[crispyambulance]

Scale is not the most important factor. It really is about supply and demand. If employers could get away with paying their developers 30K a year, they would (... and they do whenever possible).

The actual scale of the work certainly informs the compensation, like it might for other jobs like journalists for example, but that is only part of the story. If you need developers, you simply gotta pay them salaries the are competitive with what others pay for that particular role.

[ProblemFactory]

Scale is part of the demand side of the supply and demand equation.

Using dkopi's example, at a company with 2M users, it's worth hiring a developer for each "penny per user per month" problem. A company with 1B users, it's worth hiring a developer for each "0.002 pennies per user per month" problem.

Or similarly, if you look at developers who work on internal tools that save other developers time. At a startup with 40 employees, each new tools developer must save everyone else two days per year. At a large company with 20 000 developers, each new tools developer must be able to save everyone else 6 minutes per year.

As the scale gets bigger, smaller and smaller problems become worth hiring people for.

[ryuker16]

Tell that to investors.

Long term Efficiency versus short term gains is the issue.

A company like google can get away with this but not most.

[pbecotte]

Scale IS the most important factor, because it controls the "demand" side of "supply and demand". So long as hiring someone makes the company more than they cost, the company will be willing to pay that price. Because software is so well leveraged in creating profits, it means there are nearly infinite spots where companies could make a profit by hiring a developer at current rates. The rates will continue to rise, and the supply will continue to increase, until it has hit equilibrium.