Dude, it's actually rather simple. Value is subjective. You are worth whatever people are willing to give you. If an employer or client is willing to pay you $8

Dude, it's actually rather simple. Value is subjective. You are worth whatever people are willing to give you. If an employer or client is willing to pay you $80k to watch Youtube videos all day then you watching Youtube videos all day is worth that to him. What you need to do is not measure your worth in how hard you feel that you are working or how rare you feel that your knowledge is. You are probably a very poor judge of that anyway. You should try to measure it in terms of how much value you create for an employer. That's also hard to measure, but it's much closer to what you can legitimately ask for. Look at it like this: If you write a program that saves a boss an hour of work every day, and that boss makes $250k a year, that program is worth about $31,250 a year, even if it only took you three minutes to write it. If that same program saves dozens of people an hour of work every day, it's worth even more. If you write a program that does the work of three accountants, you are worth, three accountants. As a programmer, you probably produce a lot more value than you think you do. Just keep that in mind next time you're at the bargaining table.