I understand what you're saying and I agree with it, however, the exposure to the financial markets is what drives the high compensation in tech. If they were n

I understand what you're saying and I agree with it, however, the exposure to the financial markets is what drives the high compensation in tech. If they were not exposed to financial markets in the way they are then they would not pay their employees nearly as much. This is true of nearly every field with high average compensation in the American economy: real estate, finance, oil and gas, and tech. The other two big ones are medicine and law. The high paying law jobs are basically serving finance. Medicine's high compensation is due to screwed up regulatory stuff and an artificially limited supply of doctors (due to how AMA sets the number of residencies). Edit: What I'm trying to say is, the easiest way to get rich in America is to work in an industry that is exposed to the financial industry. It embeds leverage into what you earn. Let's say you own a company making $10mm in revenue and you own the whole thing. You can probably sell that to a PE firm for $20mm, much more than you would make in a comparable amount of time just from owning it yourself. I'm not making a value judgment or anything of that nature. This is the way it works.