What about the value of those who cooked your lunch? Without them, software engineers would starve and die, so that makes them have far more value, no? Do you think that food service workers are also underpaid?
Now contrast a Facebook programmer, who in one hour might be able to fix a bug that has been annoying 0.1% of Facebook's 2.5 billion users, causing them to be frustrated rather than delighted for, say, two minutes a day, for the next three years before the feature gets rewritten. Maybe that sounds trivial, but if so, shut up and multiply: 2.5 million hours of delight per month for 36 months gives you 90 million hours of delight, for the same hour of work.
So, at a rough estimate, then, the gourmet hacker is 1.5 million times as productive as the gourmet chef. Maybe if I've been overoptimistic it's only a factor of 100,000 or 10,000, but it's huge. And that's how Facebook can be profitable at all despite all the shitty and stupid things they do: capturing even a tiny fraction of the value they produce makes them wildly profitable, as long as they can successfully externalize the harm they do. Some software companies don't even need to externalize their damages.
And that's why software is eating the world.
That isn't the only reason hackers get paid more than foodservice workers. No business is going to pay more for its inputs than it is forced to; that reduces its profits. Hackers also enjoy a dramatically better bargaining position than most foodservice workers, because a hacker with US$3000 has a better BATNA than a cook with $3000: the cook is going to be trying to sell $3 burritos out of an Igloo ice chest outside of concerts while the hacker can buy a laptop, bring up a couple of VPSes on AWS, and spend a few weeks putting together a useful web service, maybe get a few dozen to a few thousand users, but at any rate can easily scale to hundreds of thousands of users. The cook is dependent on someone investing a few hundred thousand dollars (in the US) to have top-quality tools and a good location. Difficult to do yourself unless your family is rich or you graduated from the Cordon Bleu.
This is purely factual reasoning, so it cannot answer normative questions like whether it would be ethically better to pay hackers more or less. It only purports to explain the chains of cause and effect in the world that give rise to that situation, and illuminate the other possibilities inherent in the current state of affairs, and how they might change.
(Also I don't know where you're from that burritos might be sold out of an igloo chest, that just sounds gross)
It's a fallacy to view anyone's work as less valuable when contributing to the whole -- everyone's work is essential in the ecosystem even if all they're doing is unclogging the toilets of all these knowledge workers toxic turds
Software engineers are perfectly well capable of making a sandwich themselves, bringing a packed lunch, or surviving on an empty stomach for a few hours until they get home. Not to mention buying lunch from somewhere else or ordering delivery food if one cafe is gone.
Unless you're positing a world where all food production, farming, fishing, etc. has vanished, then software engineers are in no worse a position than chefs, cooks, baristas, grocery store employees, or anyone else.
I have an idea! Let's call it DevFood, and make it a requirement for everyone.
I mean, we already expect the software engineers to analyze the requirements, so we don't have to hire analysts; we expect them to test their products, so we don't have to hire testers; and we expect them to do the operations, so we do not have to hire an administrator. So tell me, why do we have to waste money on an extra guy who makes the lunch? DevFood is the future of software development!
Their productivity would drop a bit, though. The idea is that people making food enable developers to deliver their best work.
Yes.
>Without them, software engineers would starve and die
Have you ever cooked your lunch?
this is not how prices are set. If you don't like how they are set then you don't like capitalism, where capitalists pay labour, and labour have to work because they need to live.
That's all fine, but let's be clear on how the price of wages are set. It is not "value created - some 'fair value'" for capitalists.
If people could refuse to work because they didn't have to pay rent and had access to the commons to get food or work for themselves, we might see capitalists having to share the spoils more.
But we have full enclosure.
Right, CEO salaries skyrocket, not necessarily because of the value they create, but because they can get the board and stockholders to back them more than the people actually creating value in a company.
They can do this in the form of stock buybacks, dividends, etc.
The standard software engineer does not have the power to "bribe" the stockholders in that way.
If there were only a handful of qualified engineers available on the market, then they'd get paid CEO-like salaries due to the value they provide and being in high demand. But because there is a whole market of qualified engineers they get paid far less.
It's pretty basic economics and doesn't have much to do with stock buybacks/dividends/etc... Regardless of the value of an individual position, wages will be lower or higher depending on the supply of an occupation. In the big picture engineers are very replaceable at market price compared to executives so their wages are reflective of that.
Granted, one can filter out 99% of product ideas on a whiteboard but the remaining 1% is still enormously huge. And that 1% is actually the stuff that nowadays gets started.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the so-called Hackathon, where you do days of overtime in exchange for a few slices of pizza and worse, are expected to be grateful to management for providing the opportunity to do so! Nothing infantilises the profession more.
