It also works (and is similarly disgusting) in a single country where the salary discrepancy is large.
I live in Poland, where the gap between IT and non-IT is staggering. Teaching programming easily nets me 5 times as much money as a regular public school teacher would get. Same goes for regular development work: developer salaries here are 4-6x the average salary. Are we making that much of a bigger impact on society?
Any time I visit a hairdresser, a car mechanic or anyone from the services sector and I wonder why things are expensive, I compare their hourly rates to mine. The hairdresser may be getting something like 20% of the money I'd make in that time – and they have to support the salon for some of that as well (also, they're just someone else's employee, so they get maybe half of that in the end). No longer does it seem expensive at all, and it goes for any service I can imagine.
Make these people better compensated... and I'd no longer be rich. We'd all be pretty much the same. Perhaps that's where the fear you see in some other comments here stemming from – "but this will lower the salaries for the top X%!". Yes. We'd have to admit that we're not special in terms of our contribution to society – just lucky enough to be in a booming industry. Or perhaps a growing bubble.
And sure – my work has the potential to produce a lot of value. I recently wrote software that will (indirectly) enable a large warehouse operator to essentially fire their entire workforce and replace them with robots. Last I checked, the individuals currently in that workforce make something like $5 an hour, and the business owner is proud enough to put that on their job ads. When the automation machine is finished, these people will be unemployed. How will they be making their living? Nobody in the process cares. So how has my work improved the society? In the end I'll still be stuffing myself with delivery sushi and roaring a big car on the highway – thanks to the growing supply of more and more cheap labour.
I've now digressed very far from the original discussion. But being aware of this is an endless source of frustration for me, and every discussion about "what is fair compensation" awakens it :|
If you feel you're being paid unfairly in contrast to others, move to a high tax, high income country like any in Scandinavia where everyone makes a decent income and everything is more expensive that your software engineer salary won't seem so high anymore.
But be careful what you wish for as now you'll be able to afford much less. Nice house in a family friendly neighborhood like back in Poland? Forget about it!
There's no fair. There's supply, demand and people trying to make their ends meet in between. You are just the same hired worker as everyone else, and if your bosses found a way to get your work for less money, they would gladly do it - it's just they can't. People with other professions are not paid less because of you, they are paid less because of capitalists, who get much more money than you and maintain this system. It's capitalists who should feel sorry for these people, not you.
Do you really feel "rich" as a hired employee? Eating sushi and owning a car is "rich" for you?
Relatively rich, yes. I don't think any other kind of rich exists – there's always a bigger fish :) Were we on a different website with a different audience we may be having this conversation about private jets – or a dinner at a restaurant. Perhaps "rich" was the poor choice of the word (no pun intended), but I think the meaning is preserved.
And yes, you're right: it's not because of me, I'm just a bigger cog in the same machine, and similarly exploited, just for a bigger share. It is because of the capitalists – but I believe that's what the discussion is about here. Gitlab deciding that it's not worth it to them to pay everyone equally (or according to their value) because it's “not worth it” for them – they won't be able to keep as much to themselves. Their arguments for it[1] are as weak as it gets: they literally say that they don't want to pay people better because they'd rather acquire more companies – that surely makes the underpaid employees feel better.
There are many definitions. I think the most useful and wide-spread one – even among non-economists – is from the OECD: you are rich if your household equivalised disposable income is ≥150% of the median of the country.
If you want to find out whether you meet the criterium, then try to find some newspaper articles on the Web about the poverty line or poverty gap that embed JS calculators. Otherwise see http://enwp.org/Equivalisation if you want to crunch the numbers yourself.
