[Jensson]

> how would the boom cycles ever happen where employees get whatever they ask for and 5 years of work straight out of university can get you enough money to retire to a modest life without ever lifting another finger.

Founders aren't your typical managers. The boom cycle you talk about started with Google paying ridiculous amounts and giving everyone huge nice benefits, and then others had to start matching that to not get all their best programmers stolen by Google.

But today there is no longer a founder led giant who is applying pressure here, so likely things will normalize over time back to 90's early 00's, where programmers were paid more like engineers instead of being a class above.

[luckylion]

But that boom cycle worked for much more than a decade, and it was very similar in most large tech companies. I don't think that devs are paid differently because founders are developers as well and want to promote their own, but rather: there's a lot of stuff to do where you need developers and only so many developers to do them. If you want yours done, you offer more money so developers do them for you.

Unless that changes rapidly, I don't think we'll go to "developers make slightly more than the national average".

[Jensson]

> I don't think that devs are paid differently because founders are developers

You missunderstood, I was talking about founders not following the normal management culture, so they do things like "pay our people twice the market rate so we can get the best people!", no regular manager or CEO would do that, and that is how for example programmers could start earning so much more than engineers.

> I don't think we'll go to "developers make slightly more than the national average

That isn't a quote. I said similar pay to other engineers, not everyone. Engineers makes more than typical people.

> there's a lot of stuff to do where you need developers and only so many developers to do them. If you want yours done, you offer more money so developers do them for you.

This was true in the 90's as well, Microsoft was the richest company on earth yet they didn't pay all their programmers significantly more than the typical market rate for engineers. The fast rise in salaries started when lots of companies started to copy Google in the late 00's.

[luckylion]

> no regular manager or CEO would do that, and that is how for example programmers could start earning so much more than engineers

But that's literally what Wallstreet Banks and Hedge Funds do and have done for decades, and they're the definition of all things not cool by being a cross between MBAs and lawyers. Even when they needed to be bailed out, they maintained their high bonuses because "otherwise you can't keep the best people".

It's also what you'd expect to happen whenever a resource is limited and there's more demand than supply.

> The fast rise in salaries started when lots of companies started to copy Google in the late 00's.

That's because suddenly the demand for developers exploded, not because Google did some magic trick though. In the 90ies, and especially at Microsoft, having developers do stuff for you was nice and all, but it didn't convert into cash quickly and at scale. When the first dotcom boom came, that changed, and suddenly startups paid large sums. Google continued doing so because they needed to grow to capture more of the market / capture more markets.