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As an opposing anecdote, I've spent a significant percentage of my software development years in the medical arena. The overwhelming majority of doctors that I have worked with do not work as hard, anywhere near as many hours, or under as much stress and the overwhelming majority of software developers I have worked with.

The stressful period for most doctors is getting into medical school, getting through medical school, and getting into and through internships and residencies. That is roughly 10 years or so, and during that time it is absolutely at the pace and pressure I see in software development..but once they finish, for most of them, it is pretty smooth sailing. Those at the top of the game are a different story, but that's true anywhere.

The real difference is that doctors have a powerful lobby that artificially limits their numbers, essentially providing a benefit similar to unionization. You can't massively up the numbers of doctors being trained in the U.S., and you can't import massive numbers of foreign workers to increase supply. No matter how many capable people there are, the numbers will remain artificially constrained.

Software development doesn't have this protection. The only lobby in software development is regularly pushing for massive increases in supply through various channels. Doctors' salaries have continued to rise year after year..not so sure software development salaries will fare as well in the coming years..especially after we convince software devs they are already overpaid ;)

Software will continue its bifurcation into two income distributions, similar to lawyers. No lawyer earns average salary. That industry is split into low wage work and high wage work. I expect software will be the same.

This seems to be a trend among many highly paid fields:

- Many doctors earn 100k or 3-400k depending on their field.

- Many small business owners earn <100k or make a killing, depending on their field, goals, and success/luck.

- 9 out of 10 startups outright fail or aren't successful enough to compensate founders & employees for the opportunity cost.

It's hard to tell what the distribution of income is without good data. I'm skeptical that normal, non-startup businesses fall into this pattern. I'd expect more of a log-normal for most industries.

The log-normal also applies somewhat for lawyers. The partners of big firms make millions annually.

As long as we're getting into nuance, I should add that the two-peak distribution is most clear for lawyer starting salary, not long-time professional. You either go top firm or not.

Great points all around! The reason I think small businesses are relevant is that the founders/owners own the entire business. They either lose money, break even, or make money. In the sucessful small business cases where they make money, since they own 100% their profit requirements for a good return are far lower than those of a startup. I'd guess it's still a power law scenario (just with less amplitude than startups).

Very on point about the AMA functioning as a union. I'm not a software developer (and don't even live in the US) so apologies if this question is ridiculous: could software developers form a union, er I mean the 'American Software Developers Association'?

There are strong network effects in many digital markets. In these cases, given enough time, it leads to a monopolist employer in that market. Even in cases where there are a few firms competing (e.g. Google and Apple), they have incentive to form a cartel through 'agreements' on hiring practices (and there have been documented instances of this). The natural way for software developers to avoid being exploited, in either scenario, is to form a labour monopsony...

I'm not a software developer (and don't even live in the US) so apologies if this question is ridiculous: could software developers form a union, er I mean the 'American Software Developers Association'?

Well, the real nuance is that the AMA is not so much a union as a guild. It's not _legal_ to perform medical services without an AMA-blessed licence to practice.

If one could concoct a scheme by which it would be illegal to perform "unlicenced" software engineering work, I suppose there would be the same effect.

Please don't even suggest such a thing!

It's hard to see this happening since dissatisfied software developers can often fix the problem by finding another job. (Maybe not everyone can do it but that's the perception.)

You'd need a common sense of injustice. It's a lot easier to do this for, say, graduate students who really are underpaid.

The tricky part would be having some kind of license without which it would be illegal to perform certain engineering tasks.

There is. It's called the PE (Professional Engineer) license. Today, however, it mostly only applies to civil engineers. Back in the day, if someone wanted a bridge or building (especially for the government) designed, you had to be a PE to get the job. It required a certain amount of hours of work after college and an exam. Doesn't really apply to software though.

--When I got my first job as a software engineer, my dad, who's a civil engineer PE said, "I thought you were going to be an engineer, but it sounds like you're just a computer programmer." :-)

Auto union workers don't have a license needed. But yes not nearly as successful as the lawyer or doctor unions.

Doctors working well into their 60s or 70s? Yes

Coders? Never.

Interview for medical job: Normal

Coders?: Often humiliating

There are plenty of coders in their 60s, I'm one of them. You don't think computer programming was invented in the dot com boom do you? I have colleagues still coding who are in their 70s.

And no we aren't all coding in Cobol or Fortran 4.

I do agree though that it would be difficult for most of us to get new jobs in another company as developers because of the age-ist behaviour of many of our younger colleagues.

What? I work with 60+ year old coders.

I guess your 22 year old founder of a trendy Bay Area startup would have a problem hiring a 60 year old but that's both silly and illegal. I'm not sure trendy Bay Area startups attract the 60+ crowd anyway.

I don't think we'll know the answer to the age question for a little while. The number of coders has been growing over time, so the potential pool of seriously older coders (60+ for sake of argument) is already small to start with.

Anecdotally, three very different examples:

my mother (71) stopped coding in 1969

Guido van Rossum (60) is still coding

Darryl Havens (61) is Distinguished Engineer at Amazon - not per se a coding role, but definitely an engineering role

Plenty of people work much harder than dentists, lawyers etc and get paid an order of magnitude less. Supply and demand sets prices, not worthiness or fairness.

Personally, I feel like I sold my teenage years as a price for my edge in tech. I'm not always sure it was worth it.

> Personally, I feel like I sold my teenage years as a price for my edge in tech.

Yes, this. That's how I got here, too. And have the same ruminations from time to time.

Sold them? What do you regret? As far as I can tell, spending my teen years learning stuff was the right move.

Short of becoming a professional sportsman, which was never on the table for me, I don't see anything that I could have now if I had acted differently.

I agree. I learned a bunch of tech and then used it to socialize, make friends, meet women, etc. I don't feel I missed out on either the teenage part or the learning part.

Underpaid is an interesting term, I guess. When you think about it, software (in its many forms) isn't like retail or hard goods; it can be sold - usually - an infinite amount of times. The upside is massive since all hard overhead is eliminated. Where then should that overhead go? To management?

It's all about ratios, of course. If the owners/management of a company are grossly overpaid in comparison to the workers who produce - especially if physical overhead is nearly eliminated - then yes, developers are indeed underpaid. And I would posit this is true in many areas of software development. Perhaps not your situation, but overall? I buy it.

I will admit that my situation may be more unique than I realize. After all, there are vastly more software companies out there than I could ever work at, so my own experiences can never be more than mere anecdata, no matter how much I'd like to extrapolate from them. And I've only ever worked at small companies, so a relatively tiny number of developers have also worked at the same places as me. This is in stark contrast to huge corporations like Google and Amazon, where I could at least extrapolate my experience to thousands of other employees at the same company.

I have not had the sense at my own jobs that the upper management was overcompensated. I can't prove this of course as I didn't and don't have access to the company's financial statements and bank accounts, but the norm has seemed to be to reinvest profits in the company in order to remain competitive. It's worth pointing out that I've only (so far) worked at companies that have been self-sustained, not requiring any VC funding. My impression is that many bootstrapped software companies are not actually making that much money; revenue figures in the $10M-$20M range are not uncommon. This money is easily spent on a staff of 50+, office space, etc.

You can usually just do the math. Let's assume last year I decreases the loading time of our website by 50%, taking it from 2 seconds to 1 second. This reduces the drop off rate of customers (people who switch websites before it loads) by about 15%. That means a 15% increase in overall sales.

Now let's assume it was a $10 million a year business. That means it's now making $11.5 million dollars a year because a software engineer optimized the loading time. That engineer probably makes $100k or so, and he might get a 10% raise since he did such a good job. The remaining $1.49 million gets distributed amongst execs and investors.

Hardly seems fair, when most executives have no idea what's going on, and provide zero value add for that case.

$10M in sales with what profit margin? 20%? In that case the $1.5M in extra sales is $300k in profit. Also a developer with $100k in salary costs about $125k when you consider payroll taxes, insurance, 401k matching, etc. If you factor in the cost of office space, equipment and support staff the total cost per employee could easily be $200k. Most developers also don't increase revenue by $1M per year on a regular basis. So when you look at the whole picture you realize that most developers aren't as underpaid as you think. And the ones that can consistently generate $1M+ in profit by themselves definitely do get paid much more than your typical developer.

If you think most executives have no idea what is going on and add zero value then I am guessing you haven't spent much time around executives. The whole reason your typical developer got their job and is able to keep it in the first place is because executives figured out how to run the business well enough to grow and continue to hire developers and then allocate them to projects where they can increase revenue. If you think it's easy I recommend you give it a try sometimes.

You make some excellent points and I completely agree with the thrust of your argument that people should not be so quick to judge.

However, from my empirical observation of many executives, there are two broad groups.

The ones you described, those that are worth their salt and have carved out their position through helping the business.

Then there is a large group of executives who exist mainly because similar companies have similar structures and they have expectations of roles for say CFO , COO. Then there are roles required by the industry or market: Head of Compliance, Head of Risk, Head of Auditing.

Those executives have not earned their place, they are appointments by pattern matching corporate structures

According to this logic, our developer has actually earned his wages in perpetuity from this single year of work (or at least so long as that 15% value added lasts). But that's clearly not how it works either.

The issue in this example is ownership. Executives add value and they are granted large ownership stakes in the business. Workers are not. You use the example of the executive who figures out how to grow the business to prove that he is entitled to appropriate some of the other employees' added value -- since otherwise that value wouldn't exist in the first place. But our developer can't take his yearly salary out of the 15% increased revenue he enabled back in 2012, on top of compensation for whatever value he creates this year.

In any event, the example is very contrived. $10M in sales is as arbitrary as 20% profit margins. Margins could be any amount less or a great deal more. Revenues could be sky high or non-existent. You might expect to find a developer making $100k regardless.

The vast majority of executives I have worked closely with don't add significant value. They are paid well in large part because there are not enough of them to matter. The CEO of micdonalds getting a 200% raise is cheaper than a 1% raise to their minimum wage workers.

Why does everyone talk like the leverage of the business is the leverage of the developer when discussing compensation? That's not how it works.

Compensation is set by the market: what is the next person who can do this same job willing to be paid?

If we go out into the market to find all the people that can decrease page loading time by 50% and have them bid against each other, we will probably end up paying the lowest bidder who is capable of the job about the median salary of the profession.

And another point on >the remaining $1.49 million gets distributed amongst execs and investors. People who own equity in the company have legal claim on the cash flows of the business. They balance free cash flows with reinvested capital (assets,, SGA) to sustain free cash flows into the future.

Well, you are both right. Compensation is set by the market, but the ceiling for compensation to perform a task is (roughly) the amount of value that a employee can generate, in a rational market.

Of course, our market is far from rational, etc, etc.

FWIW, I don't think that software developers are overpaid, at all. It's a difficult career, requiring years of intense study to do well. Sure, maybe not as much as Doctors, at least not formally, but a lot of that has to do with the structure of medical education in the United States (in particular, the requirement to complete an undergrad degree prior to admission to medical school). The job of a surgeon is certainly more difficult than the average software developer, but compared to a SRE at Google, say, who is working with real, "living" distributed systems that interact in complex ways, I would say they are comparable. If anything, I'd expect, in a rational market, for the SRE to be paid more, because their services are providing for millions or billions of customers, while the surgeon is only providing for one at a time (and maybe a few thousand over their carrer).

What I usually reach when thinking along similar paths, using me (programmer) vs my doctor friends, is the failure scenario:

If I introduce a bug it will hurt revenue in some way, possibly affecting the company's operations. If most doctors mishandle a patient it could have significant, immediate effect on that person's life.

I deal with the responsibility weighing on me, but they've had to get used to dealing with a much heavier responsibility.

At least in microeconomics 101, companies hire as long as the marginal revenue equals the marginal cost of the employee. If the marginal revenue per engineer is high, companies will try to keep hiring them. The demand for engineers goes up, and so does compensation.

In microeconomics, the firm would use marginal gross profit not marginal revenue [sales].

Think of Amazon, Walmart, or any firm with significant COGS [cost of goods sold]. It's clear that they can't hire employees inline with marginal revenue.

> If we go out into the market to find all the people that can decrease page loading time by 50% and have them bid against each other, we will probably end up paying the lowest bidder who is capable of the job about the median salary of the profession.

And what if the companies were to bid on the employee? That would likely drive wages higher and compensate for the natural information asymmetry in the tech labor market.

I see this conversation every fucking week on HN.

I have rarely ever heard someone argue that. lettergram did not argue that, only that employee wages are exploitative. In a labor market with unemployment and no real safety net it's clear that workers cannot individually leverage a fair wage.

Well, my own experience is that the $1.49 million would more likely be reinvested in the company as a whole: hire more developers, more salespeople, expand the office, etc. That money would also take an entire year to materialize and would require your back of the envelope math to pan out perfectly. Requesting a $1.5 million dollar bonus for making the website faster seems a little ludicrous and potentially hostile to the company's continued long-term existence. Depending on the exact nature of the product, it might require additional salespeople and various support staff just to close and maintain the extra sales to create the $1.49 million in the first place -- and yet you'd be claiming it all for yourself, giving none of it to these other folks.

Additionally, I don't really agree with this underlying notion that you're entitled to 100% of the extra revenue generated by the speed increase. Imagine how bizarre it would be if you actually applied this thinking consistently over the lifetime of the company to every employee. This approach spectacularly and disproportionately over-rewards people who join the company later, as it becomes increasingly easy to create large increases in revenue because on absolute terms a 1% increase keeps getting bigger and bigger. This would lead to a complete inversion of risk, where it would be more profitable to never take risk and only take stable jobs at long-running companies that have already developed a large market share. I'm not convinced this is a sensible distribution of income to employees.

> Well, my own experience is that the $1.49 million would more likely be reinvested in the company as a whole: hire more developers, more salespeople, expand the office, etc

A lot of it also goes to essential business expenses: HR, legal, the AWS bill, the new feature that's currently losing money but will pay off in the long term.

And the person who made the $1.5mm code fix didn't do it on their own. They wouldn't have been able to improve the code if somebody else hadn't already written the first version. And neither of them would have been able to get their code into production if somebody hadn't set up the build and release process for the company. And they never would have been in the position to make the $1.5mm fix if their manager hadn't identified the need for an additional engineer on the team and recruited them. And the company wouldn't exist if the founder hadn't had the idea in the first place. And the company would have blown up last year if the lawyers hadn't made sure the company was protected from a frivolous lawsuit. Et cetera, et cetera.

Yep, a great division of labor created that wealth for the company, and the developer is not entitled to 15% of it's revenue (or even profit) just for that work. This isn't a practical issue though. The everyday situation is not that a undeserving worker is granted a large ownership stake, it's that an undeserving financier/executive/founder is.

I read this line of argument fairly regularly and am continually amazed that more people making this argument aren't off starting their own companies to scoop themselves up a heaping helping of this easy and undeserved money.

(As text is a poor medium to communicate tone, I'm positing that it's not nearly as easy as it seems, therefore nor are the profits for the successful as undeserved as they seem.)

I didn't say it's easy, or that there shouldn't be compensation! All those people add value and some of their work is very difficult. But difficulty of work is not the basis upon which they have large ownership stakes. Many jobs are not nearly as easy as they seem, but most merely pay a wage or fixed salary.

The founder controls the legal business entity and contributes capital assets and real or intellectual property. The financier purchases ownership directly. This is why they "deserve" to appropriate the value created by the company in perpetuity.

The founder may have done a lot of hard work in creating that intellectual property (including brand) in the first place, but it is the legal ownership of it that he trades for ownership in the company, not his hard work. In other instances it's possible to simply purchase IP or brand outright in the formation of a business. The commonality in these cases is legal ownership and the trade of capital assets, not hard work, whether their job is one I could not do personally, etc.

You threw me off then with the use of the word undeserving. What did you mean by that word?

> I'm not especially interested in whether or not it's cosmically fair when deciding whether or not it's deserved.

The argument about the "risk-tasking investors" rightfully owning the work of the "risk-free employees" is an appeal to fairness (the investors could lose their investment while the employees still gain their salaries), so by the way it does seem that you are interested in that.

Early efforts in organizing the company and navigating difficult waters are work and those employees should be compensated with ownership. I don't think that subsequent work by subsequent employees should not be compensated in this same way. Mark Zuckerberg and half a dozen friends created a company valued at $98M by Accel in 2005 and enjoyed ownership of that. Today he and 15,000 others create a company valued at $360 billion, of which he enjoys 25% ownership while the combined ownership of the rest is miniscule.

If you own a large amount of value or wealth that you did not create, I would say that is undeserved.

Founders and early employees contribute work and are hopefully rewarded for that work with ownership stakes in the company. Rightly so. But as the company grows, and to the degree that it necessarily hires additional employees, the proportion of ownership held by these early employees becomes undeserved (in the simple above sense of the word). Their large ownership positions remain, even as it becomes clearer and clearer that the value of the company is created by its hundreds/tens of thousands of employees.

So if you start a business and make a profit (a hard thing to do!), that is not undeserved. But if business grows and eventually the value is created by 15,000 people all together, you don't deserve 25% of it.

IMO, you do since you created the company and navigated it through the difficult early waters. If you were able to do so and maintain a 25% ownership share (astoundingly unlikely/uncommon IME), then you "deserve" it partly as a founder and partly as an ongoing investor (by virtue of not selling your shares).

There's a genuine argument that the investors and risk-takers "created" a portion of the wealth by virtue of bankrolling and hiring those 15K employees and paying them a risk-free salary.

I'm not especially interested in whether or not it's cosmically fair when deciding whether or not it's deserved. Warren Buffett "deserves" every bit of Berkshire Hathaway that he owns; Bill Gates every bit of Microsoft, Mark Z every bit of Facebook, etc. (Again, all in my opinion. I'm sure there are others who disagree, but even among them probably differ on how [or whether] to correct the "undeserved" ownership.)

And yet, it seems pretty routine for the sales team members to take residuals on leads they bring in - it's just that it's a lot harder to quantify the effects that code changes have to the bottom line.

Yes, residuals -- they don't book the entire sale for themselves. And they often have much lower salaries as well compared to development staff. Of course I cannot speak for all companies, but this is how it's been in my personal experience.

By your math, the janitors are worthless. Fire them all, and give that money to the devs! Then, as the garbage piles higher and the weird smells ground into the carpet linger, you can keep yourself warm with your extra money.

Also, why shouldn't the investors get their cut? They were forking over their money to pay you before a line of your code ever hit production; going by your math, developers should be paid on contigency of the code they write getting into production, and penalised if there's a regression.

Honestly, that engineer enabled that growth, but it wouldn't have been possible without the work of a full team providing content, security, reliability and so on. If the same work was done on an old Geocities site, there would be no value to add.

You're overvaluing the engineer in your argument; they were only one piece that enabled that extra value.

Ha ha, I have experienced this first hand, a small project I worked on netted my then-employer roughly $2m/year in additional revenue.

That money covered the bonuses of just 2 executives, I think I might have got a 2 or 3% raise myself that year...

The (17.6%) increase is unlikely to be something that only one programmer can do, so the market takes over and most devs are already making top 3% income in their countries.

That is just life as an employee though. If you want to get the lions share of that increase you need to start your own business and then you can split the profit how you want.

No, usually you can't do this math.

I sort of agree with what you're saying but just wanna point out that you may not have gone to school and have have a loan etc.

But many many software engineers do. Many of us go to uni and study a traditional degree and therefore, have a lot of loans etc as well as spend 3 to 4 years in University.

Also, learning for a software engineer is pretty much forever since the moment you stop learning is your downfall in software development.

Becoming a doctor, for example, is a lot longer than 3-4 years and is going to involve a lot more debt. Also if you want to be a doctor you have no choice but to do all of that formal education and pay the huge sums. If you want to learn software development you can do so for free (excluding time but that is true of all learning). All you need is a computer and an internet connection. All of the software you need can be free, there are loads of excellent free resources and even the non-free things like books are not very expensive.

I know people many people who learnt to code in their own time for ~6 months and landed a decent first job. Over the next couple of years they learnt a lot more and now have great jobs earning within 20% of what a doctor usually earns however they don't have the debt and saved a few years of their lives as well.

Not saying everyone can do this and become a software developer but it is very possible. I don't have a degree, I had to leave school at 16 (I am now 32) and worked in a shop to get by. I self-taught and now I earn a few £ under £100k making software. I have a super comfy life. I have zero debt (well a mortgage but no other debt), a nice house, family, a fair amount in savings, etc. Honestly I couldn't ask for more especially considering the rather small investment I put into getting this lifestyle.

I went to school and graduated with large loans because my parents didn't pay for my schooling. And I agree with the parent poster 100%. Saying software developers are underpaid is on of the silliest and out of touch things I've ever heard.

Honestly, medical school is intellectually easier than a compsci degree, even if it takes more time and more rote learning. My friends who are doctors tend to have terrible work schedules which they can hardly escape, on the other hand. Not that this actually matters a lot in compensation, given that in the circumstances it probably doesn't have a lot of effect on the supply of doctors.

As someone who completed medical school but has a bachelor's degree in CS, I have to disagree with your first statement.

I actually did the reverse (decided that I wouldn't have been good at actually being a doctor, dealing with patients, etc.); I happen to still help friends with exams and, well, there is basically nothing in there that is harder to understand than the first year calculus exam that you have to take in a computer science or engineering course. You need to acquire a working multi-level understanding of very complex systems, but I have found the chemistry->biochemistry->cell signaling and regulation->tissue etc. chain more intuitive for most people than the electronics->system architecture->machine code->programming language-> etc. chain. I'm interested in reading what made you feel that the opposite was true; maybe the issues with incomplete understanding of many processes that pop up in medicine?

I'm always surprised when we have this double standard of valuation of people vs companies. Companies rarely sit back and independently say - hey my products are making too much of a profit margin, maybe I should lower the price? On the flip side, there is this push to beat down the valuation of people - or at least to apply a completely different set of measures on the income of people. Why does it matter if the income is generated by something "too easy"?

If anything there is an argument that labor in the overall economy is undervalued, and it is destabilizing the long term strength of the economy.

I agree with the main message: we are not underpaid. Considering the risks we are taking (both in life and in career) we live comfortable lives indeed.

A side note: when you said "I didn't have to pass a single licensing exam" I immediately thought of the way our profession tends to have that kind of exam every time we interview each other. A big part of interview for a software developer is based on the exam-type material; this is very different from the way other professionals, even engineers, have their interviews. (Does not contradict your message, just a note.)

I'd rather take the bar exam (a uniform, objective, standardized test), than do as-hoc interview puzzles.

Looking at people who seem "more impressive" in their work is not a way to gauge your worth. It's really as simple as that. Surgeons appear (and have the social capita) of being the utmost important, but salaries have little to do with that. In the digital age, where dotcom millionaires and billionaires can easily be minted...everyone should strive to take what is rightfully theirs. Because capitalism.

A doctor impacts one person at a time, a software developer can impact millions. Now, people are bad when dealing with large numbers, but regularly adding removing stress from millions of people will shorten / lengthen people's lives.

For less used software this might not seem like a big deal, but targeted software can have a larger indicidual impact even if it's only making 50+ people redundant.

Completely agree. I know several overworked and really smart individuals that struggle to make a decent living. Not surprisingly all of them happen to work in different fields.. By the other hand, all developers I know have an easy life. Is it a coincidence?

Hardly ever you'll find anybody saying that earns too much or works too little. Be humble and enjoy.

What I don't buy is why it's okay to generalize your imposter syndrome to an industry as a whole.

"Maybe I feel differently about this because I'm not in a major tech hub"

Read: "I can afford to live in a comfortable place and not a closet, so let me generalize such that no dev can afford to live in historically relevant software hubs either."

Next, lest this selfish hot take get too tonedeaf, time to write off our 6 figure privilege! Since this is a recent accomplishment, let's ditch any sort of humility toward the the talented software minds who came before who made the efficiencies of our day jobs possible. Instead, we'll roll with some terrible analogies to completely non-sequitur professional industries!

• I'm not performing life-altering surgery, because emotional hyperbolic appeals will distract from the fact I base my insight into the most valuable industry in the world on 7 paragraphs of anecdotes. Forget that the fundamentals of medicine and the practice thereof bear almost no relation to that of computer science and software development.

• Wheee! I love talking about dentists with mansions. I got my teeth cleaned last Saturday, and I've never had to be on call for any sort of systems admin role. Speaking of things I've never had to do, thank god I come from an ever increasing minority of people who can afford to live a comfortable lifestyle without taking on student loan debt early in life.

• I don't need a graduate degree to get precious time in a lab with equipment I absolutely must have to do my job. Unclear if I've ever met anyone who's tried to further themselves with a IT licensure, but since those aren't in vogue any more, I'll just make dreamy comparisons to one of the most antiquated, regulated industries out there. I've worked less, but people I know are stuck in debt forever working 80+ hour weeks in BigLaw!

Despite the option of a meaningful career alternative to the above, developers shouldn't try to build on their gains. Let's just foreclose even the notion that there are people working out there who are underpaid because they don't have coworker peers, or they are just the "IT guy", or are a woman or minority, or because some doctor, dentist, or lawyer has an idea.

"My lifetime earnings won't be that different because I got such a tremendous head start" ...so why should I try to build others up?

In these kind of discussions, I often point out how software is pretty unique in that due to supply/demand, there's no labor unions or collective bargaining. But maybe it's a good thing, because I'd never want you speaking for me when it comes to how much any of us are being paid.