Open letter: Why is a developer's work worth so much?

Spoiler: Because you're paying for what a developer does during their work, outside of their work, but also for what they don't do!

The work of developers, whether web, software, embedded, or mobile developers, is one of the best paid jobs in France (and pretty much everywhere else in the world too).

And note that I'm talking about developers in a salaried position, not even freelancers, whose compensation is a whole other topic!

A few weeks ago, I also published an article dedicated to the evolution of my salary over time (a good part of which was as a freelancer), here's the link if you're interested.

Compared to the average salary, developers generally rank well above to the point where some people come to think that the pay relative to the effort involved is exaggerated.

"Really, a developer just writes code, right?"

I decided to write this open letter to explain what you're actually paying for when you pay a developer's salary, and to show that our job is not simply about spitting out lines of code, far from it!

A developer has spent an enormous amount of time (often several years) initially training themselves, they invested time and money in order to develop mastery or expertise in various complex technologies.

You're paying for skills that few people have if you look at the population as a whole.

This developer has experimented, tested, failed, tried again, and learned for hours on end, thanks to numerous projects, often on their own free time.

You're paying for experience.

They've acquired skills and ways of working efficiently that now allow them to do in a few lines of code what used to take them weeks to produce.

So you're paying for their ability to move faster.

They regularly keep up with the field, staying up to date by reading documentation, blogs, listening to podcasts, or watching video courses, most of the time outside their working hours.

You're paying for their continuous learning.

But what you're also paying for is everything they don't do, like not introducing flaws into the tools they build, and like the thousands of lines of code they don't write because they found a more efficient solution.

And everything a developer doesn't do is sometimes worth more than what they do.

In short, when you pay a developer, you're not paying someone who writes code (not only that), but someone who devotes their professional life to learning, imagining, and creating creative solutions to complex problems that, statistically, few people know how to solve.