but I don’t think most are designed to control people’s opinions

Yeah I’m on team chaos theory. People can plan and design shit all they want, but the complexity will lead to unexpected behavior, always. How harmful that unwanted behavior is, or how easy it is to control or contain, is often unknown in advance, but invented things tend to develop far, far outside the initial vision of the creators.

You have to expect that OP, who is well established in his field, to compare accordingly, not with average pay of 1990.

I’m talking about a number that is 1.4x the 95th percentile generally. It’d be weird to assume that programmers were getting paid that much more than doctors and lawyers and bankers.

According to this survey series, median IEEE members were making about $58k (which was also the average for 35-year-olds in the survey. Electrical engineering is a closely related discipline to programming.

So yeah, an $81k salary was really, really high in 1990. I suspect the original comment was thinking of the 90’s in general, and chose a salary from later in the decade while running the inflation numbers back to 1990, using the wrong conversion factor for inflation.

Edited to add: this Bureau of Labor Statistics publication summarizes salaries by several professions and experience levels as of March 1990. The most senior programmers were making around $34k, the most senior systems analysts were making about $69k, and the most senior managers, who could fairly be described as executives, were making about $88k.

Were people getting paid $81k in 1990? This site shows that 95th percentile in 1990 was $58k, and doesn’t have more granular data than that above the 95th percentile. So someone making $81k was definitely a 5 percenter, maybe even a 2 percenter.