[hobofan]

I guess that depends on if you're talking about bay area comp or high comp elsewhere, which are on two very different levels, but still high compared to other jobs in their respective regions. For the bay area it might indeed be coupled to extremely profitable tech companies, but elsewhere there is still a very high demand for software engineers from SMBs.

A lot of mid-sized businesses want to gain an edge over their competition via custom software solutions. (The optimistic part in my also thinks that it's still the early days there, where companies in each niche are trying to uncover software driven upsides with fewer resources, and once those are found everyone in the niche competes over squeezing out the most of that opportunity, which requires a lot more engineering resources).

On top of that even moderately complex websites (search function + data pipeline leading into that) that a lot of 100+ people companies have require regular attention from a somewhat skilled software engineer.

So in conclusion, I think that high compensations might be driven up by "a handful of tech companies", but a lot of the demand is mostly uncoupled from that.