> Why do football players, musicians and movie actors get payed 1000x as much as the software engineers who made the technology to make possible their success?

They don’t. The notion that they do is laughable.

Let’s look at baseball. Baseball players are known for having huge multi-million dollar contracts, right? But that’s only major league players. The vast majority of professional baseball players play in the minor leagues, where they earn just a few thousand dollars a month (and they don’t get paid in the offseason). And that’s not all; minor leaguers are still really really good at baseball. They’re all easily in the top 2-3% of baseball players. There are simply no jobs for the other 97%.

The average minor league baseball player making $15k a year playing baseball is a vastly better at playing baseball than the typical senior developer making $120k a year at $BIGCORP is at programming.

As for the couple hundred guys making multiple millions a year who you hear about all the time? Well, there’s even more engineers who have struck it rich with a startup, and no baseball player will ever come close to Zuckerberg-level wealth.

> As for the couple hundred guys making multiple millions a year who you hear about all the time? Well, there’s even more engineers who have struck it rich with a startup, and no baseball player will ever come close to Zuckerberg-level wealth.

You are comparing employees to a CEO and business owner (which doesn't have anything to do with technology, other than for the initial lines of code). Of course he has more wealth.

So there are billionaire baseball coaches?

In fairness, there are billionaire team owners, but they didn’t become billionaires by founding baseball teams.

CEO of a company with a single product, which is a web app that he wrote the first several versions of by himself, in his dorm room. Yeah, he did it in PHP, but that doesn't mean he wasn't an "engineer" working on "technology."

Still not an employee. If I inherited a big fortune would you put me too as an example of how lucrative this career is?

> Why do football players, musicians and movie actors get payed 1000x as much as the software engineers who made the technology to make possible their success?

Do you think their jobs are cake walks? You think football players really enjoy the training, really enjoy destroying their bodies on a weekly basis? You think musicians haven't toiled for years and years making no money at all before reaching the level where they can make a living?

Even if you believe that they enjoy every minute of it, you are pointing at an extreme minority. Software engineers are in the top 5 best paid jobs and frankly, our jobs are ridiculously easy and enjoyable.

It's incredible to me how hard these guys work and the level of ambition they have.

I always say Tom Cruise, Christian Bale, etc. (pick any major actor) would have been successful in their life no matter what since they have the incredible drive and discipline to achieve their goals.

I also get just a bit frustrated when we boil everything down to "software/tech runs the world" so we should be glorified in some way. Well, sewage systems also run the world. I certainly don't recall or care who built that.

Seconded.

It reminds me of a quote from Muhammad Ali:

“I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion'.”

Now I'm not going to say that every athlete or musician is like that, which is part of the point; reality generally defies generalizations, but I will say that discounting the work professional athletes put in is a bit narrow minded, regardless of any perceived pay-hardwork or pay-joy ratio.

Another quote I've heard and liked: "Training is like wrestling with a gorilla. You don't stop when you're tired. You stop when the gorilla is tired."

And the gorilla is never tired.

Apples and oranges. Only the top 1% of athletes, musicians, actors make a living off it. Compare them to the top 1% of programmers.

Alternatively if you compare all aspiring athletes, musicians, and actors to all programmers, you may find that programming does pretty well.

A good point. When you look at the top richest people of the world, some of them are (were) programmers. None of them are sports or movie stars.

eh, I don't think that's the same. Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, they weren't top 1% programmers. They are simply people who knew programming (to some degree) and got rich from their business ideas. Whereas the athletes, like Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, are incredibly talented.

The closest you can find in the programming world is probably John Carmack, who found a way to earn a large sum of money based directly on his programming talent.

You can't say that Gates and Zuckerberg were not talented though. They definitely were in the right place in the right time but if you look at their early history you would find people who did their due diligence when it came to programming and got the business running and then stepped into managerial roles. They have multiple talents if you will which is only evident by juggling all responsibilities and seeing things through. Of course athletes like Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods are incredibly talented but only in a single field. They have managers who handle the rest of their business affairs.

Zuckerburg got lucky as well. I has signed up to a few similar apps before facebook, but the timing was right to get a critical mass.

Wow. Who is to say every single professional athlete and musician and actor enjoys every single second of their career?

Athletes' bodies are taxed to the maxed. Most of the above are in the public light 24/7, they might feel unsafe and have to hire bodyguards. That's not something everyone is going to enjoy. These people work hard, sometimes long hours. They are on the road, sometimes away from their families for long periods of time. This might be an exciting life at first, but wears you down after a few years.

Your average working musician has a "day job" playing for weddings, churches, and corporate events anyway. Not the life of luxury you seem to imagine. They are spending their off time marketing, networking, and planning their next event.

Most actors don't "make it big" and spend most of their time auditioning for roles, networking, and spending time looking for more work. I know a actor. She actually quit and got a "day job" because of the unstable nature of the work. If you get a role, you're still working under a deadline, and you're still working under the authority of someone else. I've heard in an interview somewhere that TV actors can work up to 12 hours a day.

After all, while preparing for the Australian Open Serena Williams said "I don't love tennis today, but ... I've actually never liked sports."

What about the people who support the infrastructure that make your job possible? The people who get paid less than you. The people (probably immigrants) who work in farms and factories and slaughterhouses to bring you food? The cooks and servers in the restaurant. The workers in China who build your computer/computer parts.

So basically the takeaway from all of this is that instead of walking on the backs of the downtrodden, all those immigrants, infrastructure people, poultry producers and programmers should be paid a hell of a lot larger portion of the profits.

Are you really lumping bottom 5-10% wage earners with the top 5-10% of wage earners in a nation, and calling them both downtrodden?

>Who is to say every single professional athlete and musician and actor enjoys every single second of their career?

Why does this "every single second" strawman keep cropping up? The complaint was not that every single second of programming isn't glorious, it is that every single second is shit. The idea is not "other jobs are perfect because they are fun all the time", it is "other jobs are better because they aren't 100% pure shit all the time". If you don't agree that programming is 100% pure shit all the time, then argue against that. But don't stoop to lame strawman arguments.

I wasn't intending to attack a stawman. I thought the parent implied that. I am sorry if I mistook the meaning of their comment.

Personally, I don't find single second of my job to be shit. I really enjoy my job for the most part. There is some time spend on mind numbing tasks, but I tend to take those in stride. I wouldn't want to do anything else really. There's pros and cons to every occupation.

While I was reading OP's article, I remembered a blog post by an actor. The blog was gone, but basically what he said was that even those who were lucky to act for full-time in Hollywood, 95% of their work is mundane stuff. Basic training. Networking. Auditions. Imagine that you take job interviews twice a week and once hired for 3 months you take employee evaluation every day. That's their life.

They endure that life because they know the door that opens to the field where they can do what they want is only reachable through this muddy road.

I program both for work and for fun, and I can understand that. (I also act, only occasionally, and yeah, regular programming job is a lot more stable and low-risk, so it's understandable that the upside is a lot lower.)

why do you make 100k while the cleaning lady who provides you with health thru a clean infrastructure should just suck it up and call it work?