Why tech salaries are low (and why the problem is almost never the field)

We hear it all the time: tech salaries are low. In programming. In support. In any corner of the field the market labels "technology." It turns into a grievance, a rant, a post. I've heard it up close and from afar, and the complaint almost always arrives before the definition.

Low compared to what? To that colleague on LinkedIn? To the doctor down the street? To the average in your city? To the number you imagine you deserve? Without that, the conversation is just a mood. And a mood doesn't pay the bills or change a career.

Before saying "low," pick your yardstick

The Brazilian population, on the whole, isn't that well paid. That matters. If the yardstick is the national average, plenty of people in tech are already far from the bottom. If the yardstick is the top 1% of tech Twitter, almost everyone "earns too little."

Look at the city. Look at the region. Sometimes the salary seems low because the local average is already low: a small city, a thin market, few companies competing for the same workers. Judging without that context is like comparing rents without knowing the neighborhood.

There's another structural point: scarcity. Medicine has a high training barrier. In tech, the barrier is more porous. You can work without a degree. That's good for getting in. It also dilutes a bit of the "official" scarcity that pushes prices up in other fields. It's not an excuse to pay badly. It's a variable we need to put on the table before shouting that the whole field is broken.

The question that hurts more than the average

The part I think matters most isn't other people's salaries. It's you.

Look at your current job: is what you get paid today at least roughly in line with what you give back to the company? Say the salary you consider "high" is 10, 15 or 20 thousand reais. Your actions, your work, the results of your day to day need to generate at least that, and in practice a lot more.

A company needs profit. A company pays taxes on what it pays you and on what it earns. If you "generate" exactly the value of your salary, the math doesn't work for the other side. So the mental rule I use is: if you want X, think about how much you need to contribute for the company to still make a profit after costs and taxes, taking risk into account. Five times your salary isn't some mystical dogma. It's a rough way of remembering that payroll isn't the only cost of your seat.

The further you move into management roles, the more this shows. Not because managers are saints. Because high-impact strategy carries risk. Whoever steers the ship puts their own neck on the line, and when they get it right, they move revenue in a way a single ticket rarely does. Risk taken on and revenue generated go together. Salary follows that curve more often than we admit when we're annoyed at our paycheck.

If nobody will pay you more, the diagnosis changes

Some companies pay less than you're worth. That happens. It's the market. The simple test: can you get another job that pays better?

If you can, the problem may be the place. If you can't, if the field "pays badly" everywhere for you, sometimes the problem isn't the field. It's the fit between what you deliver, what you signal and what the market is willing to buy from you right now.

I see this in every trade. There are personal trainers who don't even make minimum wage. There are personal trainers who bring in close to 100 thousand a month. In tech, the range is just as wide: some people earn little and some earn a lot. The field isn't a single ceiling. It's a distribution. Complaining about the average without looking at where you sit on that curve is like complaining about the weather without checking your coat.

Cost or contribution

An ugly but useful metric: if you stopped tomorrow, what would happen to revenue?

Sometimes you're not on the end that "sells." Even so, you can look at the project: how much does it generate? How much loss does it prevent? How much does it speed up the work or reduce risk? If the honest answer is "almost nothing visible," you're operating as a cost. Costs have a ceiling. Contribution has a higher ceiling, and a more negotiable one.

We inflate our egos easily. We think we're worth more than our objective contribution supports. The opposite happens too: some people generate a lot and accept little out of fear or because they never have the conversation. Both mistakes exist. If the contribution is already there, the path is to negotiate, or to move when the place won't pay. If it isn't there yet, you need to change what you deliver.

And AI enters that equation. If you use the tool to ship code faster, what changed for the business? Did the product get out sooner? Did rework go down? Did you solve a problem that used to sit untouched? That's where the productivity gain starts to become an argument for asking for more. More code in the repository, on its own, says very little.

But producing more doesn't guarantee getting paid more either. If your contribution grew, you need to be able to show it and have room to negotiate. The company may keep the whole gain. Which brings back the question: how much more are you generating now, and who is willing to pay for that work?

What we call "low tech salaries" is often low contribution, a badly chosen yardstick or a middling position in a field with a wide range. Generating more strengthens your negotiation, but salary also depends on the market and on the alternatives you have.

Two metrics and the danger of being lukewarm

The formula I see working is no mystery: real dedication to your career.

Being lukewarm doesn't work. Hot or cold. The middling end up in the middle, and the average salary tends to reflect exactly the middling contribution. Clean code, better process, an idea that helps your boss, results that show: that's not productivity theater. It's how you get out of the pile the market prices as one.

Obviously this doesn't mean becoming a monk or giving up your life. It means refusing the ordinary when the ordinary is exactly the package that gets the "not so high" salary we came here to complain about.

So assess two things with brutal honesty:

1. How much you contribute to revenue (or to protecting it) at your current company.
2. How ready your résumé (experience, portfolio, story, network) is to back up the number you want.

If the first is weak, the answer isn't a hashtag against the field. It's generating more, taking on more real risk, or changing the kind of problem you solve. If the second is weak, studying, building, showing up and changing context stop being "motivation" and become prerequisites. If both are strong and the place won't pay, then yes: find someone who will. The field has people who pay.

In short

A "low" salary without a yardstick is just frustration. With a local yardstick, with contribution, with risk and with the real market, the picture changes.

Tech isn't a single sentence of misery. It's a wide distribution. The average describes the middle. If you want out of the middle, you need to get out of the middle's contribution, and sometimes out of the middle's job.

I say this from both sides of the table: as an employee of a company abroad and as a business owner here. In both roles, the math is similar. Payroll only goes up comfortably when the value generated goes up first. The rest is noise about the whole field, noise that rarely makes your bank balance grow.

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Watch the full video at Por que o Salário em TI é baixo? - Carreira (in Portuguese). There I go into detail on the market yardstick, the contribution versus salary math, the role of risk in higher positions and why being lukewarm pushes us back to the average.