The extremely small amount of time I have to work to earn a big mac seems grossly disproportionate to the labor involved in sourcing, manufacturing, and serving a Big Mac.<p>Am I really generating N sandwiches worth of value every few minutes?<p>Or am I (systemically) skimming value off the top of what's produced by individuals who are being paid disproportionately to the value they produce?
Of course, you're comparing apples and oranges because the price of a Big Mac is determined by the local market for Big Macs. In some places, McDonalds is considered upscale food because it's American, because it's less common, etc. In some places, the quality of McDonalds is much higher (kosher burgers in Israel, I think).
For all of us who saw that title, did a quick calculation, then thought: "25 seconds", this should serve as another reminder of just how good we have it as computer programmers.<p>So yeah, you're making 10x the national average. That means you can take all but 1.2 months <i>off</i> every year to work on your startup and still earn as much as the guy stocking shelves in the grocery store.<p>It's the reason that bootstrapped software companies work at all: we have a huge (possibly unfair) advantage over everybody else when it comes to time/money balance.
I'm guessing this is before taxes (since it works out to about $15/hour in Toronto, which seems right without deductions). It would be interesting to see the tax burden taken into account.
About a decade ago a group of contract software developers (of which I was one) decided to figure out how many seconds it took each of us to earn a cup of coffee (working for a bank, nothing was free!).<p>For the person who earned their coffee fastest, the machine hadn't even dropped the cup into place before he'd earned it.