Value is always relative to supply and demand. Case in point: elementary school teachers are far more valuable, but they are still paid peanuts because there ar

Value is always relative to supply and demand. Case in point: elementary school teachers are far more valuable, but they are still paid peanuts because there are so many of them. Engineers who can work on large scale systems in the backend and frontend are not that many. And hence they are valued higher. (I'm not talking about commoditized skills like making webpages and configuring systems, which are indeed vast majority of software jobs). How many hours you spend is a very good question, but it's a separate question from supply and demand (aka value) of core engineers.