Fail to compete and you'll be left behind in terms of compensation, performance review rankings, and career growth, the last of which also limits your future job choices. It also puts you nearer the top of the list for layoffs when corporate finances get tight.
But those things shouldn’t bother you if you aren’t interested in the “more more more” society. It’s easy to get a stable programming job in the US that pays $80k and has very little lay-off risk.
You can’t have it both ways complaining about being left behind in comp while not participating in the grind that allows those comps to go higher.
Lower paid jobs can be worse. That they can’t afford to pay you more might mean they are doing something noble but usually it is a wannabe growth startup being badly run and pushing down pressure on lower waged staff to compensate.
But you have a point: at 80k requirement you could easily freelance to earn that, for non technical people. Help set up shopify stores etc. and not need
to constantly be on a learning grind.
I don’t think wanna be growth startup is really typical. Typical lower, but not that low paid tech job is more like maintain software tooling that supports mechanical engineers testing, or aids insurance appraisal, or replacing ladder logic industrial automation with something that has more iot type features (and still might be partially ladder logic). Probably all those pay 80k-100k to someone with a few years experience. The downsides are dingy offices that you’ll have to show up in sometimes, and for the last one, potentially lots of travel to not too exciting places.
Participating in the grind however means tossing away millions of employee-hours on paper-pushing jobs that don't really accomplish much, either in terms of personal development or corporate benefit. This is being evidenced almost daily by wave after wave of layoffs for the relatively well-heeled tech industry.
