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?
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Notes -
I think it's practically impossible for anyone to calculate "worth" in this sense. It's like when Marxists talk about "surplus value." Even for simple jobs like cashier—okay, we know we're paying them 12 and hour, now how can we know if this is more or less than their "real" worth? It's not clear to me market value is different from actual value.
Some software devs are in a position to make changes that save companies millions of dollars per year. I guess in that case you could make an argument that they are worth as much money as they saved for the company, but they could only do that once for one company. They can't go from company to company saving millions of dollars in infrastructure cost. They might not be put in that position in each company, and there might not be the opportunity to save that much money for each company. It doesn't seem right that they should capture all of the savings as salary year after year, so, given that and the stochastic nature of optimizations like this where it's easy to measure the impact in dollars, what's a fair salary? Probably near the range of salaries we have now.
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