>If you look at where the good salaries are, you will not find them in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.
True, but those "good salaries" are only but a fraction of the total salaries in the countries you mention. Methinks a country should prioritize the welfare and well being of the entire country's people and the average worker instead of focusing on the top 1% SW devs while letting everyone else sink.
Maybe keeping public services running for the bottom half of society is more important for society than creating the top SW companies in the world. After all you can't eat software, but we do need garbage men, doctors, pilots, sailors, nurses, handymen, architects, oil & gas and construction workers, farmers, car mechanics, barbers etc. a lot more to survive and run a modern society, than we need web devs to write yet another food delivery, ride sharing or crypto trading app designed just to skirt the laws and scam VCs and clueless investors while the interest rates are low.
If your toilets breaks, you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix it since he can't push an OTA fix remotely from home, otherwise you'll be rooting in your own shit no matter how advanced your knowledge of K8s and ML-Ops is. Who cares if you're a well paid SW dev in London, NYC or San Fran but you can't walk alone at night because you're surrounded by poor minimum wage struggling and homeless people on substances or mental illness from wealth inequality, lack of welfare/social care and societal collapse due to decades of poor political and financial policies designed only to favor the wealthy?
This is just my biased opinion, don't treat it as gospel ground truth.
I am interested in your parallel universe where software doesn't underpin every business... What line of business do you work in that doesn't need software for accounting, banking, invoicing, payroll, communications, yadda yadda.
Consumer software doesn't run the world. I think your negative examples of software scams and hucksters are consumer based.
> just to skirt the laws and scam VCs
VCs are not generally seen as victims!
> you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix
And that plumber depends directly or indirectly on plenty of software to get their job done, from the basics of getting paid to the more complex of sourcing parts. And they use a mobile phone, which is 99.9% software with a little bit of hardware.
This is a heart felt message but has nothing to do with SWE pay. You don't make any suggestions here at all, am I supposed to interrupt this as everyone gets paid the same? If that is the case, say it.
If everyone is paid the same, who sets these salaries, unions? Then who sets the non union pay? Or does everyone work for the union or government?
Where did I say everyone should get paid the same? All I said was that focusing on producing the world's top SW companies doesn't seem to produce the societies with the best quality of life, and that that should be the main focus of a healthy society IMO.
Yeah, what I said is not a solution to such problems, just an observation to the Original grandparent comment who tried to point out a few cities that have the best SW compensation as if that should be the end goal for every country.
So we started out with the idea that unions are good for software developers, and now it’s about how you can’t eat software anyway and society should really value someone else? Yeah I get it…
No, I was just pointing out that what London, NYC, SF, are doing might not be the best for everyone even if they host the topo SW companies in the world.
True, but those "good salaries" are only but a fraction of the total salaries in the countries you mention. Methinks a country should prioritize the welfare and well being of the entire country's people and the average worker instead of focusing on the top 1% SW devs while letting everyone else sink.
Maybe keeping public services running for the bottom half of society is more important for society than creating the top SW companies in the world. After all you can't eat software, but we do need garbage men, doctors, pilots, sailors, nurses, handymen, architects, oil & gas and construction workers, farmers, car mechanics, barbers etc. a lot more to survive and run a modern society, than we need web devs to write yet another food delivery, ride sharing or crypto trading app designed just to skirt the laws and scam VCs and clueless investors while the interest rates are low.
If your toilets breaks, you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix it since he can't push an OTA fix remotely from home, otherwise you'll be rooting in your own shit no matter how advanced your knowledge of K8s and ML-Ops is. Who cares if you're a well paid SW dev in London, NYC or San Fran but you can't walk alone at night because you're surrounded by poor minimum wage struggling and homeless people on substances or mental illness from wealth inequality, lack of welfare/social care and societal collapse due to decades of poor political and financial policies designed only to favor the wealthy?
This is just my biased opinion, don't treat it as gospel ground truth.