What about the linesmen who provide the power for your computers?
What about the road workers who make it possible for you to get to work?
What about the African miners who dig up the rare earths for your components to run your computer?
What about the guys soldering all this crap together?
I bet you'd say the road worker creates hardly any value, but in reality the economy just ceases to function without roads. Or sewage. Or power lines. Or gas stations powered by truck drivers. Or a million other things.
Developers create a portion of a valuable system, they're not water-walking god-kings. I know, I'm one of them--and my code is probably faster and more reliable than a very large proportion of that created in the rest of the industry, but I don't kid myself thinking I'm doing it all by myself or creating something that has a stand-alone value and operates outside of a larger system; we're all cogs and together we make an amazing machine.
I'm glad I can watch Silicon Valley on TV instead of having to live around those characters. Delusions are detrimental.
Supply/demand. There's a much larger supply of people capable of building roads vs. those capable of developing a system. And the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system.
You're right about the value of teams being greater than an individual contributor, but the ability to work within a team is a valuable skill just like any other.
> the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system.
Pick another profession then. How about customer support? The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value... nevermind that novice engineers often create negative value by creating liabilities that can cost the company millions, while still getting paid more than the highest paid customer support people.
The truth is, you are just assuming the people making the roads have nothing to offer in terms of outstanding value, because that's your preconceived notion. You already decided they were worth less than you, even though you never bothered to check. Never bothered to measure. Never bothered to ask.
If you really believed in your value, you wouldn't be afraid of a system where people are paid what they are worth to the company. Instead you hide behind "market rates" because market rates are good to you. But markets are flawed, we've seen it over and over. There's a lot of money in rigging markets, and the salary market is no exception.
> But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value
Cherry-picking one profession to claim low salaries are because of gender is absurd. The world is an unfair place if you can't cope with the fact that a large majority of jobs will pay "peanuts". If tomorrow there is an infinite supply of highly qualified programmers, surely programmers would be paid low wages too but the truth is that there never will be - there is a lot of valuable software left to be created, to be maintained and we won't hit saturation any time soon.
> Cherry-picking one profession to claim low salaries are because of gender is absurd.
Community/support roles are still widely considered "soft skills", and thanks to a century or two of patriarchy, are indeed considered womens' work. (This is, needless to say, bullshit.)
You seem to be implying that there is an "infinite supply of highly qualified" community/support folks; hence the low wages. There is not.
The difference between an average and a great customer support is not millions of dollars in revenue. You are thinking about the difference between a terrible and a great customer, and with 1 in a million scenario.
There are some situations where great customer support brings the company tremendous value and opportunity. But these situations are so rare and few that investing in great customer support (for high price) is not worthwhile. An average person should do.
If good customer support is really bringing in value, then they should be able to negotiate for more pay. If they leave, the company should see losses.
Reinforcing this, B2B customer support is vastly different than consumer-facing customer support.
Screwing up B2B support genuinely can cost millions in a single incident, which is why service level agreements and reliability standards exist. Compare that to the service level of your average help line (somewhere between "maybe if you're lucky" and "go die"). And of course, entities like ISPs don't count in the first place when they're immune to competition.
There are customer support reps making six figures. They tend to go by names like "service engineer", and actively solve problems the customer can't, rather than just guiding someone through a reboot process. In extreme cases, customer support is the development team - if your business is worth enough you'll end up talking to someone who actually made the broken product.
As you pointed out, it's not an accident that the companies with useless, call-center customer support are the ones not worried about losing a consumer or two.
Of course it is. Everyone remembers getting shitty offshore technical support from company X then a few years later you're the engineer making recommendations or the CTO signing off POs and you think "I will never deal with X again".
I've got my list, I bet everyone reading this can think of their own X's too...
What do you mean by it? That the difference between great and average technical support is worth millions of dollars in revenue?
Everyone remembers getting shitty offshore technical support
This seems hardly generalizable, but beyond that, I agree with you. Shitty tech support is never excusable.
Pay for average or above-average tech support. Those you can train in less than a month.
Don't break your back paying for "great" tech support. This is a silly directive, because it's so obvious once you are in the shoes of an executive, having to recognize tradeoffs in every decision. Unless your company is large enough where the tradeoffs make sense, paying for stellar tech support is an inane investment.
You can say a lot to the leader as a follower, but once you start leading, you must dance around the intricacies of decisionmaking.
EDIT: Not quite sure, but your assertion based on the so-called "list" of shitty tech support seems to be a case of selection bias.
There were probably many cases of reasonable tech support, but you haven't made a list of them :P
"Average" tech support is pretty bad is why. Companies either care a lot about support (i.e. their reputation), or they don't care at all, there is no middle ground in my experience... Companies with good tech support are good all round.
"The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value... nevermind that novice engineers often create negative value by creating liabilities that can cost the company millions, while still getting paid more than the highest paid customer support people."
Spent a few years doing community management / customer support. This is _100% correct_. Oh, the stories I could tell. The role is critically important, and terribly, horribly underpaid. I went back to web development because, even with a 3-year gap in my resume and taking a non-senior role, I was still able to make 50% more.
I can train someone in less than a month to be a world class customer support agent. Assuming they have the temperament, the job requires no scarce skills. I can train a person to work on a crew pouring concrete in a day. Comparing road crews to software engineering is a false equivalence. Mining in Africa is certainly hard work, but I could staff a mine with eager workers in an hour.
If one feels that income inequality among the professions is a problem, one should change professions. There's nothing stopping anyone right? However if we do acknowledge that there are barriers to entry, then we have just proven the point as to why a guy pouring asphalt is paid less than a person writing APIs. Marxist theory has every profession being equal. Yet, why, in the Soviet Union were nuclear scientists rewarded differently than the shop clerk at Moscow's GUM department store? Why were Soviet ballerinas treated like relative royalty while the people running electricity to the Bolshoi treated far worse?
Because of scarcity. Gold is worth more than sand. Though without sand, you wouldn't have concrete. I can't believe we're still having economic discussions where scarcity seems to be a novel (and controversial) concept. Marxism fails every time it has been tried because it fails to recognize scarcity.
Supply vs. demand explains so much of this world. Some people either don't grok the concept, or refuse to believe it applies everywhere.
It hurts our emotions when we think about a miner in Africa (working 120 hour workweeks, wiping the sweat off his brow, with five mouths to feed) getting paid hundred times less than a software engineer fresh out of college working four hours a day, sitting in ergonomic chairs and getting in massage pods as a "break."
But pain is not value. Sorry. This is not a utopia. Don't make decisions thinking the world is a utopia. Have a correct mapping of the world, and then do something about it.
The article starts with "In a groundbreaking effort to close the wage gap between men and women..." I do see what you were getting at but my guess (based on karma and skimming previous comments) is that the gender comment was sarcastic. I could be wrong though.
Serious? There's more to customer support than picking up a phone. I've worked with some very intelligent customer support people who know the product as well as the engineers.
B2B seems like the obvious standard of comparison here. Customer support really can be worth millions there, and that's reflected by how the system works.
Keeping customers happy as a general principle isn't gendered, or undervalued, or much of anything else. It just varies from "you're an essential customer, you can call our engineers night and day" to "abandon us forever, see if we care". Any kind of generalization like "treated as women's work" or "don't put technical people in front" is going to find counterexamples in big, high-stakes contracts.
I saw one contract with a clause that a Sev1 incident had a 15 minute SLA to the highest tier support engineer and 30 minute SLA for initial contact from an SVP level exec to the customer CIO.
There's more to customer support than picking up a phone.
I agree. There is more to customer support than picking up a phone, and some people make it sound like supporting a customer is just reading from the manual.
There's also more to cleaning than mopping. You can employ your philosophy of cleanliness and make things perfectly ordered and spiffy-shiny.
Maybe one day the CEO might walk in and be impressed by your attention to detail, hire you as an intern, and so goes the rest of your success story.
But how much value is the janitor bringing to the company by doing a stellar job? How about customer support? Either hire a stellar engineer and mediocre customer support, or hire a mediocre engineer and stellar customer support. Which would you choose?
When we start talking about jobs, we tend to imagine, in our minds, the people working. Then when people throw out words like "software engineer brings more value to the world than customer support", we translate those words to "you are saying this customer support Jan I am imagining is more valuable than the software engineer Dan I am imagining?"
(Names Jan and Dan were chosen as such because I have seen more female customer support and male software engineers than their counterparts. If you think that is sexism, then you are inherently valuing the human worth of software engineers over that of customer support personnel.)
People's worth is not determined by how much value they bring to the world.
Digression aside, we tend to construct mental models emotionally and attempt to justify with logic.
That is why people include gender in this argument, even though gender has nothing to do with whether people bring value. Again, the software engineer Dan is not a more valuable person than customer support Jan. If you don't get this difference, read No More Mr. Nice Guy or The Way of the Superior Man. The titles are somewhat of a misnomer; I suppose women will gain just as much value from those books.
This is a total shot in the dark, but female engineers are probably paid less than male engineers because they bring less value to the company (read: people hiring) than their male counterparts. The reason why male trait is valued more in STEM is because there are more men in STEM already.
We tend to want to work with people who are similar to us. Thus to a male CEO, he probably prefers a male over female engineer, if they are equal in aptitude. This, of course, is not a right judgment call, but this is humans' default mode of thinking.
There are also job-specific preferred traits. If I were running a hospital, I would pay a male nurse less than a female nurse; female nurses, by their gender trait and societal preference of female nurses (both men and women prefer female nurses), female nurses inherently have more value.
A complex topic that is easily subject to emotional manipulation. But worth talking about.
I disagree with a lot of what you said (starting with the importance of janitorial services -- have you ever worked in a place with truly bad janitorial services?) but to stick to the factual side right now, male nurses earn more than female nurses. The article I'll link from the Journal of the American Medical Association includes analysis of approximately 290,000 RNs.
That is my mistake, I would have assumed otherwise. Thus it must make my example invalid. I would have to think otherwise, then.
The point about janitorial services — I am sure having horrible janitors (and horrible customer support) is a true disaster. But being an average janitor is not too hard; if a place has bad janitors, then of course that should be a priority investment.
> (Names Jan and Dan were chosen as such because I have seen more female customer support and male software engineers than their counterparts. If you think that is sexism, then you are inherently valuing the human worth of software engineers over that of customer support personnel.)
That's not really needed, my Name is Jan and I'm male. My cousin is called Dan and she is female (people call her Dan but it's Danielle).
Assuming people should pay what things are worth to them is complete and utter bullshit and isn't how economics work.
Do you realize how much water is worth to you? You cannot live without it, but you aren't going to send your water company $100/gallon for it because there is a massive supply of it.
The same applies to paying people to do things. Nobody is going to pay more than what the price is for the skills they are looking for. To expect otherwise or lament the fact that's it's not happening shows a very basic misunderstanding of economics.
> And the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system.
I used to drive over the I-35W bridge, twice per day, on my way to work and back.
Feel free to keep talking about how there's not much difference between roads, but I'm not going to be listening.
Our economy pays differently for different jobs for exactly one reason; scarcity.
The best road workers in the world, they do what? The best miner? Now, the best coder? Some coders should be paid like the best road worker. Few road workers should be paid like the best coders, because there's just too many ready replacements who would do the work for less.
Coding is becoming that way, but far from it currently. Our best invention is the one that puts us totally out of work.
More supply than demand only exists for 'free' or 'public' goods. If there are costs of production, nobody (except government) will want to supply more than is demanded, as they will be giving the product away (or paying people) to get rid of it. Garbage is an instance of supply > demand.
Try building a road system with just road workers, and no civil engineers or systems and operations analysts, and all this entails.
Or pay the house painter what you pay a software engineer, and see how many people paint their house themselves, or with less frequency. House painters would be priced out of the market, and more homeowners would fall, and/or have crappier paint jobs.
That is supply and demand in a nutshell, and how markets value a skill or talent you have to offer with obvious exceptions.
All of those guys already got paid by the time you sit down at your desk.
The wealth that the GP is talking about is the incremental wealth created by the engineers under consideration. They're taking publicly available things and putting them together in a new way to create something more valuable than the cost of parts and labour.
Yeah, I suppose it would be interesting to look at the value multipliers throughout the supply chain to see if they are even or uneven. There is a difference between value of input goods and a value of output products, and workers capture some percentage of that difference as pay.. For instance, if someone who takes raw metals at $1/unit and processes them into component-ready materials at $2 per unit and are paid $0.50/unit, they're capturing 50% of the value they have created. A programmer takes software and hardware components that have some intrinsic value (perhaps not, difficult to reason about here) and processes them into software and hardware or services that have a greater intrinsic value. At large tech companies, the programmer might get a salary of $1XX,XXX, but the company might making a profit on the services that programmer created of $5XX,XXX, which only capturing 20% of the value added. I guess what I wonder is: should everyone in the pipeline for goods creation capture the same percentage of what the inherent value they've created? Or is it the nature of markets to differentiate based on scarcity of labor at each stage?
You could be charitable and read OP as making the case that labor in general should capture a greater portion of corporate profits than it does now. I'm sympathetic to your comment, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree.
Coding is definitely higher value for sure, just as driver who operates a berry picking machine can deliver more value than a migrant individually picking berries.
Why a migrate rather than say someone who picks berries by hand? Vice did a story comparison on this and actually migrate workers worked harder and picked more fruit than Americans pulled from temp agency.
But in your comparison, the machine would be of higher value, the operator would be of little value since it does not take extensive skill to operate - much less skill than someone working on power lines for example. It's all based upon geographic demand.
You have a prejudice against Silicon Valley / California.
Aside from that, I think one key point you failed to observe is that the engineers are often the biggest producer of innovation and invention in the production process. Software engineering is not manual labor, instead a heightened level of mental focus and ingenuity is required to perform the job.
I think I might have a prejudice against manual labor.
Major difference is trainable skills versus innate talent. The number of people who can be trained/educated to perform the tasks you described above are pretty large. The number of people who can write elegant, concise code is a pretty small pool.
It's also important to distinguish between day-day coders who write CRUD apps (trainable skill), and developers who develop platforms that others build on.
Another way of looking at this - by providing significant rewards to top-end developers (and top end developers should be starting around $500K, and be making north of $1mm with 5-6 years of experience in their chosen vertical), you encourage outstanding individuals who might chose another field where they might be more richly rewarded (Law, Finance, ...) to put their skills to good use in programming.
And that's the crux of the matter - I don't believe we should provide outsized rewards to developers with exceptional talent because they deserve the extra money - I think everyone who works a 40-hour week deserves a comfortable, stress free life. I believe we should provide outsized rewards to developers with exceptional talent so as to ensure efficient allocation of capital and labor, resulting in economies with increased productivity, and greater rewards for everyone interlinked in that economy.
From that perspective - I guess I agree with you, we are all cogs working together to make this amazing machine -I just want to make sure the right cogs are allocated to the right machine.
There is nothing unique or special about being a programmer.
Programmers think they are undervalued and should get more. But guess what, nurses think they should get more as well because they are saving lives. Soldiers think they should get more for making us all safe. Police think they should get more for reducing the level of crime in society which benefits us all. Teachers think they should get more because they are educating the next generation of wealth creators. Everyone thinks they should get a little more of the pie.
How do you resolve this? (Hint: supply and demand)
Couple points - I didn't say there is anything unique or special about being a programmer from a skill perspective. Almost everyone who can graduate from high school can be taught to program, and put together useful applications. I tried to call that out when describing the difference between a day-day CRUD developer and platform developer.
But there is a distinct hierarchy of developers who can, for example, instinctively comprehend pointer-to-pointer data structures, or have walked through and mostly understand AoCP, or heck, can (quickly) write concise elegant code like this: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/bea....
One key difference between programming and teaching/soldiering/policing, is leverage. A single 100x teacher/soldier/police officer is limited in the impact they can have on the world, whereas a single 100x developer can write a platform/system that is used by 100s of millions of people.
Now we're talking about heroic icons. There are thousands, or maybe 10s of thousands of 100x developers. There is only one Florence Nightingale, Steve Jobs, Donald Knuth, Michelangelo, Einstein, etc...
You don't need to be a heroic icon to be more valuable than a 100x developer.
The 100x teacher who molds the mind of the kid/teenager/adult who eventually cures cancer is worth more than just about any single 100x developer out there right now, and you'll never know that person's name.
(Yeah, I'm aware there will be multiple different cures for different cancers, the point remains)
It would be interesting to see if any great researcher could tie back their success to a teacher. My suspicion (based on nothing more than gut feeling) is that while a good/great teacher has some impact, that beyond a certain level it's 99.9% the individual and their environment/peers/parents/contacts, rather than any particular teacher.
Another way of saying this from a mercenary monetary point of view is that I don't think investing more than $250K/year on a K-12 teacher makes sense, though you might be able to make an argument that people who teach teachers might have greater leverage.
I certainly agree that the spread in productivity between the best and mediocre seems to be huge in software development compared to most other industries. In fact, I cannot think of another one quite like it off the top of my head.
We do have certain other advantages though. We can create a start-up and potentially make a huge amount of money. This is a realistic possibility for a substantial percentage of good developers. Much fewer people from other industries have that kind of chance.
> There is nothing unique or special about being a programmer.
Really? Take 1000 programmers and try to teach them skills nurses have. How many will be able to do the job well enought to be able to work at the hospitals?
Now take 1000 nurses and try to teach them skills programmers have. Is the number suitable for profession work at sowftware companies be the same, as in the first case?
You can claim, that there is nothing unique or special in being theoretical physicist. But is that really true?
I’m in no way mentally prepared to be a nurse. That is something I suspect I would never ever be able to do. That has to do with skills (especially hard to learn skills, like interacting with people properly), it also has to do with being emotionally ready to do such a job. Especially a job like being a nurse is in my estimation not something you can just teach. You need people who are prepared, ready and willing to do the job.
I think very, very few of those 1,000 programmers would be ready to work in hospitals. I would not at all be surprised if you could find more great programmers among 1,000 nurses than you can find great nurses among 1,000 programmers. To me being a nurse is an extremely demanding job.
I am a developer and have a very close friend who is a nurse. I am pretty sure I could teach her enough to do an entry level web dev job within 2-3 months, whereas there is no way I would be mentally or emotionally prepared to deal with working life as a 'real' nurse within that short amount of time, if ever.
I couldn't agree with you more that nursing is a tough job that deserves excellent pay (though out here in SF, registered nurses do earn more, at the median, than software application developers, though this is a bit unusual and not the case in most areas). It would take a tremendous amount of time, training, and effort to turn a software developer into a registered nurse, no doubt.
I am pretty bummed to hear a developer speak so dismissively of what it takes to be developer. I'm not sure what you mean about an "entry level" web job, of course - if "entry level" entails no background or skills, then I suppose I could prepare someone in no time at all.
However - and I fully acknowledge this is just anecdote - after 15+ years in the field, I have yet to see the mythical simple CRUD app. I came into this field after a major in math with a CS emphasis and a MS in Industrial Engineering, during which I wrote a lot of code for various numerical analysis problems. I've written apps that need to build and solve linear programs with a few million variables and communicate results to analysis within one minute, which we felt was the maximum amount of time anyone would wait for an interactive tool designed to explore multiple supply chain scenarios. It is hardly a work of genius, but these were real CS and math problems, with a dose of programming optimization.
In many ways, those projects were considerably easier than the "CRUD" projects I've been on. Seriously. You have to gather business requirements from people who do understand their business, but aren't accustomed to explaining it in a way that works within the strict confines of computer code. You often have to work with existing code bases, deciding how much customization you can get away with before forking yourself into a maintenance hell (and you have to deal with that maintenance hell). You have to integrate with many different data sources, back and forth, over networks, many of which are obscure, poorly documented, and poorly maintained. You are pressured to provide estimates and deadlines for systems that you have no idea about (how long will it take me to alter a code base for an existing application to integrate with a data source that I haven't studied yet? Uh, a week?). You have to weave through existing data structures, code bases that involve intricate logic, uncover magic documents that nobody told you about, interview and talk to business analysts, test, design UIs or work with UI people... and often encounter an (at best) irritated look when you didn't meet your "estimates" that turned into deadlines.
I maintain that even the "simple CRUD" projects are difficult, stressful, and require a very high level of logic, coding ability, and the ability to communicate will with people at many levels of an organization.
If you truly believe that web dev is simple, of course you have every right to make that point. You shouldn't back of from saying what you think is the truth just because the truth is harmful to the reputation of developers.
What pains me is that I absolutely don't agree with you, I think it's a really hard job, and I think we developers really hurt ourselves when we trivialize our jobs this way.
This is all very interesting, but has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my point. I am saying that both web dev and nursing can be very challenging, yet while everybody of college ability could learn enough web dev to function well in a junior position (and your description definitely wasn't a junior position at any of the companies I have seen), very few have the emotional and psychological strength to work as a nurse - especially given the difference in pay.
The world knows how difficult software development is - we don't need to put down other professions (which equally difficult yet in a different way)
We're both looking at exactly the same words, sometimes people just reach different conclusions. You've said that we don't need to put down other professions, but consider your words about software development and nursing...
"I am pretty sure I could teach her enough to do an entry level web dev job within 2-3 months, whereas there is no way I would be mentally or emotionally prepared to deal with working life as a 'real' nurse within that short amount of time, if ever."
I do see that as putting down software development in order to build up nursing. Like I said, we're looking at the same words, so this is just a matter of perspective.
Perspectives sometimes vary because of experience. I actually don't agree, as a general condition, that the world knows how difficult software development is. Some of the world does, and some software development positions are clearly respected. But as a general statement? No, I really don't agree - I see too many developers working loud, distracting open offices, back visibility, methodologies that reduce autonomy and long term thinking the to micromanaged 24 hour "sprints", and a career path where "successful" people should term out before age 35.
I certainly wouldn't argue that this describes all dev jobs, but it sure does describe a lot of them. I do think that the kind of denigration of the field I'm hearing here does contribute to this.
That's why labor policy is so important. The guy digging proverbial ditches does indeed deserve more, but the market has been distorted by large corporations who lobby for lax enforcement of immigration law. On the other end of the spectrum engineers and programmers probably deserve more but the market has been distorted by large corporations who have lobbied for massive numbers of H1Bs or colluded with each other to keep poaching/salaries down in the valley.
Because I have a basic understanding of supply and demand. I even explained how supply of labor was being distorted in my post at both the higher and lower ends of the job market. I think the more appropriate question is how do you not know?
Labor economists have concluded that undocumented workers have lowered the wages of U.S. adults without a high-school diploma — 25 million of them — by anywhere between 0.4 to 7.4 percent.
This is the paragraph immediately following the sentence you quoted:
> The impact on everyone else, though, is surprisingly positive. Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, has written a series of influential papers comparing the labor markets in states with high immigration levels to those with low ones. He concluded that undocumented workers do not compete with skilled laborers — instead, they complement them. Economies, as Adam Smith argued in “Wealth of Nations,” work best when workers become specialized and divide up tasks among themselves. Pedro Chan’s ability to take care of routine tasks on a work site allows carpenters and electricians to focus on what they do best. In states with more undocumented immigrants, Peri said, skilled workers made more money and worked more hours; the economy’s productivity grew. From 1990 to 2007, undocumented workers increased legal workers’ pay in complementary jobs by up to 10 percent.
Don't make it look one-sided.
Besides, you didn't tell me what you think a ditch digger should earn, which is what I asked. But that's fine, because you can't tell me, because you don't know. In fact, nobody knows. It is an unanswerable question. Much like determining what someone's "fair share" of taxes or benefits is, or their fair standard of living, it is impossible to determine the income they "deserve." There is no absolute standard for any of these things. The only way to know if someone is being fairly compensated is to compare their income to some kind of absolute standard -- but such a standard does not exist.
In the case of unskilled American workers, maybe their incomes are 0.4-7.4% lower than they would have been in the absence of immigrants. But that by itself does not tell us anything about fairness. Perhaps they were overpaid before the immigrants showed up -- after all, there were other people willing to do the job for less money, so what did the American workers have to offer that justified a higher salary for doing the same work? Again, in the absence of an absolute standard of what their income ought to be, it is impossible to know if they are fairly paid, underpaid, or overpaid.
So your argument is that it's okay that we've made it worse for the people who already had it the hardest because the rest of the more wealthy people in the country benefitted from it? Sorry, but that doesn't make it better.
As for the rest of your post, my comment implied a context of the moral an legal framework currently in place in the US and most countries people would actually want to live in. But you're willing to dismiss major components of domestic and international law as well as the basic moral principles most of us live by with a vague existentialist argument about whether fairness even exists. We're not even debating the same thing, and what you want to debate isn't something I'm interested in debating.
> So your argument is that it's okay that we've made it worse for the people who already had it the hardest because the rest of the more wealthy people in the country benefitted from it?
Where did I write that? I included the excerpt from the article to demonstrate your intellectual dishonesty in selectively quoting a single sentence from an article that is positive about the effects of immigration. I did not make any moral judgments anywhere in my comment. Quite the contrary -- I argued that a moral judgment in this situation was not possible to make.
What legal framework have I dismissed which determines what someone deserves to earn, aside from the minimum wage?
We are debating the same thing. I'm arguing that your assertions have no basis. If you don't know what is fair, you cannot know if someone is treated fairly or not.
You have no basis for your claim that some people are paid less than they deserve to be paid, unless you know what they deserve to be paid, and can demonstrate that what they are actually paid is a lower number than what they deserve to be paid. That's not a vague argument. It is very clear. It's also not existentialist, and if you think it is, you don't know what existentialism is.
I wasn't referring to philosophical existentialism. This is the definition of existential I was using, straight from google.com:
ex·is·ten·tial
ˌeɡzəˈsten(t)SH(ə)l/
LOGIC
(of a proposition) affirming or implying the existence of a thing.
Sure, okay, there's no absolute standard for fairness. So there's no point in discussing the article, because by what basis would you even discuss whether or not employers should be allowed to ask applicants for their previous income? By what basis should we determine whether we should have any labor laws? What is the absolute standard by which you determined that there should be a minimum wage, or what that minimum wage should be?
If we ignore the entire framework of the conversation and my original comment, then we're veering off into a place I don't find particularly interesting.
I didn't say that fairness does not exist, or that there are not standards for fairness for some things. I said there is no standard for determining the fairness of what someone is paid. There are plenty of areas of life where fairness can be determined.
...and increased the wages of otherwise poor Guatemalans, Mexicans, and their families by thousands of percent. Why exactly should I be opposed to this?
Let me see if I understand this: In your worldview, allowing the brown-skinned person next door to bid on the same work that you are bidding on is equivalent to taking money from you?
>The guy digging proverbial ditches does indeed deserve more, but the market has been distorted by large corporations who lobby for lax enforcement of immigration law.
Do gravediggers get paid relatively more than other kinds of jobs in countries where there is essentially no immigration for economic reasons? I doubt it.
What about the road workers who make it possible for you to get to work?
What about the African miners who dig up the rare earths for your components to run your computer?
What about the guys soldering all this crap together?
I bet you'd say the road worker creates hardly any value, but in reality the economy just ceases to function without roads. Or sewage. Or power lines. Or gas stations powered by truck drivers. Or a million other things.
Developers create a portion of a valuable system, they're not water-walking god-kings. I know, I'm one of them--and my code is probably faster and more reliable than a very large proportion of that created in the rest of the industry, but I don't kid myself thinking I'm doing it all by myself or creating something that has a stand-alone value and operates outside of a larger system; we're all cogs and together we make an amazing machine.
I'm glad I can watch Silicon Valley on TV instead of having to live around those characters. Delusions are detrimental.