Software Engineer Salaries

There was an article submitted here a long time ago, it's title was:"Fuck you, pay me."I find it applicable here as well.If programmers were paid like doctors, more talented people would start considering programming over med school or finance as a career. And then you would have more "talent". That's economics, that's capitalism. (Yes, laws hindering immigration are a trade barrier, and hiring immigrants is "more efficient" and therefore &

The reason software engineering pay so much better than similar fields is since there is a lack of software engineers. Encouraging people to pick that option in order to lower wages to similar levels as other fields makes perfect sense, don't you agree?

I assume by low/high you mean skill level, not closeness-to-the-metal?Isn't this to be expected, though? As software consumption becomes more commoditized and de facto standards arise (your basic lookalike business webpage), more and more people are able to easily replicate the feat, and it becomes less about creativity and innovation and more just a matter of rote implementation, like any other manufacturing trade. Interchangeable agencies pumping out cookie-cutter code on an assem

The thing is, those aren't fair comparisons. Software engineers are in exceedingly high demand at this stage. This is just a reaction to that demand. In addition, software engineering is a very flexible field. You can engineer under or tangentially to almost any position or field and be a part of what makes those things interesting. Assembly line worker and street sweeper are not so similarly blessed.

I was doing rocket science but switched to software engineering because I want to someday afford a decent house in the Bay Area. So yes, higher compensation definitely increases the supply of software engineers. Different people have different price points at which they would switch, but the potential supply is definitely there. Companies need to do a much better job of not screening out applicants with non traditional resumes though - I had to go through triplebyte to get my foot in the door.

Personally I think it's more likely that the low salaries in other areas of technology (particularly physical products) has pushed people to software, rather than high salaries in software pulling them. Same effect in the end but I think the race-to-the-bottom in manufacturing, machining, and physical product development began the cycle. Soaring software salaries followed.

No need, the pay for software development is more than enough (like, 3-4x more than enough). The main problems are excess housing prices (so that income is not enough), and a combination of ambition / competitiveness / fear of missing out / fear of running behind.

this is good for top tech companies, highest bidders.if mediocre companies cannot hire top engineers, they will not develop software in-house and instead will buy the SaaS software from those big tech companies that pay top dollar for leetcoders. Software scales up easily

"It sounds like lots of the interested people are more interested in preparing students for a career in software engineering"That could be the case. Programmers are expensive because there isn't enough to meet demand. If you can get a lot more people interested and entering into the market, the cost will go down. I would imagine an employer would prefer programmer's salary to be more in line with what a typical employee's salary is. If there is an end goal, it would probably be to make progra

I wonder about this.It might be a huge bias but I would imagine a significant amount of productivity gained in the economy, and thus new wealth created, over the last couple of decades has been software driven. So it _should_ pay well, right? It doesn't really matter that it's considered easy or hard, just scarce.I've heard it, perhaps jokingly, stated that more than half of software that gets built fails; it never finds a market or never meets completion. In that case high-