Yeah, it mystifies me. One of my ex-boyfriends worked at a chain coffee shop. He was paid minimum wage, as the manager of several branches, for working insane h

Yeah, it mystifies me. One of my ex-boyfriends worked at a chain coffee shop. He was paid minimum wage, as the manager of several branches, for working insane hours, and (as he once said to me) the person three levels above him was paid about £50k (~$60k). That guy was in his 50s - that's how long it took to get promoted. And he was a smart guy: excellent programmer, wrote an emulator for some old games console, wrote and managed his own email servers and VPNs, filled in as an engineer for a few months at my former startup (for no pay, very kindly) when we were understaffed, etc. Could've easily worked as a programmer for 10x the pay, in other words. He was a massive coffee fan, and had tens of thousands worth of coffee equipment at his house, and I think he genuinely loved it and did it for that reason, but someone like that must be one in a million for them; I never had any fucking clue how they filled all the other positions... (I'd be fascinated to hear anything anyone else knows!)