[xacaxulu]

This is a great counterpoint. And as someone who has done incredibly difficult physical labor (former US Marine with multiple deployments) I can tell you that what has been much harder for me has been the CompSci courses I've taken, thousands of hours of pouring over API documentation, and countless late nights coding. Just because we aren't sweating in some warehouse somewhere doesn't mean that the work isn't incredibly complex and difficult. I'd argue that we work quite harder than guys who makes sandwiches, and we are paid for it accordingly. Working in tech takes a lot of sacrifices early on.

[ylou]

I would like to believe that I'm paid as much as I am paid on merit alone. Perhaps based on some universally objective measure of work ethic and difficulty.

But that is a fantasy. We are paid according to how much the market has decided we are worth. We are rare and therefore, in demand. That is it. I could say that I got here on hard work alone, but that's not the whole truth. How I got here is a mixture of one part hard work, one part privilege, and one part fortune.

[AnimalMuppet]

I sometimes describe what I did during a particular day as "trying to shove my brain through a concrete wall". (Usually applied to debugging, where the "concrete wall" is the reasons why what's happening is impossible. The trick is to find where the crack is in the concrete wall,..)