You're right about the value of teams being greater than an individual contributor, but the ability to work within a team is a valuable skill just like any other.
Pick another profession then. How about customer support? The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value... nevermind that novice engineers often create negative value by creating liabilities that can cost the company millions, while still getting paid more than the highest paid customer support people.
The truth is, you are just assuming the people making the roads have nothing to offer in terms of outstanding value, because that's your preconceived notion. You already decided they were worth less than you, even though you never bothered to check. Never bothered to measure. Never bothered to ask.
If you really believed in your value, you wouldn't be afraid of a system where people are paid what they are worth to the company. Instead you hide behind "market rates" because market rates are good to you. But markets are flawed, we've seen it over and over. There's a lot of money in rigging markets, and the salary market is no exception.
Cherry-picking one profession to claim low salaries are because of gender is absurd. The world is an unfair place if you can't cope with the fact that a large majority of jobs will pay "peanuts". If tomorrow there is an infinite supply of highly qualified programmers, surely programmers would be paid low wages too but the truth is that there never will be - there is a lot of valuable software left to be created, to be maintained and we won't hit saturation any time soon.
Community/support roles are still widely considered "soft skills", and thanks to a century or two of patriarchy, are indeed considered womens' work. (This is, needless to say, bullshit.)
You seem to be implying that there is an "infinite supply of highly qualified" community/support folks; hence the low wages. There is not.
There are some situations where great customer support brings the company tremendous value and opportunity. But these situations are so rare and few that investing in great customer support (for high price) is not worthwhile. An average person should do.
If good customer support is really bringing in value, then they should be able to negotiate for more pay. If they leave, the company should see losses.
But that never happens.
Screwing up B2B support genuinely can cost millions in a single incident, which is why service level agreements and reliability standards exist. Compare that to the service level of your average help line (somewhere between "maybe if you're lucky" and "go die"). And of course, entities like ISPs don't count in the first place when they're immune to competition.
There are customer support reps making six figures. They tend to go by names like "service engineer", and actively solve problems the customer can't, rather than just guiding someone through a reboot process. In extreme cases, customer support is the development team - if your business is worth enough you'll end up talking to someone who actually made the broken product.
As you pointed out, it's not an accident that the companies with useless, call-center customer support are the ones not worried about losing a consumer or two.
I've got my list, I bet everyone reading this can think of their own X's too...
Spent a few years doing community management / customer support. This is _100% correct_. Oh, the stories I could tell. The role is critically important, and terribly, horribly underpaid. I went back to web development because, even with a 3-year gap in my resume and taking a non-senior role, I was still able to make 50% more.
If one feels that income inequality among the professions is a problem, one should change professions. There's nothing stopping anyone right? However if we do acknowledge that there are barriers to entry, then we have just proven the point as to why a guy pouring asphalt is paid less than a person writing APIs. Marxist theory has every profession being equal. Yet, why, in the Soviet Union were nuclear scientists rewarded differently than the shop clerk at Moscow's GUM department store? Why were Soviet ballerinas treated like relative royalty while the people running electricity to the Bolshoi treated far worse?
Because of scarcity. Gold is worth more than sand. Though without sand, you wouldn't have concrete. I can't believe we're still having economic discussions where scarcity seems to be a novel (and controversial) concept. Marxism fails every time it has been tried because it fails to recognize scarcity.
Supply vs. demand explains so much of this world. Some people either don't grok the concept, or refuse to believe it applies everywhere.
It hurts our emotions when we think about a miner in Africa (working 120 hour workweeks, wiping the sweat off his brow, with five mouths to feed) getting paid hundred times less than a software engineer fresh out of college working four hours a day, sitting in ergonomic chairs and getting in massage pods as a "break."
But pain is not value. Sorry. This is not a utopia. Don't make decisions thinking the world is a utopia. Have a correct mapping of the world, and then do something about it.
Don't skip the first step.
You can't say highly technical fields are comparable to customer support.
Do you think the receptionists in hospitals should earn the same as doctors?
Gender was already in this.
The article starts with "In a groundbreaking effort to close the wage gap between men and women..." I do see what you were getting at but my guess (based on karma and skimming previous comments) is that the gender comment was sarcastic. I could be wrong though.
Do you realize how much water is worth to you? You cannot live without it, but you aren't going to send your water company $100/gallon for it because there is a massive supply of it.
The same applies to paying people to do things. Nobody is going to pay more than what the price is for the skills they are looking for. To expect otherwise or lament the fact that's it's not happening shows a very basic misunderstanding of economics.
I used to drive over the I-35W bridge, twice per day, on my way to work and back.
Feel free to keep talking about how there's not much difference between roads, but I'm not going to be listening.
