You spend around half of your wakeful hours at your job, if it's unfulfilling you're trading misery in addition to time for money.
Not at all. They pay what it would cost to replace you. If someone accepted to do the same job for cheaper (or free), they'd take it, regardless of the value it generates.
Salary is correlated with market demand and alternatives, both for the company and the employee.
For example, I know engineers who are some of the most valuable people in the company, and some engineers who are borderline useless. You can be borderline useless but good at self promotion / good at negotiation and be paid a lot more than very valuable eng. fwiw, I'm on the business side of the house, but used to be an engineer. So I think primarily in terms of business value.
Or think of CSMs. They get paid a lot less, on average, than engineers. Are they less valuable / do they create less value? It's quite hard to make that argument: No CSMs, no customers and no upsells.
CSMs have no leverage. Engineers are powerful because their work can have an org-wide impact.
If we're talking about business value I think that sales (B2B), marketing (B2C/DTC) and engineers are the largest generators of business value in companies because of the leverage they have.
I can see how that differs with a different business model, but I don't see how you can simultaneously believe CSMs don't have leverage, but salespeople do. In a business -- particularly in a saas model -- where you have CSMs and AEs, CSMs have more leverage, because you probably barely break even on year one of a customer.
But it's cute that serfs under the yoke of capitalist exploitation think that they are being paid in proportion to the value they generate!
They wouldn’t hire you for the job in the first place if it generated negative value.
Some people find making money meaningful and fulfilling, many of us don't.
Everyone exchanges their time for money, if you work a job that's entirely unfulfilling you're trading happiness too. It's an exchange that no one wins.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking everyone posting on HN comes from a similar background. I work for a non-profit who go to great lengths to make the workplace comfortable.
To approach work with the mindset "it must be fun or else!" can lead to a lifetime of misery.
It's not that it's not fun, but fun doesn't pay the bills. If it didn't _have_ to pay the bills, I'd probably still develop software but with a very different focus.