If, as a programmer, you are not contributing much more value to the world than a janitor, you are doing something terribly terribly wrong. (And I say this as someone who has worked two janitorial jobs.)
And recently I've been teaching my middle school son to program. A few weeks ago, a project he did for his aunt caught the attention of a Gifted and Talented Ed (GATE program) director in another Silicon Valley city, who started recommending it to all the parents. My son had been accustomed to the school routine of having to use his skills to do hard work on school projects that were then treated as having no real value by the people who requested them. Over a weekend, his programming skills suddenly made him valuable in the real world to a lot of adults, none of whom he'd ever met. It was a revelation to him. It's unlikely that his yard-cleaning skills would have produced similar results.
It appears to me that the feedback from the real world is that people would much rather have my family writing code for them than washing their windows, and our experience is hardly unique. I can't say for sure that Japan's enlightened policy of paying programmers like janitors has contributed to Japan's near irrelevance in the global software industry, but when I've worked with developers in Japan (I lived in Tokyo and speak Japanese), I've always been glad that I wasn't a Japanese programmer.
The Japanese programmer was talking about how noble the jobs are. You may think the programmer is underpaid. The Japanese programmer thinks the janitor is undervalued (not viewed highly enough for the noble work that he is doing). He has his own cultural context, with its own emphases. Their free market reflects their culture- programmers and janitors are "valued" more equally than in the West.
He's also saying that a more egalitarian valuation is better than ours which has greater variance.
Also, even from my western perspective, I can see logic in both positions. Programming certainly requires more skill than janitorial work. On the other hand, it's more inherently rewarding as well (at least to most people). So even outside of cultural biases, if there's sufficient highly skilled labour available, it makes sense for pay rates to equalize (and eventually for less desirable jobs to be paid even more than skilled ones).
Yes, the Japanese programmer was talking about how "noble" the jobs are, but Western marxists do the same thing. If his objection was to people's attitudes about the inherent human worth of a janitor, well, I couldn't agree more, thank you very much. I was just as noble a person when I was a janitor, but what people were willing to offer me financially for my work made it clear that one type of work was more financially valuable to them than the other. Paying me for nobility hides a price signal that I can use to adapt my work so that it is of more value to others.
Pay for theoretical nobility ought to mean equal pay for everyone, which is the kind of economic inflexibility that is ultimately self-limiting.
HOWEVER- For hundreds (thousands?) of years, money and behaving in a way that is profit driven was reserved for the lowest of what was considered people in Japanese society. "Merchants" (a broader term than our interpretation of it) were seen as barely a step up from the lowest group that we would consider people, the eta "filthy mass" or hinen "non humans".
So that might explain some of why their culture still might not value money like we do.
Description of Chinese merchant class (does anyone have a link to a Japanese focused article?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_occupations#The_shang_.28....
Non humans http://thisjapaneselife.org/2013/07/03/burakumin-japan/
Now, without janitors we'd be like in the middle ages. We'd have to clean everything ourselves, everywhere. The roads would be like 19th century Paris or 16th century London. The stench would be unbelievable, plus lots of diceases.
In this way I think janitors can contribute significantly. But I think the more important point is that contribution to society is always a team effort, not an individual thing. Any contribution you make is in part thanks to your parents, teachers, co-workers, janitors, and so on. They deserve some credit.
> Without the janitor the building doesn't last.
Janitors aren't carpenters or construction workers or architects or civil engineers. They're janitors.
Also, as to your comparison, it strongly depends which business you are in. If you are running a building services company and your web designers quit, that might lose you some business. If your janitors quit, you are out of business. (edited to add - even if you are in a web design business, if you need a building to run the business from then the janitor will be a fundamental part of keeping the business afloat, unless you can get your web designers to also mop the floors and manage the security and maintenance. I have worked for a small media company in London where this was almost exactly the case, only there the CEO didn't expect it of the staff, but took over all janitorial duties himself as it was a small building and didn't take much time out of his day. He'd do most of his planning while cleaning.)
There is a truth behind the cliché of the chief monk being the guy with the brush sweeping up and there is good reason behind the cleaning days that are promoted by Hidesaburo Kagiyama as a management practice for Japanese companies, where the day starts with the CEO cleaning a toilet with their bare hands in front of their employees.
Here's an example of Hidesaburo Kagiyama visiting a Chinese University to explain and demonstrate his philosophy:
"When Kagiyama visited a university in China to clean the toilets with the students, the toilets were exactly as described above. The students held their breath and waited to see how Kagiyama would treat those filthy toilets. Under the gaze of the students, Kagiyama started pushing the pile of feces and urine deep into the toilet bowl with his bare hand and flushed it. He then looked back at the students quietly and said, “Now you clean this toilet.” In this way, he assigned the toilets to the students respectively. Looking at the example set by Kagiyama, the students could no longer back out. They set about to clean the toilets."
from here - http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~nippon/file/jog480e.pdf
Hidesaburo Kagiyama is the president of Yellow Hat, a Japanese car parts supplier that takes just over a billion dollars (120 billion Yen) in yearly revenue.
Are you kidding me? If a bunch of janitors left, you'd replace them with another bunch. It's a low-skilled job which makes little difference at the margin.