This is a very dangerous argument to make. It's the same sort of argument that makes people turn a blind eye to the wage-collusion class action. Just because we're slightly better paid than average doesn't mean labor protections don't apply to us.
For argument's sake, let's say you're paid $80K per year. On the one hand, you may think that is high (it always depends what your frame of reference is). If the code you produce directly makes the company millions of dollars though, does that change your assessment of the 'reasonableness' of that salary?
This is the argument I've heard as to why sports stars get paid so much (because you have to look at what they get paid vs the amount of money they're making for the comapnies paying them).
It's a real can of worms.
Edit: 1,259,520$ (March 31, 2015) http://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyet.php?code=GOOG
In 2014 Apple had a pretax income of 53.48B and 92,000 employees. It could give them all a 200,000$ / year pay bump and still make 35Billion in profits.
PS: Not that any company thinks this way, but it's not hard to argue that top programmers are underpayed.
So they could presumably pay everyone $250K more than they do now and still be marginally profitable.
I was one in 1989. So were many of my coworkers. Someone told me that Apple employed so many contractors so that it could inflate the ratio of revenue to employees.
Hiring more contractors doesn't make a company any more money but it does help inflate the stock price in a purely artificial way.
The main point I want to put across is that it's unfortunate that as software engineers, we have somewhat of a tendency to feel guilty for what we do earn and as a whole profession we can be prone to underselling our own value. I find the parent comment a perfect reflection of this tendency.
Having "no fixed hours of work" is a social class signifier in many cultures.
But you are right some one getting paid 250k is still a worker and does have "labor" issues just as some one on 25k does.
Obviously issues may present in different ways for high and low paid workers
On the other hand, there are also high-status professionals, like lawyers, who bill by the hour.
I think one advantage of being paid for every hour of work you do is that whoever is paying you is going to be less likely to burn overtime hours on meaningless things. For example, that arbitrary end-of-month deadline you're working on doesn't look nearly as urgent to the business if they need to pay for the night and weekend hours required to meet it. If the company knows that each of your hours is valuable, they might even treat you with more respect.
There is also a LOT of sharp practice in legal billing