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Couple notes: 1. There's a HUGE difference in skill sets between software engineers. Some of us have deep understandings of algorithms, linear algebra, and CS

Couple notes: 1. There's a HUGE difference in skill sets between software engineers. Some of us have deep understandings of algorithms, linear algebra, and CS theory, and others know how to style a button with appropriate margins. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which of these is more difficult. 2. Inequity exists everywhere, and neurotic self-guilt doesn't really accomplish anything. The bottom line is we're all brought into this world with differing advantages/disadvantages across both nature and nurture. Rather than bemoaning the inherent nature of a free market on a random news board, you'd be better off searching for methods of active altruism, donating to auditable charities (Charity Navigator and GiveWell come to mind), and actively helping those in need.

binary132 2y ago
The fact is that our pseudo-liberal market is extremely dysfunctional and doesn’t offer meaningful opportunity to most people who didn’t get technical degrees. A healthy society cannot run on pure software engineering, and cannot offer meaningful work only to its brightest nerds and most unscrupulous thieves. It’s good and right to notice this, and the solution is not that the nerds and thieves should consider dribbling a few extra scraps to the poors (at this point, everyone else). No, I don’t think knowing how to perform an affine transform justifies a 20x better salary than the common man has access to. The vast majority of folks in tech are not building rocket ships and flying cities.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  Software engineers don't recieve a 20x better salary than the common man has access to. The heatmap indicates that the median software engineer tends to make 2-3x the local median income.
kridsdale3 2y ago
> Some of us have deep understandings of algorithms, linear algebra, and CS theory, and others know how to style a button with appropriate margins. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which of these is more difficult. I have the former, but 95% of the value I bring to FAANG is the latter. My job lately is to double the revenue of various products that were built by a thousand deep algorithm workers but got no attention in the attention economy, by identifying and improving which button color (eg) would direct the traffic. My simple work gets all the money directed to the company, but was far easier than the hard work of making The Thing. Because algorithm nerds often have no idea what is appealing or valuable to human customers.

binary132 2y ago

The fact is that our pseudo-liberal market is extremely dysfunctional and doesn’t offer meaningful opportunity to most people who didn’t get technical degrees. A healthy society cannot run on pure software engineering, and cannot offer meaningful work only to its brightest nerds and most unscrupulous thieves. It’s good and right to notice this, and the solution is not that the nerds and thieves should consider dribbling a few extra scraps to the poors (at this point, everyone else). No, I don’t think knowing how to perform an affine transform justifies a 20x better salary than the common man has access to. The vast majority of folks in tech are not building rocket ships and flying cities.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
Software engineers don't recieve a 20x better salary than the common man has access to. The heatmap indicates that the median software engineer tends to make 2-3x the local median income.

kridsdale3 2y ago

> Some of us have deep understandings of algorithms, linear algebra, and CS theory, and others know how to style a button with appropriate margins. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which of these is more difficult. I have the former, but 95% of the value I bring to FAANG is the latter. My job lately is to double the revenue of various products that were built by a thousand deep algorithm workers but got no attention in the attention economy, by identifying and improving which button color (eg) would direct the traffic. My simple work gets all the money directed to the company, but was far easier than the hard work of making The Thing. Because algorithm nerds often have no idea what is appealing or valuable to human customers.