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Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

This idea that a job is inherently "worth" some amount of money is way off. The entire point of a market economy is that prices are driven by supply and demand. And salaries are just prices.

If more and more people are capable of delivering high quality software, but the demand for it doesn't increase at the same rate, then it should be worth less.

Furthermore, hirers aren't evil people for wanting to pay less, any more than job seekers are evil people for wanting to get paid more, or shoppers are evil people for wanting discounts. The supply side is always going to want higher prices, and the demand side is always going to want lower.

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The supply and demand is a convenient myth, skirting a lot of the nuance and artificial factors. If supply and demand did work like the proponents of "simple answers" claim, then every remote software engineer of similar tenure would earn about the same amount anywhere across the globe. That's just one single very simple example, to make my point obvious. There are countless slightly more complex examples too. In fact, it can be made even simpler - let's forget comparing two different engineers, let's pick only one. If one full remote software engineer moves between countries without even changing the job, his compensation may change dramatically, simply because in one country wages are suppressed at X level and in another at Y level. Same hold for any other activities too, not only SWE.

In my amateur opinion, the compensation for each particular job is highly dependent on the historical accidents and unrelated political and economical events, and the rate of quality code (or whatever other end product/service) is a distant secondary factor in that.

Most of big tech enjoys some degree of monopoly power through network effects, so it's a little disingenuous to wave "It's the market, stupid" in this case.

Quite apart from the fact that in the jobs 'market', one side is forced to participate, else they starve.

Market pressures for thee, but not for me.

Eh, businesses die and starve all the time. Most businesses fail, and competition to hire is brutal.

Big tech are among the top tier businesses. So I don't think it's fair to compare them to average employees. Rule #1 if you want to do well in the market is not to commoditize yourself, and average employees are commodities: people who slot into job titles with almost no differentiation between others competing for the same job title.

It's more accurate to big tech to top tier employees. Your execs, your staff engineers, your top sales talent, your startup founders who get acquired. Just like big tech, these people have a lot of negotiating power, tons of options, sometimes multiple clients, and often a nest egg so they can take time off work and be picky.

I think we can agree that a 'starving' company is not the same as a starving human.

Your other points about differentiation are especially valid, now, but the great mass of people have limited capability there. Should they just starve?

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