I honestly think this is a completely wrong-headed way of looking at things. You are paid what you're paid not because the company is determining what is 'fair' given all of your circumstances, but rather the minimum they feel they can get away with.
Nearly all employees would accept more pay if they were offered it, nearly all employers would pay less if they could - so like any market it is always an equilibrium between the two. And frankly in some job markets the salary is negotiated better than others.
There is a sort of learned helplessness to 'I don't deserve more for this job' etc. in the eternal words of Unforgiven - deserve's got nothing to do with it.
> rather the minimum they feel they can get away with.
I completely agree.
I certainly would accept more pay. But I wouldn't switch jobs just to get it. There are several reasons, most importantly that interesting jobs in my niche are scarce. So my employer has a resource that is perhaps scarcer than myself!. Second (and this is the part where it becomes self-fulfilling), because there are no super high salaries, I'm close to a kind of ceiling. I'm not sure what that ceiling is and you could always be lucky and find some extremely well paying job, but let's say that for a job I'd be willing to do, the ceiling is within 50% more than I'm currently making.
If marginal taxes are 50% (at least), then that's a net 25% pay rise. It's basically $1500 more a month net, and it would require me to make probably several job switches. It's certainly not insignificant, but it's just not significant enough. Had there been jobs across the street paying 3x what I do, then certainly I'd start chasing more money. But I value my 6-8w holidays, I can already afford to travel etc. I'm comfortable.
Great response - I very much agree that from the employee's point of view you are always trading off a number of factors and they are by far not all about money.
My main contention really was with the assertion that you don't see why you should get rich - as if it were about what is deserved whereas of course it is a market where the correct price is the one people are willing to pay.
I myself trade off a number of factors in my career which don't equate necessarily to salary.
I'm not saying it would be wrong to be rich or that devs should be rich if they work for companies that make a lot of money per employee. But that's a pretty "valley centric" view that creating software means creating infinitely scalable money machine and each developer always creates a value much larger than what they are paid.
For most us devs, especially in europe where a larger fraction of us developers work, I imagine, in traditional industry rather than "in software", there just isn't a situation where we create this massive value. We create more than we earn, sure, but it's not exacly Netflix money. The company I work for, like almost all companies, have a huge number of employees and a profit margin that has looked pretty similar for a lifetime.
What's unfair is perhaps that there are instances of such companies, where the developers really could and should be rich because they write software that make billions. If such devs were paid better, then I could also be paid better, because I'm paid in competition with them. More likely though they'd be paid more and the jobs that aren't in that category would be done elsewhere. So in a sense, I'm also a tiny bit happy that the pay structures aren't as widely distributed as they are in some places.
Yeah that's probably the wrong way to express it (hadn't had coffee). If I get $N pay rise, it's only a $0.5N net pay rise, which makes it much less attractive.
> You are paid what you're paid not because the company is determining what is 'fair' given all of your circumstances, but rather the minimum they feel they can get away with.
And the maximum you feel you can get away with. It’s a market, after all.
Nearly all employees would accept more pay if they were offered it, nearly all employers would pay less if they could - so like any market it is always an equilibrium between the two. And frankly in some job markets the salary is negotiated better than others.
There is a sort of learned helplessness to 'I don't deserve more for this job' etc. in the eternal words of Unforgiven - deserve's got nothing to do with it.