[zzzcpan]

This is really dishonest and disrespectful to people. Most companies are dictatorships, where all of the profits that come from maximizing value to customers do not go to employees. Employees have absolutely no say in it whatsoever and in fact are paid for their time for the sole purpose of not sharing profits with them.

[mitchellst]

I don't think it's disrespectful, because I think this is what the OP is saying. When considering how to make money in this business, you need to look at the company you're working for. He emphasizes that if it does not provide value, you won't do well there. If it's overly greedy, the same holds.

It's worth noting how good we have it: when you examine career salaries against years of school required and unemployment/failure rates (i.e., insurance salesmen can make millions, but most don't/can't.) then software engineering is one of the highest paid professions in the US. Could this be true if a controlling majority of employers were so greedy?

[hinkley]

It’s a fiefdom. They are the lords and we are the peasants.

[dboreham]

True but they also get to not share in any losses.

[gooseus]

Depending on the company, management and situation - you are the first to experience the loss in the form of being replaced with a younger, more naive candidate or an outsourced dev shop that can keep the product long enough for management to get another round of funding or find themselves an exit that minimizes their losses.

To not share in the losses you need to make yourself essential and irreplaceable, which is more and more difficult since a lot of the popular frameworks and cloud services that make developer/devops jobs easier also make them an easily replaceable part.