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Doctors and lawyers have to sacrifice more for similar pay because their work doesn’t scale. A lawyer and doctor serves one customer at a time. A programmer at
by dbreunig 4y ago
Doctors and lawyers have to sacrifice more for similar pay because their work doesn’t scale. A lawyer and doctor serves one customer at a time.
A programmer at your average SaaS app produces work that serves many, many customers at once. And for long after they performed the labor.
This effect is also very apparent when you look at the avg cost of goods and services by category over time. Things that don’t scale — legal, healthcare, education — have skyrocketed in price relative to everything else.
So long as this state of affairs doesn’t change, programmers and anyone else whose work can be replicated and distributed effectively infinitely for no cost will continue to make more, more easily.
- kazinator 4y agoA lucky lawyer can serve a large group in a class action suit. Or serve one client, but one that is a huge corporation.
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoThen why are journalists not paid well?
- kinkrtyavimoodh 4y agoUnlike programmers, their work doesn't generate revenues as easily, otherwise every blogger would be rich.
- aksss 4y agoAnd we’re arguably far more tolerant of broken journalism than we are of broken code.
- luckylion 4y agoMaybe we could try labeling broken code "opinion".
- WWLink 4y ago^ this is the best explanation I've seen so far in the thread. Software translates directly into money. The company I work for makes physical devices - they have all kinds of engineers, but what we're making goes directly into making the company money. Like I can straight up say, they make millions off the stuff we produce for them. If your work makes the company a lot of money, it's not frivolous to ask for a small chunk of it lol.
- Tarsul 4y agoone could also say that tech companies get an unjustified amount of the money that should go to the journalists through their capture of ad networks.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 4y agoIt's hard to say whether it _should_ go to journalists. Even before the digital era, newspapers largely made money through advertisements, not subscriptions. They were monetizing eyeballs just as much as the Facebooks or Googles of the world do. In their case they brought in the eyeballs through their content (whether responsible journalism or tabloid-trash) and monetized them through also showing ads to the same eyeballs. The difference is that journalism no longer has a pseudo-monopoly on the kinds of things they historically did (content, distribution, eyeballs etc.). My grandfather read the whole newspaper every morning. In one day I think I read a LOT more content than him but it is spread over a wide variety of surfaces, print, websites (no single author) etc.
- mjjjjjjj 4y agoThey generate value to society, not profit. Any amount of profit extraction comes at the expense of value creation.
- saddd 4y agoCollusion. Good luck breaking that up, though.