[flyingfences]

The popularization of computer science degrees absolutely did push down the price of software engineers on average. The Big Names in SV are outliers; the rest of the industry employs us at wages far closer to other professions than they could a generation ago.

[busterarm]

This. People really do forget what it was like just before the peak of the dotcom bubble. There were companies that offered perks like a fully paid lease on a brand new Porsche 911. This wasn't just for the software engineers either.

If you could breathe on a keyboard, you could land a high-paying job.

Demand was that high.

That era of tech minted way, way, way more millionaires on average.

[netdevnet]

Surely, we can all agree that this is not sustainable. Companies basically throwing money at people that might not have the skills you need is a massive waste of money from the companies point of view.

[busterarm]

Nobody was talking about whether or not it was sustainable, we're just comparing salary potential now to a generation ago.

To the managerial class, tech people used to be literal wizards conjuring the impossible and now we're regular commoditized office labor like any other.

[netdevnet]

Not sure if comparing salary potentials coming from two different socio-economic periods is useful or likely to mislead.

Tech and people versed in it were not common (to people outside tech) and so the high salaries would reflect that. Now is not the case. It was always going to be temporary. As people become acquainted with tech people, the magic vanishes, you see the code behind the pixels. At the same time, tech people themselves did cause this by making tech easier to understand and manipulate.

It's like a magician, the first few times, it is enticing and mysterious but after a while it becomes ordinary. Tech wizards are just like that.

[busterarm]

People with wizard-like skills are out there but typically can't command the salaries they used to.

Todays SWEs tend to know far less about how computers operate and how protocols work than in the old days.

[netdevnet]

The reality is that thanks to those tech wizards, most companies don't need tech wizards to build tech products and most tech workers don't need to know anywhere near as much as you would need to back in the days.

The same kind of "I just love to code" tech wizard that builds an amazing service/library/product, overworks itself while letting big companies extract max value out of it and contribute nothing or extremely little to the open source world.

Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily. This should be in the mind of every dev imo.

Tech wizards wrote their fate on code, compiled it and served it to the market. This is the result

[Workaccount2]

The SWE buzz/boom of the last teens into the early 20's was largely fueled by VC's with access to tons of capital at all time low prices. The game was build a company with a shiny exterior and a radiance of hype and hope it got bought out. It didn't matter that you were burning millions on exorbitant salaries and endless perks. It was the cost of shine and radiance. And it drove up the cost of tech labor across the whole sector.

In a really condensed and simplified version: Big money was placing $50-100MM bets everywhere because the house was lending for basically free, and you only need a few hits to come out on top.

But now that money is expensive again, they game has been crashing down.