[Bucephalus355]

I’m in Austin, Texas. I’m 26, graduated with a BA in Sociology, and make $140,000 as an AWS Engineer.

There’s tons of money in engineering in the United States, but I would say it has come with a cost. The only reason so much money has been able to be plowed into software and hardware was because of financial products developed by Wall Street since the 1970’s. Obviously we’ve seen great results in software and hardware, but all the recent financial busts have shown there is no free lunch...

[chrisco255]

Financial products? Fintech is but a small portion of the overall software industry. Neither Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, nor Amazon specialize in fintech, and the big 5 are as much a driver of high salaries as anything else. We get paid highly because, while software is expensive to build, it's basically free to distribute and so you have huge economies of scale where sometimes as few as 50 employees can make a multi-billion dollar product. And also, because software is hard to do well and there is so much platform explosion.

[Bucephalus355]

“Financial Products” as in online trading, convertible stock, debt securities, etc that made it easier for investors to invest in things like Google, Apple, etc.

Perhaps the biggest example is the 401k, which shifted huge funds towards Wall Street. It’s not fintech, but just an example of a new type of product.

I hope that explains better than my original post.