[adultSwim]

The first job I had out of school billed me out for $325/hr. That's a high rate for a high level lawyer. Unlike lawyers, they were able to bill me out for almost every hour I was at work, which comes out to about $650k/yr. I made a small fraction of that.

Were we better organized, we engineers would take a much greater portion of the profits we generate. After unionizing, professional athletes are paid about half of what they directly generate. Before unionizing they got peanuts.

[projektfu]

And if the industry were better organized overall, the other workers in it would be taking home more, too. Support, customer service, technical writing, etc. It seems that programmers are pretty hostile to organizing as a group. Many here even defended the anti-poaching agreements that FAANG got in trouble for.

A lot of our innovation these days is coming up with new ways of extracting rent. The programmers don't directly do that but they make it possible at scale. Google, VISA, Yelp, etc.