You could argue that devs are being paid the money that is being extracted from lower-class workers, too. Companies get to underpay for physical production labor, construction labor, etc., and some of that gets fed into developer salaries.
More gets fed into their profits and the executive salaries, but I think you get the idea.
I don’t think you can make the argument that devs are extracting money from lower paid employees when:
1. Exec pay is 100-1000x that of dev pay. I’d also include huge war chests of cash and stock buy backs as evidence that devs aren’t the problem.
2. The vast majority of “high paying” dev roles don’t pay enough money to buy a house in the real estate market that their office is in. A metric that I’d consider bare minimum to call someone adequately paid.
I guess my point is more that devs are a symptom, not the problem. We get the runoff from their exorbitant hoards, which are derived from whole swaths of people getting hosed.
I think if you account for inflation, devs are basically one of the only roles that have been treading water to keep a middle class lifestyle while everything else has dropped through the floor. I do think it's debatable that even developer pay gives you a middle class lifestyle if you can't afford housing.
I do agree that the entire system is broken and devs are mostly working on things that add negative value to humanity but effectively hoover up capital from the masses and deposit it in the accounts of the wealthy.
More gets fed into their profits and the executive salaries, but I think you get the idea.