Why most skilled employee gets paid less?
Jul 5, 2021
197 Comments
So in my department im the only one who can code. And im so much ahead of the rest by tech skills. Also i got GMAT 740 and way better education
But im getting paid the least amount among other peers and bosses. Who cant code shit, doesnt know math nor stats.
For what skills do they get paid for?
comments
(1) Value is not the measure of how you get paid. If it was, blue collar professions like handling garbage and plumbing would outpay software. You are clearly not as valuable as the person who can stop your entire house from getting waterlogged. Or if you want a fancier professional then think about teachers. They shape kids who are the most important thing in most parents life. They get paid shit.
(2) You might not be as valuable as you think. Consider a hedge fund. The core strength there is to be able to raise the hundreds of millions of $$$ from clients. If you have that then you can easily get someone to write software to manage it. While there are certainly business around it, in most cases if you only write the software to manage the funds then you aren't going to be able to raise money for the fund based on the software. Core competencies matter.
(3) Your view of what a person does is absolutely not going to be the same as what they actually do. Simple example is execs. Do you think a Google director is the person writing the best code? Or they are the best at designing a product? Or keeping systems reliable at scale?
A lot of their value is in the ability to take resources that Sundar might give them and make Google successful in some area. There is immense value in Sundar being able to delegate and trust that there is a very good chance of success. His bandwidth is limited and has massive opportunity costs.
So you need to really understand what is valuable to your company, figure out how you can add to it and in the process somewhat prove that you are in higher demand than you are being paid to get paid better.
Till then you can certainly justify to yourself that the world is doing you wrong because you can code and those who can't get paid more. Or you can understand why things might be the way they are and productively change things.
Blind is always there for to circlejerk about how coding make the world work. It's not very useful beyond that though.