> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc

You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.

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avalys 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.

If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.

When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.

	▲	jplrssn 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society. I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.

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gus_massa 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When I was young, to buy a tee shirts for the kids you have to walk like 10 block to visit like 5 shops and compare prices. Let's say 1 or 2 hour and the choices were quite limited and you must keep a mental list of the location and quality of each shop. [The cheap ones may open only at the same time you have to be in the office.]

Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.

Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?

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ajsnigrutin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?

Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.

If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.