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by badpun 2242 days ago
> Margins are super low on pretty much everything that's not a B2B behemoth

There's tons of in-house custom enterprise software development where, depending on the skills of the manager leading the project, the idea for the developed solution can be sold to upper management as the second coming of Christ (e.g. we'll spend $10m over two years on developers and potentially earn/save hundreds of millions) and this unlocks a pot of gold for the development budget. The manager will then want to hire good/expensive devs as this increases the chance that the team will deliver what he promised to the upper management. I've seen this multiple times in large organizations I've worked for.
1 comments
monocasa 2242 days ago
That's equally true of a lot of hardware. I worked on a storage device that could store an exabyte. Went for 10s of millions before even talking about the support contract where the money is.

It doesn't change the underlying equation.

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badpun 2241 days ago
I suspect there's just not enough jobs like that (most is low-margin consumer electronic crap), hence there's little competition (in terms of throwing money at people) for the best people, and the salaries for that skillset don't rise. Meanwhile, all the corporations need millions of Java developers to work on important projects and it creates enough pressure on salaries.
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monocasa 2240 days ago
The UK needs millions of Java developers too, and they get peanuts.

https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Computer_Programmer...

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