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The median income in the US (in 2014) was $29k. The median salary for a software engineer is supposedly $95k. That's more than triple the overall median.

Sources: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-salary-...



That's the average salary for a software engineer, not the median. Also, the SSA site uses "net compensation" for their numbers, which they define as "compensation (wages, tips, and the like) subject to Federal income taxes, as reported by employers on Form W-2" and "includes contributions to deferred compensation plans, but excludes certain distributions from plans where the distributions are included in the reported compensation subject to income taxes". It is not clear to me how that maps to salaries reported on Glassdoor.


I could have sworn that page said median, not average. Thanks for the correction.


That median salary includes fast food workers and other low/non skilled positions. Comparing our profession against that is dishonest.


You completely lost me. We weren't discussing the median skilled wage, we were discussing the median wage. The median wage is the median of all wages.

Trying to redefine words in the middle of an argument strikes me as dishonest.


I didn't redefine anything. I pointed out that the "median wage of all wages" does not add anything in the discussion when we're talking about skilled labor. Trying to compare skilled labor wages to all labor wages of course is going to make it seem like the skilled labor is getting paid too much. That's what's dishonest.




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