Productivity has a standard economics definition: dollars in / hours worked. The medical industry employs a lot of people. Yes, lots of people have decent wag

Productivity has a standard economics definition: dollars in / hours worked. The medical industry employs a lot of people. Yes, lots of people have decent wages - that just means the service is expensive, because many hours worked * decent wages = many dollars. Tech has a hit-driven structure. A tech company that finds product/market fit can generate huge profits per employee - Apple and Google were running at over $1M/employee for a while, and Whatsapp serviced a billion users on 13 employees. That lets them pay high wages on low employee counts. The huge profitability for successful tech companies inspires a lot of copycats which don't make much money at all - these are the parts of the tech industry that pay low wages. But the sustainable parts of the industry - the ones that actually generate profits from a useful product - all extremely high productivity, because an engineer can write a piece of software and the software can be duplicated infinitely.