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Comment by rvogler | Hacker News Reader

i think the analogy holds because there is also an established idea of software developers being passionate about what they do and hence create and maintain open source projects for free. never thought about it but music/musician <> software/developer is pretty isomorphic. also it simply isn't true that software developers make double the median - that's just true for the sv bias here and a few other hot spots.

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> also it simply isn't true that software developers make double the median - that's just true for the sv bias here and a few other hot spots.

On a US national basis it is basically true. Median weekly earnings for full-time workers is $1,192[1]. Median hourly pay for a software developer is $62.58[2], which, assuming a 40 hour week, is $2,503.20.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Yes, this. SV and similar are even more extreme, but if you take all software engineers across the country and compare to the nationwide workforce, we make double the median.

That may not be a fair comparison to the extent that software devs are concentrated in high CoL areas, though, so you don't see a ton of us out in the cheaper and poorer regions. The effect of that is somewhat ameliorated by taking the median instead of the mean, but not fully.

I think if you compared the median wage of people holding at least a bachelors degree with just software developers they'd be closer together as well

That figure is in the above link as well: $1,705. So, yes, only one and half times more than the median bachelor degree holder. What is sadly absent from the report is the median weekly income of those who own a Ferrari. I expect that gap is even smaller.

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