Yeah, it's the lack of supply that drives salary, benefits and status for American software engineers. I do wonder about the positions that are at or below my

Yeah, it's the lack of supply that drives salary, benefits and status for American software engineers. I do wonder about the positions that are at or below my salary that have higher status. Like the non-profit public policy lawyer I know, or medical students / doctoral residents, or the business-side people who get to _make decisions_ while I'm kind of just implementing their business decisions. Last winter I dated a writer who has some local celebrity (definitely has some status), and she was getting down on herself about how little she's paid, and how she works a part-time job to make ends meet. I was also kind of depressed that winter, but more for reasons that I never make super impactful decisions where I'm at. I'm not steering the company's decisions much; the best I can do is be involved in architecture and be a faster/better coder. And the code I write is read by, at best, 6 other people. My PRs are usually just read by 1-2 other people. Whereas, what my ex was writing would be read by thousands of people easily. I don't mind the idea of emptying out my own biases to try to absorb the craft as much as possible. But I do feel like, because engineers are in such high demand, it's not efficient for businesses to let engineers think about product/business decisions, even though engineers would have good intuition for those areas. Being at the end of a waterfall kinda sucks.