[theorique]

I explained (1) poorly. And yeah, I do agree that they feed into each other. Companies and orgs collectively create supply and demand, and people's attitudes have impact on that.

What I meant was there are fewer designers on staff because there's a need for them, but a much lower need for designer man-hours than coder man-hours.

Your average web/software startup can be served by one or two designers while the coding team scales up to 10+ times that number. Maybe that's different in video games or other design-heavy areas but consumer and business products don't seem to have as much demand for designers.

Designers work tends to be in much more of a winner-take-all star system, where a celebrity with a track record like Johnny Ives, Karim Rashid, or Phillipe Starck can make millions, while your 'average' designer makes very little. In contrast, it's probably a flatter distribution for software engineers.