This is mostly because I struggle to relate what I do—code websites—with other jobs in society.
So my question is: how do you see your job in the broader societal context? Do you think it’s fair for developers to be paid or expect to be paid more than a lot of other jobs?
We live in a market economy.
Charge as much as you can for your work, constrained only by how intensely you're willing to work and for what causes you're willing your work to be used for.
If you're unsatisfied with the social good of the causes your work is used for, redirect some of the earnings towards social good.
I think this is a very common approach, and it's a good approach because it's very simple.
What I’m personally struggling with is not really the social impact of my work per se but rather the fact that jobs that are more important to society as a whole—at least in my opinion—are not paid as much as developers.
And that is something I have a hard time accepting. But you’re right, the best solution is to try compensate this frustration of mine by doing things that are good for society.
this is a great point. Here I think the best thing we can do is be politically active and advocate for, e.g. teachers to have higher salaries
As for why our work is so well-paid, it's because we automate things, and automation kills jobs. That's the sad truth: you can measure our value in how many people our software saves our clients from hiring.
A good example: one of my clients was struggling to find $160k/yr financial analysts. Their jobs were 90% copying and pasting data into Excel.
We automated the copying and pasting, and now that client isn't hiring any new analysts.
We spent $30k on the software and our client saved at least $800k. They pay us somewhere in between.
Simple things are already happening that will flatten the discrepancies: more and more people go or switch into IT, and those high earning IT people now battle for services of those paid less, so their prices go up as well.
It's a long process, though.
This is not to discount the complexity of high paying IT jobs (and the amount of education needed), but until we reach a point where developers are not at such a stark deficit, pay will stay up, though others will see their pay rise as well.
Visited a few congresses for dermatologists. 10% medicine and 90% beauty products (that don't work). Frustrating for many doctors but this is where the money is because people like to spend it here.