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Comment by ohstopitu | Hacker News Reader

I feel we are not getting paid enough!

FYI if you think devs are overpaid, it's generally in SV (and even there, they make average considering the cost of living - a good idea is to look at the end of month savings instead of earnings).

With that said, we are getting paid a lot less than the value we add - seriously - the entire world around you works on software and if it were to stop for even an hour, we'd have a lot of issues - so with that in mind - we should be getting paid more.

Now i know you'll say a CRUD developer adds no value, but I could argue that neither do most lawyers or traders - but they get paid a lot more no?

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> we are getting paid a lot less than the value we add

Keep in mind that hiring developers is a lemon market. Imagine if any other industry worked like tech. E.g. if when you took your car in for an oil change, there was a 50/50 chance of the mechanics taking it for a joy ride, totaling it, and then charging you tens of thousands of dollars. Or if you went to the doctor the only treatment they were familiar with was sawing off your leg, so that's what you're getting regardless of what the problem is.

If this sounds absurd, it's probably because you're in the tech industry. The average small business owner's experience working with developers is handing over a good portion of their life savings and then either having the dev team just take the money and run, getting back something completely broken and unusable, getting back something half done and a year late, etc.

I literally became a developer myself because it was the only way to reliably avoid these sorts of issues. The only other industry this broken is maybe the medical system, but at least they're taking (small) steps in the right direction.

I totally understand.

And we have quite a lot of bad lemons (if I may), who basically have 0 clue of what they are doing. They join teams or take on projects, blow away loads of $ and have nothing to show for it.

But imagine if every doctor or lawyer was paid based on such bad lemons for example (considering that we can still had bad lawyers and doctors even after having licensing exams).

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