[swatcoder]

FAANG got into a bidding war when money was cheap and stocks were moving fast and turned their SWE jobs into a upper middle class vehicles like medicine, law, finance, etc

Cargo cult startups followed along by naiviete and businesses that had to compete for their same pool of talent followed along by necessity.

But those compensation packages are disconnected from the value generated by the engineers and eclipses it in almost every business and division, so it's not sustainable. The big layoffs are a first part of the correction, and a quieter adjustment will happen as non-cash compensation (options, stock grants, etc) calibrates itself into today's more grounded economy.

The managers saying "80k is a high salary" to you are give-or-take correct (assuming you're in a mid/low cost of living area). Software engineering remains a hot market with lots of money flying into it and will pay better than other engineering fields for a while longer, but ultimately pegs into the same "professional middle class" bucket as the rest.

If you want to be filthy rich, software engineering is only the right choice when you have an opportunity to ride one of the boom waves and FIRE yourself. You probably won't have that opportunity again for years if you aren't on today's cresting wave already. That's the second hill in your bimodal distribution and it's a dwindling aberration.

But if you just like writing software and being financially secure, the first hill is pretty great.

[ZephyrBlu]

This is way off. The median US SWE makes ~$120k according to BLS (Govt data). Median. High comp is not at all disconnected from value. Revenue per head for engineers can be extremely high.

[Akronymus]

I fully expect the faang salaries to stagnate until they are back in line with most other companies.

[zrn900]

> But those compensation packages are disconnected from the value generated by the engineers and eclipses it in almost every business and division, so it's not sustainable.

Thats incorrect. Statistics show that those who take most share out of the economic value that they generate are the higher paid tiers of engineers in Silicon Valley. And even they get at most a 10% of the actual economic value they generate.

This means that not only those engineers are already being paid WAY less than the actual economic value they generate, but also the majority of the population receive only a pittance from the economic value they generate.