People say engineers aren’t underpaid because they compare it to teachers or nurses. That’s the wrong lens. The right comparison is what you generate vs. what y

People say engineers aren’t underpaid because they compare it to teachers or nurses. That’s the wrong lens. The right comparison is what you generate vs. what you keep. Your £150k package looks generous until you realise the features you ship spin off tens or hundreds of millions. You’re not “well paid,” you’re just a cheap cog in an insanely profitable machine. The gap between your salary and the wealth you produce is corporate rent extraction on an industrial scale. And the “high” salary is an illusion anyway: Housing costs are inflated by the same capital paying your wages, so you hand it straight back to landlords. Equity comp is handcuffs, not ownership. Burnout churn keeps you replaceable. You don’t own the thing you built, you don’t share in the upside, and when the cycle turns you’ll be tossed overboard with a “transition package.” That’s not wealth - that’s rations. Tech wages only look high because every other profession has already been strip-mined. Relative to the value you generate, you are drastically underpaid. That’s why companies can shower 100k engineers with “luxury” salaries and still post record profits.