Tech salaries are risk premiums
Tech salaries are high for a number of reasons: programmers are highly productive, reducing the amount of work that others must do, the job is hard, and requires basically autodidacts to do it.  The personality traits for being a good programmer, I think, are rare.  There are a whole suite of poorly paid positions in the United States that are similarly difficult and not as highly paid as they could be: teachers, for instance.<p>But why do we even discuss it when there is a whole cohort of salaries that actually make no sense in comparison: All of the VP's, CEO's, etc... even stock holders just wasting efficiency collecting dividends from existing wealth and the productivity of others.  Why are tech people trying to defend their salaries when we could just point at the next people up the chain?