[pascalxus]

You gotta understand, it's a reflection of supply and demand. Companies will treat you exactly how well you are valued by the marketplace, no better, no worse (in the long term average). There's an extremely vast oversupply of non-engineering talents (MBAs) etc, so they're treated poorly. At least with engineering there is some semblance of balance. There's still some oversupply of engineers but it's not nearly as vast as other areas.

[RestlessMind]

Then I seriously don't understand why so many tech workers want to lower the bar for entrance into the profession and induce higher supply of tech workers. What they don't realize is that that won't make lives better for the new tech workers - it will just make it worse for existing tech workers (just like what mechanical engineers or lawyers went through).

This is probably the biggest con pulled by tech companies - play on egalitarian tendencies of tech workers to induce more supply and thus gain additional leverage over employees.

[jackhack]

Correct. And it's been this way for a long, long time.

Back in the early 1990s, I recall browsing the "open positions" list, posted in the cafeteria at work and being shocked at the variance in starting salaries: Windows (3.0) Programming positions (C & Visual Basic) requiring no more than a high school education were offered at $70,000. Positions for PhD Chemists began at $35,000 and demanded a long list of accomplishments not limited to publications in major journals. "listed as primary inventor on one or more patents, a plus!"

So in summary, one trade could be learnt by a motivated self-directed student in the span of a summer, for no more cost than a short stack of books. The other required at least 6 years of advanced education and likely $50,000+ of debt -- a serious investment not only in time and money but also opportunity cost, as those 6 years are NOT being spent earning. Yet the former paid twice the latter. (And may still, for all I know.)

Obviously, this was a lead-up to the great wave of offshoring efforts. Executives must have noticed this variance as well.