All of what you are saying is true, but it's on a different track. I was addressing what I thought and still think were incorrect statements by Spooky23.

I did not restrict myself to state-wide numbers. I also listed information about the metropolitan regions with the highest officer, first-line management of officers, and software developer salaries.

I am unsure as to what your point is. Should I have included cost-of-living adjustments? That seems unduly difficult for the point I was trying to make, which itself was an order of magnitude above the written effort by Spooky23 in making those statements in the first place.

The numbers I reported already seemed tilted since I excluded the two highest paying states (California and Washington). Even then, software developers were still making 15K/year more than the 75 percentile of police officers (patrol and first-line). The full analysis would also have to define what "hick" means; I arbitrarily decided it was the bottom 20 or 30% of salaries. I strongly doubt this is true.

There are 954 people in the Deputy Sheriff Retirement System of West Virginia. this is essentially confirmed with https://www.wvretirement.com/DSRS.html which says "DSRS currently has approximately 990 active members and 299 retired members."

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_wv.htm#23-0000 says there are 3,500 "Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers" for West Virginia, and 410 "First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives" with median wages of $37,830 and $54,910, respectively.

You can see that Deputy Sheriffs don't make much ( http://woodcountywv.com/page/page149.php says Annual Salary $32,603, http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Berkeley-County-Sheriff-West... says $36K, http://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/tri_state/west_virginia/... says $36,048.)

Thus it cannot be that most of the police officers employed in West Virginia retire in the Deputy Sheriff Retirement System because some 75% of the police officers are not deputy sheriffs.

As a further refinement of your numbers, https://www.wvretirement.com/DSRS.html reports "Active members contribute 8.5% of their gross monthly salary pre-tax and the Sheriff's Office contributes an additional 12.5% of the member's gross monthly salary... A member is vested after completion of 60 months of covered employment. ... A regular retirement benefit, paid in equal monthly installments, is an amount equal to 2.25% of a member's final average salary multiplied by the member's years of credited service." This is in line with what you estimated.

I then went to https://www.wvretirement.com/Forms/2012-CAFR.pdf . On p187 it says that 1 pensioner made over $60K/year in pension, 1 made over $48K, and most (168 of 272) made under $24K/year. It also says that plan is set up to earn 7%/year. The math to see if that all works out is not something I want to do now.

Under my earlier numbers, I estimated a software developer salary of $93,486, which is about 20% higher than the officer salary of $77,683. With access to the same pension savings fund, doesn't that make the two salaries roughly equivalent, and give the software developer a chance to retire after 20 years?

Of course, there are no software development unions in the US to oversee such a retirement fund. Our loss.