[whimsicalism]

Yes, but we also have to price things for overall societal benefit.

If a software engineer can shave off 1 hour a year for 2 million of the 28 million nurses in the United States, that is allowing us to redeploy 228 years worth of nurse labor. We want to incentivize easy scaling solutions like that, so I do not necessarily have an issue with paying the software developer a premium if it allows us to help more people.

I don't think that this is arguing against nurses being paid well for the huge beneficial impact and selflessness they do have, but I don't think the analysis needs to be necessarily comparative with software engineers.

[i_haz_rabies]

If those hours were redeployed in such a way that people still had decent jobs, sure... but a lot of what we programmers do has a much less positive impact on other people and their jobs.

[whimsicalism]

Definitely. I think wealth consolidation remains a huge problem, somewhat driven by automation, somewhat driven by other factors.

I'm curious, what do you think the compensation for being a nurse should look like?