The jobs are massively not the same. It's like saying the IT guy that's in charge of reimaging PCs at your municipal office is broadly doing the same job as the couple that built this lan house.
There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.
There is plenty of crossover. e.g. look at the salaries of an engineer at Netflix vs one at ABC/Disney that works on their streaming platform.
Netflix is operating at a higher technical level, no doubt. But the salaries can be something like 5x higher. Maybe all industries are like that but I’m not sure they are.
It's the same shock/objection that's expressed at CEO salaries: Do we really think the engineer at Netflix who makes $1M/yr is really 10X more productive or adding 10X more value than the engineer at NoNameCo who makes $100k/yr? Or are people simply paid what each company is willing to pay them, without some kind of full-industry merit-based leveling system? In my view, pay has long since totally divorced from productivity and more closely tracks random chance of what company you ended up in, and who acquired who.
> There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.
I'd love to see some data on this though I don't know how you'd measure it. I suspect a high percentage of west coast FAANG level jobs are low impact but also low complexity. I do figure people work more hours though. With scale comes new problems but also a lot of infrastructure and support around it.
It's pretty silly to use IT guy when there's loads of software devs working on complex stuff for critical infrastructure making less than 200k.
There's growing popular sentiment that being a millionaire/billionaire at all is morally repugnant and antisocial behavior that deserves to be shunned, if not punished.
If a kid graduated with comp sci degree in 2000, joined decent companies as a w2 employee, does he become "repugnant" and "deserves to be shunned if not punished" the moment his net worth crosses 1m, which may happen within a few years of graduation?
Or does he need to "marinade" a few years as a millionaire before we roll out the guillotine?
If he joined a worse company (or slacked and didn't get promoted) and hadn't become a millionaire, does he avoid the repugnancy and punishment?
What if he did make the money but blew on stupidity, does that also avoid that classification?
My understanding most Tier 1 employers are paying $700k-$1.5m usd per year in TC.
$75k is less than his tax bill.
Also the home is in Texas (I think). So lower cost square footage.