe that I'm paid as much as I am paid on merit alone. Perhaps based on some universally objective measure of work ethic and difficulty.

But that is a fantasy. We are paid according to how much the market has decided we are worth. We are rare and therefore, in demand. That is it. I could say that I got here on hard work alone, but that's not the whole truth. How I got here is a mixture of one part hard work, one part privilege, and one part fortune.

I sometimes describe what I did during a particular day as "trying to shove my brain through a concrete wall". (Usually applied to debugging, where the "concrete wall" is the reasons why what's happening is impossible. The trick is to find where the crack is in the concrete wall,..)