[NhanH]

I was thinking along that line too. In traditional more "human" field, a good lawyer/ doctor can just do that much, regardless of how good you would be.

It would be interesting to compare revenue or profit per employee for tech company, comparing to law firms and the like.

Another thing is that we believe (ie. The Mythical Man Month) in software, there is a limit of programmers per task before you just can't throw any more body into it anymore. Is this true (or still true), and does this apply to other fields of comparison?

Immigration could likely be a bigger factor than we thought. How long has developer compensation been skyrocketing? The immigration situation to the US has only been getting shittier for the past 5-7 years mostly (although it wasn't flower and pleasant before that, if you wanted to do startup or worked in the US with a job offer, it's several folds easier back then). And seeing that it takes like 5-7 years for a startup to mature, even longer for immigration "market" to catch up with reality (it takes a long time for people to decide or to immigrate in general), it wouldn't be a surprised that compensation is still lopsided for the US.

[gaius]

would be interesting to compare revenue or profit per employee for tech company, comparing to law firms and the like

Apple makes about $2m/employee/year. Goldman Sachs makes about $1.2m. These metrics are easy to get for any public company.

[spdionis]

> there is a limit of programmers per task before you just can't throw any more body into it anymore

This is important. The effect is that to complete the task you have to effectively scale the team up, you can't scale horizontally, which increases demand on top talent.

It means that if a programmer is (theoretically) 10x more effective than an average programmer he may get much much more than 10x the pay.