| First of all: supply and demand. Software development is a field where supply and demand apply without debate. Supply and demand are only ineffective when there is a form of monopoly / regulation in place. Which is not the case here: 1) It's very easy to make a startup software company (in comparison to others types of companies), and there is a healthy pool of existing company 2) CS education is very popular and we have a flow of new graduate every year, on top of that self-teaching is quite accessible. Now, that means that the market is leaning toward demand (for programmers). Being "necessary" have never being enough to have a high salary, there are countless jobs badly paid at very wealthly companies, you must be necessary (demand) AND difficult to replace (supply too low) to have a high salary. Some reason of the current trend: - Very low supply of very high quality that a lot of projects requires: there is a huge difference between "programming" and actually doing software engineering at scale. And if you add some specialities like ML or security, the pool of candidate is getting very low. - Rush for leading certain fields like AI, Autonomous vehicule, blockchain, etc... Those rushes are so fast paced that it drives the demand up. - There are so many new startups, as I said earlier it's one of the field where making a startup is the easiest, and a good amount of them have strong ambition and investments (again in comparison to other fields) |