I’m a software engineer with 8 years in the industry, currently at an R&D lab as a staff software engineer. My wife’s an accountant. Across every job I’ve ever had — and every job she’s had — there’s a pattern that’s so consistent it’s starting to feel like we’re losing our minds:

We are constantly overworked and relatively underpaid… while the majority of our peers are chronically under-worked and wildly overpaid.

At my current job, I’m now starting work at 6 AM and wrapping up around 5:30 or 6 PM, five days a week. It’s meeting after meeting, plus deep technical work that actually moves the needle. And in the middle of this, my boss will randomly ping me for “status updates,” as if I might be kicking back on the beach instead of drowning in deadlines.

Meanwhile, the managerial class — from what I can tell — spends their days in “alignment sessions” and “strategy syncs”, sends a few vague emails, and leverages the work of their teams to look busy. This specifically is something I've noticed my entire SWEng career: middle-management, product managers, <insert_noun> managers will *use you*, the engineer, as a mechanism to appear useful (i.e. PM can just say "Yeah, I've got tuckerpo working on that.", somehow commanding a gigantic salary).

And hell, it's not even exclusive to management: I've got a half dozen buddies working remote for Nvidia, absolutely SWIMMING in RSUs, like, newly minted millionaires, who will come to my apartment in the middle of the work-day to "hang out", for hours, while supposedly on the clock. These are Principal+ engineers.

My wife’s story is even more absurd. She’s in the office from 7 AM to 6 PM, buried in work. Her peers? Many openly admit to doing maybe two hours of actual work a week, sometimes calling her just to chat because they’re “bored.” When she raises her workload with management, she gets gaslit: told it’s a “time management” problem, as if her 11-hour workdays are just the result of her not using the right productivity app. Again, not a one-off deal, consistent trend across roles at several companies for her.

We both feel like we’re starring in The Truman Show. We’re surrounded by people who seem to have cracked some secret corporate code... getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to appear important while producing very little tangible output.

So, a few questions for readers here on HN:

- Is this just us? Are we somehow in a doomer echo chamber of two, convincing each other that we’re the only ones actually doing work?

- Or is this a widespread thing across industries? Do you feel it too?

- Are we total jamokes for actually working?

- And the real question: how do we get in on this game? How do you climb into that gilded $250k+ corporate tier where your main deliverable is a calendar full of recurring Zoom calls and the occasional “per my last email”? Do we get MBAs? Learn to politic and schmooze?