Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Until recently, one used to often hear people say that while software engineers had high salaries, they were actually only paid a small fraction of what they were really worth. If that were true, these mass layoffs probably wouldn't be happening, and they certainly wouldn't be causing stock prices to rise, as they did when Meta announced its layoffs.
Were the people who said software engineers were underpaid mistaken? Why did they believe this? Was it based on some naive calculation of profit per employee, ignoring the cost of capital, as is really common among people with no formal economics education?
In my experience, most people working in an organization don't know or understand the big picture. This causes them to both overvalue the contributions of their peers - since they can understand them - and undervalue the contribution of other parts of the organization - which they fail to understand the value they bring. See e.g. this exchange I recently had with @thomasThePaineEngine regarding what HR does for the company.
If you mostly talk to programmers, you'll get a distorted image of the importance of programmers and probably some denigrating image of everyone else - first-level managers, C-Suite, marketing, HR - who perform non-technical functions that are vital for the company's existence.
In truth, while (almost) every function in the org is vital, most people performing those functions aren't. This is true for every discipline, and as such includes programmers. At the very least 50% of the people in any one discipline could probably be safely replaced, with minimal overhead.
On the other hand, there really are some high performers who deserve a high paycheck for what they do. Not all of them get what they deserve, and that's a shame. Sometimes it's because those people aren't assertive enough, or because some company policy prevents them from getting a very high raise. Some other times it's because they're very valuable to the org they're in, but much less valuable everywhere else - which means they don't have leverage.
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