This is why I went into freelance. It’s not about being a junior, there are people that put in so little effort they basically bring negative value, and I’m being paid comparable to them

This can be said for every profession.

> you're a senior delivering 10x the value of a grad

Not arguing one way or another. But an alternate hypothesis would be this skill gap has closed.

Education might be better. Or tooling may have improved such that the tangible benefit of experience has, for most current applications, depreciated. Assuming the reduced innovativeness of the average tech worker today versus ten years ago, the equation balances.

Test might be measuring this skill gap in new industries (e.g. crypto) versus established ones (like adtech).

Even with the best education, tooling and copy-paste resources, it still takes at least 4-5 years to become competent. In my opinion, entry-level quality as consistently dropped over the last 20 years.

It's not, juniors are as bad as they were 2 years ago. Generally it's politically easier to nerf better paid employees than cheap ones.

You can have the socialist argument of "hey senior engineer, take a salary cut / no raise for the common good, to avoid layoffs of junior engineers - which btw would be the first to go as they're not as productive as you are" and I've seen plenty of senior engineers accept that. Their livelihood are not as stake so they'll take one for the team, forgetting that it's a for profit company which can't find the money.

In the above scenario, I refused and I wasn't fired - but I also started looking for a job and switched 2 weeks after the above episode happened.

How is that a socialist argument? Telling workers to share resources because the company refuses to reduce its profit margin sounds capitalist to me.

Do you still believe pay is directly correlated with how much "value" you deliver?

Maybe in an alternative world, it would... but in my experience, salaries are almost entirely based on market demand and supply, local regulation, and how much money the particular industry you can find jobs on can make, divided by how many people they need to make it happen (which changes how much they pay when they get desperate for experienced workers).

How much value you actually deliver depends not only on your skills, but on the company you're working on actually creating value (which depends on not only the product, but the marketing, sales, local conditions, competition etc.)... and even though that will affect your salary, as I mentioned before, the real driver of salaries is supply (more specifically, how many capable people could do the job besides you, and how much other companies would be willing to pay them)...

For example, we know lots of companies that made billions of dollars while only employing a few dozen engineers... I'm pretty sure those engineers were only getting the minimum possible salary to keep them from leaving for another job... despite them each arguably producing several million dollars of company value every year.

On the other hand, lots of companies make losses for year while still paying good salaries to thousands of people... would you rather see those people getting no salaries until the company turned a profit??

Now that we've established that there's no real correlation between the value an individual salaried employee produces and how much money a company is actually willing to pay them, let's look at the social aspect of the problem as well.

When everyone gets a decent pay (by us increasing the bottom relative to the top), society is fairer in a greater sense, as more people will have the means to have a good life regardless of their education or skills... those with greater skills will always be more highly appreciated and better compensated in a free economy (specially those willling to start their own business - which allows them to extract nearly ALL value they produce at the cost of high risk to themselves... by the way, that's why those who do it are not willing to give their salaried employees ALL the value they deliver). That has great benefits to society as a whole as there is going to be fewer people that resent the "smart asses" making 10x more than themselves, the economy becomes more vibrant as there's more people who can afford to spend money on fun things, and so much more... imagine your son turns out to be a bit dumb (it happens, unfortunately)... should he be doomed to a life of misery?

Finally, you assume you deliver 10x more than someone else but I bet you have zero evidence to back that up. Developers specially are extremely hostile to actually having objective measurements of anything, so we can't really know for sure.

So, that's why I think that no, it's not very fair for anyone to make 10x more than anyone else.