[brsg]

I think there's 2 opposing forces that will affect "us" (rich country engineers) over the coming decade.

1) An absolutely insatiable demand for software as _everything_ needs to be remote friendly and digital.

2) An equally insatiable demand to offshore engineering talent for a fraction of the cost.

I'm not sure which will have a greater effect. Technically, if the demand for software grows faster than the world's ability to educate developers, salaries might actually grow. However, there's a real chance the gold rush of super high California $300k+ software salaries is coming to an end.

Personally, I'm seeing moving into management as more attractive everytime I see an article posted here about remote work. People here are understandably dismissive of this, but it's happened before in a lot of industries.

[ghaff]

Rationally, it's hard to see why one branch of engineering--especially in a few locations in one country today--should generally have significant compensation premiums relative to other branches of engineering. There are a lot of dynamics involved but even just talking US universities, a lot of would-be engineering majors don't have strong preferences for one specific branch of engineering. And if there's a big salary gap...

Of course, there are legit differences in demand for all sort of reasons but it's hard to imagine some equalization of demand and compensation not happening. Especially given that for programming, as opposed to computer science more broadly, the barriers of entry are lower than for engineering more broadly.

[comp_throw7]

I mean, trivially speaking, the reason you might see a continued mismatch is that supply is only one factor - demand is the other. Increased compensation is a factor of both the size of the mismatch in supply and demand, as well as the willingness-to-pay on the demand side. Willingness-to-pay is largely a function of the returns on that kind of labor, which are much greater for software engineering than they are for other engineering disciplines, and those returns are increasing over time, not decreasing.

And, like... we _do_ see that the growth in CS degrees granted (broadly speaking - the most granular data I could find is "Computer and information sciences") does slightly outpace other the growth in other Engineering degrees: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_322.10.a...

CS/CIS went from 43,066 in 2010-11 to 88,633 in 2018-19, while Engineering went from 76,356 to 126,687 over the same time period. ~106% increase vs ~66% increase. Of course, degrees granted are a lagging indicator; if you graduated in 18-19 you didn't start later than 14-15. It's possible that the rate of increased enrollment in CS has continued to itself increase, since compensation really only obviously went on a tear a couple years after that. Nonetheless I'm very bullish on the 5-10 year outlook for SWE compensation, to the extent that it's reasonable to make predictions that far out in the future.

[mehphp]

> Personally, I'm seeing moving into management as more attractive everytime I see an article posted here about remote work.

Any chance you can expand on this?