[swatcoder]

No, in the pure market sense that enough businesses have decided to target the same pool of workers and can afford to pay them that much.

Yes, in the sense that most businesses can't justify that cost and that lots of SWE's make more than enough for their desired lifestyles at much lower TC.

But it's nothing new. 20-30 years ago, there was a comparable spread between SWE's who took jobs in finance companies vs the rest of us. A new top-school grad could get a job at Goldman Sachs out of college for 2-4x what someone working in most other software fields would earn because technical innovation in that space was intensely competitive and they desperately needed more hands on deck. Eventually, that divide largely evened out and the ostensibly "overpaid" sector moved to new technical frontiers.