Outside of SV and investment bubbles software just doesn't pay much over your average white collar job.
I actually don't mind. I want an economy with a fat middle class for blue and white collar workers, part of that is accepting fewer sky high salaries. Devs in VC bubbles must realise they are an anomoly and there are perverse incentives driving salaries up. Everyone else has to fit into a more grounded economic model.
I feel like this is a good application of the two red button meme. Do you want a fat middle class or do you want to get paid in line with the value your work produces?
These aren’t inherently mutually incompatible, but the nature of software is distilling hard problems into products with nearly 0 per unit marginal cost. As a result one pretty ok programmer can generate millions of dollars of value.
I definitely want the fat middle class, but it's a pretty complex reason that probably doesn't shake out in a free market. For one, we can make software more accessible to broader society.
You are right that many types of software produce orders of magnitude more money than was put in. But if you were to look at the broader workforce and industry, you'll find that much software is just a small part of a much bigger machine that has almost nothing to do with software. That's where I would rather see more software developers.
As it stands, VC pours billions into startups that make 0 money until they can flip the investment dollars on the public market. They stand somewhat isolated from the rest of the economy. That's why wages can get so high. Not because the software itself sold billions of dollars worth of service or value.
There's probably lots of software that doesn't get written but would be hugely beneficial to the numerous facets of society, because small businesses can't afford a software engineer when competing with SV wages.
That's me looking at things from afar, I am not in SV, and my experience is on the ground floor of software companies that are producing work for industries that aren't software. It's a totally different market, and I would rather see more software in this space than making another overvalued software doodad valued entirely for it's potential as an advertising platform.
Is there much of that middle class in Europe, though? My definition of "middle class" is "someone with substantial savings, almost enough to not work" and I suppose that there isn't much left from 50k after food and housing bills are paid.
"there isn't much left from 50k after food and housing bills are paid"
This is quite US centric view (partially due to higher prices, partially due to runaway expectations).
This was quoted in euro, maybe at least some employed people are outside USA?
To quote results of <minimum wage Ukraine> search:
> As of today, September 1, 2020, the minimum wage in Ukraine amounts to 5,000 hryvnias (181,4 dollars) per month and 29,2 hryvnias (1,06 dollars) per hour.
I understand tour point but keep in mind that developerstht can work a bit remotely will makemih more than minimal wage of their country and more importantly minimal wage is a decision, you can have a rich country with no (or very minimal) minimal salary. Could be interesting to find 1st decile salary or median by example.
I feel like this is a bit of a misconception. Most of the time cost of living doesn't scale alongside compensation increase. And most devs in high paid regions, even if their region has a higher COL still end up with much more wealth in the end.
For example, San Francisco COL will be around 5000$ per month for rent, utilities, food, transportation, etc. Where as dev compensation will be around 150k a year. On which you'll pay about 36% in tax, leaving you with about 100k a year. That's 8333$ a month.
So as an average dev in San Francisco your monthly profit will be 3333$ a month. That's 40k a year in savings.
Now we were looking at a high compensation of 58.4k and a low of 32.5k based on OP about blender compensations. That's an average of 45k. So their COL and tax burden would need to be less than 5k just to make the same amount as the average San Francisco dev. Any higher then that (and it's very likely to be higher), and they are making less than the average San Francisco dev.
Now that's not all. The largest portion of the COL of the dev in San Francisco was rent, 3500$ went to rent. That means, any dev in San Francisco can easily choose to make an extra 1750$ a year simply by choosing to live with a roommate. Or they can easily make an extra 500$ by choosing to rent slightly further out. If they happen to live with a partner that has income, and especially if they also are a tech worker (which happens often since so many people in San Francisco are working in tech), well they both similarly now make an extra 1750$ a month. That's an extra 21k a year, so now that dev can have a profit of 61k a year if they want, which is more than the total compensation of the highest paid blender dev.
And if the San Francisco dev manages to get a home loan and purchase a home or condo, they can expect to make back close to 2500k per month which they were previously losing in rent.
So I'm not saying COL doesn't matter, but most of the time, regions with higher pay, even if higher COL, still leave you in a much better financial situation.
The only real thing you sacrifice is the size of your home or apartment. But for a lot of people, that's a fine sacrifice to make, especially temporarily, say in the first 15 years of your career for example.
Are you suggesting one should pay more because his living expense is higher than the other?
You should pay for how much is being contributed.
The only thing that should lower the pay is developer's own satisfaction. In other words, one would pay more for stuff others don't want to do or incapable of doing.
Well, this simply isn't how it works in capitalism. Garbage truck workers also contribute a lot to society (wait until they go on strike for a month). However, the job is paid badly, since it requires very little education, so almost anyone can do the job.
If you actually take the word "contribute" to a better degree, if a work can be done by anyone even though the society needs it, it's not much of a contribution.
