[throwawayboise]

Cognative dissonance because we know we are obscenely overpaid to build stuff that nobody really needs, while others work themselves into disability for a order of magnitude less pay doing things that are essential for civilized life.

[sidlls]

We are not obscenely overpaid. We're relatively more well paid than other workers in our class, but we're still generally getting the short end of the stick.

Even people in my boat. I recently won a decent IPO jackpot at the company I have worked for a few years--have $3MM or so in investments as a result. The CEO has well over 100x that, and well over 10x any IC who's been at the company from day 1. There's no good reason for the CEO of this company to have benefitted to the tune of over $3Bn when ICs who've been at it as long and hard as he has might have cracked a few $10s of millions at best. Are these ICs disgustingly rich? Am I? Of course. But, relatively, we got shafted in comparison to the people who benefitted much more.

[BLKNSLVR]

> We are not obscenely overpaid.

Everything following this line seems to point in the other direction. Just because a smaller percentage of higher-ups received more doesn't mean you / we are not obscenely overpaid, it just means "they" are phenomenally obscenely overpaid and at the top of the exponential scale of "what's wrong with shit these days".

Teachers and nurses, as the pandemic demonstrated, are essential to the daily functioning of society. I couldn't do what they do day-to-day, dealing with the full range of the bell curve - and their children - and their ailments and inability to see / relate to the world. Holy hell.

The annual inspection of the foundations of the ivory tower have been sub-sub-contracted to the lowest bidder, which is a company at the end of a series of shell corporations for whose ownership can only be determined with the cooperation of a string of people that have no legal obligation to cooperate.

[sidlls]

Laborers at most levels in our society deserve better compensation and treatment. The lower on the socioeconomic ladder, the more so.

That some are underpaid compared to the value they deliver than others isn’t controversial to me. What is controversial is the suggestion that because some in the labor class are somewhat better paid they shouldn’t complain about also being underpaid relative to the value they provide.

I have more in common with the $35k/yr teacher than with the CEO of the company I work for. Not just because of relative economic position, but because I have personally been more or less homeless and impoverished in my life at various points.

[BLKNSLVR]

Well said, and I definitely sledgehammered the nuance.

Are we going to see the pendulum gathering momentum in the swing towards unionization? Could be I'm already late on that call given that Amazon employees have already had a recent victory in pursuit of this.

The world at large* seems to be reaching a breaking point in their tolerance of the widening wealth gap, manifesting in this collective burnout / great resignation / cynicism of purpose. Interesting times...

*may just be projecting myself onto the rest of the world and / or my media bubble's limited view.

[TapWaterBandit]

The greed and envy in this comment reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcYLVdfFro

[goodpoint]

Better: *some* are obscenely overpaid to build stuff that nobody really needs

Some are obscenely underpaid to implement crucial software e.g. Boeing MAX, medical diagnostic stuff, industrial automation, FOSS libraries like OpenSSL, research tools, etc.

The correlation between social utility and income is... interesting.