[hibikir]

A whole lot of automation is limited not by what could be automated, but what one can automate within a given budget.

When I was coding in the 90s, I was in a team that replaced function calls into new and exciting interactions with other computers which, using a queuing system, would do the computation and return the answer back. We'd have a project of having someone serialize the C data structures that were used on both sides into something that would be compatible, and could be inspected in the middle.

Today we call all of that a web service, the serialization would take a minute to code, and be doable by anyone. My entire team would be out of work! And yet, today we have more people writing code than ever.

When one accountant can do the work of 10 accountants, the price of the task lowers, but a lot of people that before couldn't afford accounting now can. And the same 10 accountaings from before can just do more work, and get paid about the same.

As far as software, we are getting paid A LOT more than in the early 90s. We are just doing things that back then would be impossible to pay for, our just outright impossible to do due to lack of compute capacity.

[kristianp]

The pay being larger, is caused (I think) by VC money and the illegality of non-compete contracts. If your competitor can do something you can't, hire someone away from the competitor to show you how to do it. Hence developers can demand more pay for retention, and more pay to move.