[jplrssn]

> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc

You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.

[gus_massa]

When I was young, to buy a tee shirts for the kids you have to walk like 10 block to visit like 5 shops and compare prices. Let's say 1 or 2 hour and the choices were quite limited and you must keep a mental list of the location and quality of each shop. [The cheap ones may open only at the same time you have to be in the office.]

Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.

Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?

[avalys]

If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.

If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.

When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.

[jplrssn]

My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society.

I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.

[qwytw]

Cost of labor is based on supply and demand not the value created. If there were more engineers capable of creating those JS frameworks than there was demand for they'd get paid way less and whoever was paying them would pocket the difference.

While a "Javascript Framework engineer" is a very neutral example how do you feel about the engineers working on ads, making exploitive predatory video games, gambling apps etc. etc. they can get paid even more yet the net value they create for the society is negative.

[gymbeaux]

You’re assuming supply and demand is logical or efficient but like the stock market it’s often irrational and driven by some C Suite who doesn’t know what he’s doing. FAANG blew billions over hiring software engineers in 2021-2022 and often paid engineers to do effectively nothing for months or years. Despite their very high salaries, these individuals contributed nothing to society in exchange.

[yunnpp]

Do you really believe that nonsense? By that logic, we should legalize all drugs and optimize that LSD supply chain.

[birksherty]

Meh. Those are just Making meaningless things that tracks users, hogs computer resourses, showing nonsense social media posts, brainrot contents, changing things constantly to put in their resume at the expense of users. Would prefer if these people did not exists in first place.

[ajsnigrutin]

I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?

Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.

If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.