That's how markets work. You get paid what what the market will bear, not what you "should" make.
My comment was more about the companies though which may form cartels to drive down employee wages. Companies forming cartels is illegal, while unions are legal in many places.
In every other aspect of computers, the industry has finally embraced usability as a desirable goal, and not just for end-users.
On my first computer, you had to read a 100-page user manual and learn exactly what commands to type. In my first programming language, you had to manually allocate (and worse, deallocate) memory. With my first database, we used to have to go type VACUUM regularly. None of these is true today.
Yet even though some of the highest paid people in the world are members of unions and have agents to do their negotiating, programmers seem to have latched onto this idea that if you're not making top dollar or have your ideal working conditions, you should "just negotiate better".
Why stop there? Tell programmers they should "just program better", too.
> You can also unionize
Have you ever organized? I don't think you realize how difficult this is, especially without strong support from an existing union. There's a reason unions heap rewards on people who do it.
Existing unions also have great labor lawyers. A common response to even thinking about unionization is getting fired. (That was in the news recently because it happened 4 weeks ago here in Seattle.) Labor laws aren't what they once were, and there's usually no consequence to the company for firing organizers.
Flipside: I can still write software for my first computer without looking anything up, over 30 years after reading those 100 pages. I still know the memory layout, opcodes, assembly etc by heart and it is still the best way today to program that particular computer (which still works in my man cave) today. Yes, today it is all simpler, but the 100 page example I find a plus, not a negative. Maybe you were referring to something but my 100+ page manual was usage and at the same time programming (using was programming beyond the basics) as that was the only way to use the system.
In other words, markets work that way because that's how the bosses and capitalists want it to work, and have so far been successful at thwarting attempts to use the government to change things.
