[Fr0styMatt8]

It gets more complicated when you ask the question "How much money is the software engineer making for the company vs. what the company pays them?"

For argument's sake, let's say you're paid $80K per year. On the one hand, you may think that is high (it always depends what your frame of reference is). If the code you produce directly makes the company millions of dollars though, does that change your assessment of the 'reasonableness' of that salary?

This is the argument I've heard as to why sports stars get paid so much (because you have to look at what they get paid vs the amount of money they're making for the comapnies paying them).

It's a real can of worms.

[mariojv]

I see the value in your point, and I generally agree with it. However, in this hypothetical situation, I think you'd largely be ignoring the hypothetical product manager, any marketing involve, servers involved, code written before the software engineer that payed enough for the development (R&D?) time, etc. Also, the company probably wouldn't want to pay that person unless the value that person produces is higher than their wage. That being said, as a software developer I wouldn't argue with a more "reasonable" wage. :o)

[Retric]

Google has 1 million in revenue per employee. They could pay everyone 500,000$ / year and still be extremely profitable.

Edit: 1,259,520$ (March 31, 2015) http://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyet.php?code=GOOG

In 2014 Apple had a pretax income of 53.48B and 92,000 employees. It could give them all a 200,000$ / year pay bump and still make 35Billion in profits.

PS: Not that any company thinks this way, but it's not hard to argue that top programmers are underpayed.

[jonas21]

But companies have expenses other than payroll. Google has to buy machines, run datacenters, pay partners, etc. If you look at income per employee, it takes all of this into account. For Google, this is $270K: http://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyeit.php?code=GOO...

So they could presumably pay everyone $250K more than they do now and still be marginally profitable.

[MichaelCrawford]

Contract programmers.

I was one in 1989. So were many of my coworkers. Someone told me that Apple employed so many contractors so that it could inflate the ratio of revenue to employees.

Hiring more contractors doesn't make a company any more money but it does help inflate the stock price in a purely artificial way.

[Fr0styMatt8]

I totally agree with this.

The main point I want to put across is that it's unfortunate that as software engineers, we have somewhat of a tendency to feel guilty for what we do earn and as a whole profession we can be prone to underselling our own value. I find the parent comment a perfect reflection of this tendency.