There is substantial wage stagnation in tech. I'm pretty sure average compensation hasn't really risen much in 20 years (50k-75k entry, 125k after 5 years, average dev peaks around 200k). This is while many of these developers are making the companies they work for millions in value. Of course there are outliers, and a lot of big blowout top-of-HN companies qualify, but the number of developers has grown substantially and thus diluted the income pool to largely maintain the status quo.
And it feels like there is an active campaign by tech companies to obfuscate that fact. That they can guilt trip developers into saying "well we are still getting paid better than most people being exploited by corporations for huge profits per worker!" as if that means they shouldn't argue for their fair share of the value they create.
Some developers should be paid millions because they are making millions for the company. Some should also therefor not even be employed because they aren't actually doing anything valuable - there are a lot of "developers" that snake their way into teams where they don't contribute functional or productive code and just manage to exist as a fixture of bureaucracy where the dozen layers of management over them don't understand what programming is or how to evaluate their performance so they just collect their 6 figure check as a trick of good fortune.
So there is a faction of developers who don't want to see greater pegging of their salaries to their value, the executives usually don't want to do it because underpaying your top talent is hugely profitable, and the productive devs that should be arguing to be paid according to the value they create are guilt tripped by everyone that they shouldn't. But that absolutely produces tremendous wage stagnation. Just because developers are fortunate to be in short enough supply to demand a higher base salary doesn't change the fact the only reason there is so much demand is because there is so much money to be made.
I think this is why tech companies and venture capitalists are investing in bootcamps. Take the Lambda school for example - it got funding from Peter Thiel, Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital, Google Ventures, GGV Capital, Vy Capital, and Y Combinator.
And it feels like there is an active campaign by tech companies to obfuscate that fact. That they can guilt trip developers into saying "well we are still getting paid better than most people being exploited by corporations for huge profits per worker!" as if that means they shouldn't argue for their fair share of the value they create.
Some developers should be paid millions because they are making millions for the company. Some should also therefor not even be employed because they aren't actually doing anything valuable - there are a lot of "developers" that snake their way into teams where they don't contribute functional or productive code and just manage to exist as a fixture of bureaucracy where the dozen layers of management over them don't understand what programming is or how to evaluate their performance so they just collect their 6 figure check as a trick of good fortune.
So there is a faction of developers who don't want to see greater pegging of their salaries to their value, the executives usually don't want to do it because underpaying your top talent is hugely profitable, and the productive devs that should be arguing to be paid according to the value they create are guilt tripped by everyone that they shouldn't. But that absolutely produces tremendous wage stagnation. Just because developers are fortunate to be in short enough supply to demand a higher base salary doesn't change the fact the only reason there is so much demand is because there is so much money to be made.