Do Harder Jobs Pay More?

Early in my career, I had two choices: infrastructure or business applications. I chose infrastructure because it was more challenging. But after some time, I realized that pay isn’t always linked to difficulty. (Fun fact: infrastructure teams at big tech companies are often based in cities with lower average salaries.)

Pay depends mainly on scarcity—that is, how supply and demand match. While difficulty affects the number of people who can do the job (supply), demand is shaped by factors like market trends. One key factor related to the work itself is how reusable it is. Infrastructure is highly reusable. For example, there are only about 348 relational databases in use worldwide. Business applications, on the other hand, are harder to transfer across companies—even though there are many application frameworks.

From a company’s perspective, business applications are more directly tied to profit, so they’re willing to pay more. Infrastructure usually plays a supporting role.

But that doesn’t mean one is more valuable than the other. The value of business applications is more visible to companies, while infrastructure often has broader externalities. That’s why I believe big tech companies that benefit from open-source infrastructure should take more responsibility for supporting open-source communities.