Programmer Salary Debate

They pay their software developers top dollar because if they weren't they'd work elsewhere, but everyone else....

Programmers work in little cubes with the other peons. Why should they be paid so much?

Why do programmers get paid so much?

If you are not paying top of market wages, one or more of the following has to be true:1. You don't believe top developers are intrinsically 'worth' the amount that FB/Goog/Amzn/ and many other SV companies pay, that it's not a net win for the company to have top talent.2. You think that you don't need top developers, that really you're just going to be fine recruiting a bunch of B players, and it's some other 'thing' (busi

Here are my random thoughts about the reasons (not in a specific order):1. they are not part of a software company, say, not generating revenue directly, so they are not high on the payroll list2. the pay is based on the overall performance of the whole development team, so the great programmers' productivity got mitigated by the worse ones'3. high productivity may mean technologically superior products, however, superior products don't necessarily lead to market success4. if there i

The worst part is that on average developers are still often underpaid. In some cases grotesquely. Some individual engineers can easily account for millions in revenue in a year to the company they work for, but they are only paid upwards of a few hundred thousand. On the flipside there are certainly a lot of people employed in industry making their companies negative revenue - costing developer hours to make up for their mistakes or ineptitude worth less than the working code they produce.So

Ask them what they get paid vs. the developers.

When it comes to wall street bankers, there seems to be a consensus that money is the only thing that's going to bring in good talent.When it comes to programmers, the consensus seems to be the opposite. I mean, they ought to be motivated by having a refrigerator full of Red Bull or being able to bring their dogs to work -- I mean, the Linux kernel got developed by people who work for free... Why do we need to pay people anything at all to develop applications for our intranet?Althou

You're paid more because you are expected to provide a lot of value and are also hard to replace. Society is simply giving you back some of the value that you're creating for it. A housekeeper can only change so many people's sheets per day, while features you engineer at Google can impact a billion+ people. BTW, if you don't feel like you contribute a lot yet, give it some time - in 5-10 years, this should change.

If competent developers are willing to work for whatever "BigCo" is paying, why would BigCo pay more?