Summary: we don't understand why programmers are paid so well.

Something I didn’t see addressed here or on Dan Luu’s blog post are productivity (as the main economic reason for wages) and scale ( as an amplifier for SWE productivity )

A SWE is made more productive by the tools available: fast cpus, internet, cloud, OSS, mobile

Cloud and mobile then amplify the value that the modern SWE brings to a business - but not to all of them

Businesses are not charity, they will pay less if they can