To answer your last question: how much you’re paid has little to do with how hard you tried or how hard your job is. Secondly your vague statement about ‘withi

To answer your last question: how much you’re paid has little to do with how hard you tried or how hard your job is. Secondly your vague statement about ‘within 1-2 sigma of the hardest jobs on Earth’ seems a little hard to interpret to me. If you say the hardest jobs are at 5 sigma (~2k people on earth have them) then 4 sigma gives 250k people and 3 sigma gives about 10 million people. (In the US the numbers give you 85 people, 9.5k people, and 400k people. 2 sigma gives 7 million people, about 2% of the population). So maybe if you say the hardest jobs in the US sit around a Z-score of 4 and programmers at high-paying companies sit around 2 your numbers make sense. But programmers at well paying companies being in the 98th %ile of income sounds plausible to me. It seems programmers are getting a reasonably good deal in that their income percentile is roughly corresponding to their percentile in whatever metric you’re thinking of (if their Z score is about 2). Other professions don’t seem to have this quality. (One assumption I’m making is that not everyone with Z>2 will be a programmer at some well-paying company).