Surgeons and engineers make bank last I checked, so that's a bit of a funny example. Markets do reward in-demand practical skills.
What societies (in general) really reward is dumb luck and networking, though.
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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Ehm mister or not,
What engineers does society in 2026 reward? Last time I checked everyone is fucked
The people at FAANGS (or whatever they're calling it now) famously start with wages that would be the absolute peak of someone else's career. Never mind comparing to an unskilled worker.
I know less about what physical/"real" engineers make in 2026, but I doubt it's changed that much.
Real engineer here, mechanical working to design medical devices like plates and screws for trauma cases.
We average around $100k across the US, and on the extreme end can top out around $200k, but that's a rare case. Typical top end is $150k with I'd say at least 12 years if experience.
Starting salary typically $70k.
This is for places that are average COL, so not San Francisco, and also not Alabama.
Yeah, that's decent. Not fuck-you money, but decent.
OP asked for any example, so I went with FAANGS, but wages there are inflated by being a bunch of monopolies all headquartered in the same place. Last I heard a senior dev in Canada makes like 60k.
A senior dev in Canada also makes 6 figures.
But some recruiters label beginner positions as senior for whatever reason.
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Is there any system that reward talent, hard work or skill ?
In theory yes but in practice greedy leeches have found their way
If you try to do that you need metrics for evaluation and then you get people gaming the metrics. One example is academia.
You would think, but actually there's been some recent research that I think has interesting conclusions. The example, which is semi-related, is performance as a manager. When promoted using merit based, people tended to perform worse bcz they are promoted based on past performance in unrelated roles. When promoted randomly, the people who excelled at being a manager stayed in that position, and outperformed others who were promoted based on merit.
The point being, you don't know who's going to be good at something based on past performance in unrelated roles. We've built an entire system based on that concept, and it's not really that surprising that it doesn't work that well. If I can find the research article again, I'll link it.
Edit: found it
The point being, you don't know who's going to be good at something based on past performance in unrelated roles.
What's surprising to me isn't that the random promotion system works over the performance in past unrelated roles system...
What's surprising to me is that you practically never see the only other logical conclusion used in the business world much.
Aptitude testing.
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Market socialism maybe. Look up mutualism and anarcho-syndicalism.
But personally I don't think we need to do that. It's to each according to need, not to each according to ability. We shouldn't give people less because they're disabled or more because they're abled.
^ this.
Once we can meet everyone's needs, then we can start talking about how to allocate the surplus. But I trust a society that takes cade of its people more than I trust us, in our current state, to have the right ideas about how that should work.
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Sports, kinda. It's possible to go unrewarded with them, but it's very hard to go rewarded without them.
If you mean economic system, not really. Capitalism rewards having capital over everything else, communism (if we ignore the flawed attempts and go for theory) rewards everyone equally irrelevant of how hard you work or what your skills are. Though being skilled in something that's actually pleasant as a job is a reward in itself as you won't have to work manual labour.
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No, because it would be up to people to assess talent/hard work/skill and people are imperfect.
Also would you even want that system? Reward a bunch of John Henrys for killing themselves when their work should be done by machines? Reward artists for art that no one can appreciate? Reward skill that doesn't ultimately benefit anyone?
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This implies neurosurgeons aren’t talented
Well, it's not rocket science...
Spoken like a true butthurt neurosurgeon
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in before some child comes, downvotes people and bullshits about how Elon is actually very clever
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I'm all of those and I'm super rich
an yet, you're on lemmy with the rest of us...
fake and possibly gay
Hey, we all love you if you're gay. Fake, however, that's unforgivable.
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