But... we understand EXACTLY why developers are paid so well. Economics (the sam... (2024)

There are more factors than just supply/demand and use value. There's the sensitivity of productivity and employee turnover with respect to pay, and the replacement of costly performance quantification with a significantly cheaper rank-ordering system (usually informal via promoting your "best" few engineers).

The former leads to efficiency wages, and the latter to tournament theory.

Example of the first: there are two jobs with an identical market-clearing wage and expected net present value of productivity. The first is relatively unskilled labor - you train them for maybe a week, and they do pretty much average performance for however long they stay. The second requires a year of training during which they provide zero value, then stay an average of a year after that during which they provide double the value. A savvy employer would pay the market-clearing wage for the first role, and above that for the second. By doing so, employees of the second type would be unable to find a job that pays as well as what they have now (since the market isn't clearing), so they'll tend to stay longer and provide extra value.

Example of the second: corporations will pay CEOs much more than vice-presidents. The work that both jobs do is largely the same, and the disparity in value added between the two roles is much less than the salary difference. The spread is there to make sure that senior executives work really hard to be seen as a better choice than their competitors - now the board doesn't have to evaluate how well executives did in an absolute sense, but rather need only judge who the best candidate is for the top role.

Of course, high salaries will attract more supply over time, which will put pressure back down on salaries. The current dynamic is SO out of whack though- there is a ton of slack in the system.

I understand all of this.

Are there any examples of industries where - for lack of better terminology - a salary "bubble" formed and later popped? For example, X job used to pay 100k and now it pays 50k? Probably better to exclude jobs that aren't around anymore because they were replaced by automation or don't make sense because of modern technology, at least for this question.

I guess I have an inkling that - ignoring things like economic downturns and lowering salaries due to high unemployment - employees will fight back against any downward pressure on pay, and once salaries go up, they tend to stay up. Sort of similar to what you see when an individual gets raises and jumps companies for an income boost - you rarely see someone take a job paying less than their current job.

All that reminds me of how people who graduate during recessions earn lower income over their careers[1].

[1] https://hbr.org/2018/09/people-who-graduate-during-recession...

I thought a lot of the pay changes with lawyers was due to tort reform and caps on punitive damages, but I am basing that purely on vague memory.

To be fair, first year lawyers at top firms do earn comparable pay to programmers at good companies, maybe not as much as a full compensation package with equity, I’m not sure. But those lawyers who consistently rank at the top of their class and among their peers and stick it out and eventually make partner - they will make much more money than the average software engineer. See this link for some details on what top Texas firms are paying associates [0]. Partners at the big firms make a lot more than 190-300k - probably 2-3x.

The catch is that with law or investment banking you need to be at the top of your class and pedigree matters if you want to get the best jobs. With software engineering these days, a degree is becoming less and less important.

I think at the end of the day the person who enjoys being a lawyer is a very different type than the person who enjoys being a software engineer / coder, and I’d be surprised if there’s much overlap between the two. I’m sure some people can be good at both, and certainly most good developers have the brains to get through law school and pass a test, but the work is so drastically different many people just won’t be happy in the job, and, like what possibly happened to your girlfriend, they move on.

[0] https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2018/06/25/major-te...

For a long time, law was also a thing that a lot of liberal arts majors from good schools sort of fell into when they had trouble turning their English or History degrees into a decent living.

Big Law still pays pretty well--although I assume the associate work life is as punishing as ever--but it's probably not a great career path in general for someone who is mostly chasing the dollars.

We saw this with programmers and the dot-com bubble. There was briefly really high demand and high pay, and then when funding suddenly disappeared there were massive shutdowns and layoffs. Many devs couldn't find work for years, and the market wage was much lower because there were so many extra devs. (College CS enrollment also plummeted then, which is one hypothesis for why CS training has been slow to scale up to current demand.)

Automotive factory work is another example, I think. Something like: there were high wages (with unions) in Detroit factories, and then competition first from overseas and from other US states led to a collapse in pay (along with a general collapse in Detroit).

I haven't looked into it, but I suspect that there was a time when some railroad workers were very well paid, which then went bust when one of the railroad bubbles popped.

I do feel that the dot com bubble was different. In that case, the whole industry was brought into doubt. "Maybe this whole internet thing isn't all it's cracked up to be." That notion is clearly ridiculous in 2019.

The much scarier "bubble" today is "actually most of this stuff isn't all that hard". There are probably also smaller bubbles to be had in AI, blockchain, venture capital, etc., but I don't think those will be nearly as broad-reaching as dot com.

The thing with dot-bomb was that there were cascading effects. All those startups were buying gear from the "Four Horsem*n of the Internet" so their collapse brought down a bunch of the large firms as well. (And it was all mixed in with 9/11, etc.)

Today, even if there were a big ad-tech collapse, a bunch of highly paid Bay Area engineers might end up having to move back to Ohio but I'm not sure you have the same overall economic effects. (And, if it's mostly just a drying up of VC capital, the effects are even less.)

Yeah, I’m slightly familiar with that. Flying is a bit unusual since training is so much more expensive than other professions, and requires a lot of hours, so I guess you can consider the first few years like a medical residency. A low-paid training job.

http://www.aacadetacademy.com/CadetAcademy/career_progressio...

AA has an interesting program here, but I still think the best route for aspiring pilots, if you can get a pilot spot, is probably Air Force Academy. It’s very hard to get a pilot spot, though, and I don’t think it’s ever guaranteed unless you do the Army Street to Seat flight program, which does not require a college degree, but they mainly fly helicopters (maybe only?).

I often wish I had been a pilot... currently reading “Viper Pilot” by Dan Hampton which is a hell of a book.

Those companies became very profitable because technology made them so. It wasn't some accident that is here today and gone tomorrow. Technology is at the core of companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook. Without the technology, which is implemented by SWEs, none of these would exist.

Their number isn't declining, it's growing.

> Those companies became very profitable because technology made them so. It wasn't some accident that is here today and gone tomorrow. Technology is at the core of companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook. Without the technology, which is implemented by SWEs, none of these would exist.

Yes but don't assume that people in india, africa, or eastern europe are too dumb to do the same work. Nor do the outposts of the companies you mentioned pay the same US levels in those countries. There must be another component of this.

> Yes but don't assume that people in india, africa, or eastern europe are too dumb to do the same work.

Where did I ever assume that?!

> Nor do the outposts of the companies you mentioned pay the same US levels in those countries. There must be another component of this.

How about "they pay what they have to"?

In India, if they pay $60k/yr, plenty of talented candidates would work for them. In the US, if they paid that much, nobody would apply.

Simple.

The answer would be: 1) they do, and 2) they can't

1) Google clearly hires plenty of people in India. Here's their new office in India, with allegedly ~10k employees: https://careers.google.com/locations/hyderabad/. The assumption that Google is only hiring "expensive american employees" vs "cheap indian employees" does not hold

2) Talking about "american" and "indian" employees is misleading. Your question could just as well be "Why not hire for $100k from <midwest> instead of $370k in CA?" At that level of salary, you're talking about attracting top talent from around the world, who are often happy to migrate. The salary is a reflection of an arms race between tech companies - the same person isn't going to opt for $60k to stay in India - they will either take a $350k job in Facebook, a $300k job in Amazon, or at worst, a $100k+ remote job to stay at home(numbers are illustrative). You simply cannot attract the same talent due to how global(and competitive) the top-end of the programming marketplace is.

> Why not hire for $100k from <midwest> instead of $370k in CA?

That's not a realistic comparison. That's a comparison of an average-ish salary in the midwest to a far above average salary in CA. Realistically, it's more like $100k in the midwest vs $130k in CA or $370k in CA vs not being able to hire anyone in the midwest because there isn't enough volume to be able to find someone who's that much of an outlier.

> The German software industry outsources heavily and tech wages don't reach the US levels.

German SWE work doesn't pay well domestically. It's also struggling to attract talent. Probably a reason why Germany isn't known for its many profitable software companies.

> Well the question is: why don't they replace the $370k/yr american employees by the $60k/yr indian ones?

In the case of an engineer making $400k in the US, I suggest this is a fairly exceptional individual, with a level of skills and abilities that are rare in _any_ country.

Since that individual produces large profits for their employers, employers struggle to hire them at any price that is lower than their productive yield.

Strong SWEs can make companies like Google and Facebook millions of dollars per year. So these companies will gladly pay any six figure salary for these individuals.

Of course, if they can get away with only paying them $60k in India, they will. It's not their goal to pay well; it's a necessity.

They try to but it's not always that easy. When you outsource you often need a lot more people to do the same work since there is more overhead. So the total cost may not be that much lower and the output is less.

Not saying this is always the case but it has been like that at my company several times. IMO IT and business need to work close together to efficiently produce quality stuff that the customers want. This is way harder if you are separated by a sucky phone line.

Additionally, businesses learn after being burned a few times that throwing distant resources at software problems tends to make a bigger mess than they started with (no matter how good their PM may be). Often one good developer embedded within a domain in a company is worth more than an entire outsourced team.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but it's what I've anecdotally observed over my career to date.

Google would have to become a remote management company for that to happen. But Google makes so much money that they're not really under pressure to do that.

Outsourcing is a strategy employed by companies who need software engineers on the cheap and are less concerned about the non-zero difficulty of remote work/management.

Except for defense projects, it doesn't matter where the code is made, US or India.

Actually, yes it does.

My point is that there are usually quite specific conditions and money flows leading to very good compensation for certain jobs, rather than a 'force' like 'Technology' which seems a bit magical to me. An example is when Ford starting offering higher wages to change the labour market dynamics [1]. Although yes, this was brought about by the industrial revolution, saying that doesn't really provide the crucial insight into why it happened and the effect it had.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...

Your initial comment talked about "tech companies that became very profitable very quickly" as if that's some sort of accident. I'm reminding you that it is not, but a direct result of their technological focus.

Technology is a force that makes employees more profitable. Work that used to require dozens of employees now requires just one engineer writing code for multiple computing devices. Nothing "magical" about it, it's the very nature and purpose of technology.

It is inevitability. Increasing productivity is the goal of technology. Look at technology from the dawn of time, all it did was increase the productivity of labor, both individually and as a group.

Without getting into a huge topic - it also encourages a "winner takes all" set of conditions, in which companies with the right technology and the best employees control a disproportionate amount of the profits in their field.

Current comp is ultimately because computers and the internet are both the entertainment medium of choice (displacing film, radio, TV, and we know all of those industries and the supporting industries they spawned were huge) and a universal personal and business tool (with an impact as great or greater than the automobile did on both personal and business transportation and, as before, we know how big the auto industry and supporting industries became). Computing and the internet are so fundamental now that I do not expect this wave to stop until every person on the planet, no matter what their local standard of living is, has a personal smartphone within arm's reach 24/7.

We're not guaranteed to have no bumps along the way of course but, over the long term, it's really hard to envision a case where demand for developers, and consequently comp, drops drastically before this global saturation occurs.

I guess that depends on if you're talking about bay area comp or high comp elsewhere, which are on two very different levels, but still high compared to other jobs in their respective regions. For the bay area it might indeed be coupled to extremely profitable tech companies, but elsewhere there is still a very high demand for software engineers from SMBs.

A lot of mid-sized businesses want to gain an edge over their competition via custom software solutions. (The optimistic part in my also thinks that it's still the early days there, where companies in each niche are trying to uncover software driven upsides with fewer resources, and once those are found everyone in the niche competes over squeezing out the most of that opportunity, which requires a lot more engineering resources).

On top of that even moderately complex websites (search function + data pipeline leading into that) that a lot of 100+ people companies have require regular attention from a somewhat skilled software engineer.

So in conclusion, I think that high compensations might be driven up by "a handful of tech companies", but a lot of the demand is mostly uncoupled from that.

Those handful of tech companies need a boat load of engineers, restricting the supply.

A restricted supply means you have to play a higher price.

It doesn't matter what causes the lack of supply, its the lack of supply that causes price rises.

> Of course, high salaries will attract more supply over time, which will put pressure back down on salaries.

It's not clear to me that there aren't soft and hard caps on supply, even if everyone wanted to be a programmer because the compensation was so great. There are certainly aspects of intelligence, temperament, and personality that are needed to crank through information, organization, and abstraction problems as part of a team for decades of one's life.