30 People Are Calling Out Jobs They Think Are 100% Overpaid

"In general, the people who create more economic value (profits) tend to get paid more. However, at some point, the compensation amounts become ridiculously out of touch with reality. The clear case is CEO compensation at large, publicly-traded companies," financial expert Sam told Bored Panda that some salaries simply don't make sense, given the value they don't provide.

"For example, Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai's compensation was over $280 million in 2019, largely consisting of stock awards. Nobody reasonably believes that Sundar deserves to earn that much. There are plenty of well-qualified people who could have done what he did on 1% of his total compensation."

Meanwhile, the people who bring the most value to our society don't necessarily get paid as much as they contribute. "Then you have some of the most important professions in the world, like teachers getting paid less than $100,000 a year. If children are our future and our most valuable assets, teachers should get paid way more. Society's extreme focus on profits fails to fully appreciate the work people do where immediate gains are not as clear. We need to appreciate more our stay-at-home parents, educators, nurses, and social workers," Sam said.

According to Sam, increasing our earnings potential, at its core, is about increasing our value to the company. A large part of this is using our social skills to our advantage and putting in the extra effort at work. "We must be well-liked, grow our network of supporters, work longer than the average employee, and manage our managers. I believe most of us have the ability to make six figures a year," the expert shared with Bored Panda.

"If we cannot get that raise and promotion we deserve, absolutely job hop for better opportunities. Job hopping tends to reset your value to market rate, which helps you keep climbing. Once you master the six-figure income opportunities, it's time to learn about who makes over $1 million a year to get really motivated! The top 0.1% income-earners are more ubiquitous than we think."

Of course, salaries don’t just stick to whatever the national average or mean is. They fluctuate. They deviate. Some wages make others as jealous as can be while others make them frown and mumble about how unfair life can be. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to worry about not earning enough to get by or enough to put a roof over our loved ones’ heads. However, this isn’t a perfect world and some professions appear to be vastly under/overpaid when you consider the amount of sweat, tears, and effort the workers put in.

According to Jobted, some of the professions that greatly deviate from the national average salary include pharmacists (they get roughly $112,800 per year), data scientists ($97,200), nurse practitioners ($96,285), and software engineers ($89,200).

On the flip side, some underpaid professions include electricians (they earn around $47,800 per year and are roughly 11% below the national average), pharmacy technicians ($35,800), medical assistants ($34,672), and certified nurse assistants (barely $29,286 which is 45% below the average).

What blows my mind is that jobs that sound similar have a financial gulf between them. Nurse practitioners and pharmacists earn several times more than pharmacy technicians, medical assistants, and certified nursing assistants. And it makes you wonder whether there haven’t been a few oversights here.

Previously, I reached out to financial expert Sam, the founder of the Financial Samurai blog, for a chat about why CEOs get paid so much money for what they do, compared to regular employees.

“CEOs have no magical powers. Yes, they have the operational experience to run big companies. However, they are often just spokespeople and ambassadors of the firm. One person cannot make that big a difference in a large organization. If Tim Cook from Apple steps down, the company will be fine. Another overpaid CEO will take his place,” he told Bored Panda during an interview.

“The reason why CEOs can get paid so much is due to the direct correlation of the size of the company. When a company is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, it’s easier to pay a CEO tens of millions of dollars a year, which comprised mostly of stock options,” Sam said.

“At the end of the day, the CEO and the Board of Directors’ goal is to provide as much value and returns as possible for its shareholders. And if that means firing thousands of employees, then that is what they will do. It is a sad reality of extreme capitalism,” he shared.