[lemonlime]

The vast majority of engineers earning these salaries work for "startups" like Google minting huge amounts of money on software built by these engineers. They are underpaid if anything. Do you really think management or shareholders (that get paid more for doing less) are the underpaid ones in this equation? Where else would the money go?

The amount of revenue per employees at some of these companies is in the 7 figures.

The "vast majority of startups" is not a useful unit of measure. Look at where all the people and the money actually are (FAANG).

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Define FAANG.

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google employ <1M engineers in the US. There are 4.4M engineers in the US.

[IMTDb]

That does not change the point that most of the engineers earning insane salaries are working for FAANG

There are 4.4M engineers in the US, but almost all of them make far less than the one working for FAANG.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Fair point.

I didn't know we were talking exclusively about engineers in the top 5% of pay or so.

I thought this was about engineers in general.