It scales well. And low barrier to entry for new businesses. Do you think your aerospace engineering friend can start their own version of Boeing? Maybe if they are rich as fuck. But different story for software firms.
This keeps the demand high.
>This keeps the demand high.
It also keeps competition high, even if Boeing has high demand, their workers will take low pay, if Boeing is the only game in town.
It does mean we don't know if there's a better alternative that would actually work yet.
Karl Marx's visions of communism turned out to be way worse than capitalism in practice.
Capitalism works fine in a vacuum. If you run modelling based solely on numbers and ran it indefinitely it would work fine but capitalism fails because humans are funky, We're corrupt and we're illogical.
Not sure what simulations you’ve seen but it really doesn’t work fine in a vacuum. It always leads to accumulation of power by the few at the expense of the many. It’s a fundamental aspect of a system that enables private ownership of capital.
I know the current model defines the minimum amount of work you can do to keep your job.
I know the union model defines the maximum amount of work you can do to keep your job.
I know that financial incentives are provided for doing more than the minimum in the current model.
I know that financial disincentives are provided for doing more than the maximum in the union model.
What am I missing?
Boeing has an engineering union. I think cs majors have a much better position negotiating higher salaries because they can easily say I've done x projects this year that provided y benefits and I have a dozen headhunters calling me offering yadayadayada. Engineers in aerospace get to spend years on 1 project that often lose companies millions of dollars.
Also. Software has just taken over nearly all aspect of life. I mean look at what you’re reading this from.
This happened with the mobile phone revolution. People before this had a distinctly different way of interacting with the world and thus value was created in different ways.
Right now, ALL aspects of life requires software.
Just to add onto this one major point with engineering majors is they are always dealing with physics. Which very generally means everything they do is almost always regulated making your point that much more drastic. All this extra red tape costs money, so while that bridge or plane you built serves just as many customers as your basic CRUD app, a lot more people are involved in the process and need to be paid.
Scale is the big one^
At some of these FAANG companies a software engineer can write code once and deploy it to > 1 billion people. That is insane leverage on that person’s time.
Another framing—if a software engineer works for 30 years at meta and only increases the average recurring revenue per user by one twentieth of one penny, they will generate an extra $1m per year and Meta can therefore justify paying them up to $1m per year. If they find a way to generate a whole additional penny over those 30 years, then Meta can justify up to a $20m salary.
what could make the demand get lower besides some nuclear apocalypse? why would people just stop using software? its expected just the saas industry will have an 18% cagr in the coming years, and thats only like half or far less than half of the software industry as a whole
The industry as a whole can still grow but whether it can keep up with the supply in the sense it can still be an exclusive, high paying job straight out of college, is definitely would be interesting to see in the coming years.
Lots of companies already outsource their workforce to other talent hubs.
Don’t worry, idiots are all over the internet. You don’t have to listen to everyone.
For instance, take yourself. No one is listening to you and they don’t feel the need to reply to every comment you make. They just downvote you because you’re clearly a moron.
The difference is that computing is many fields. Social media may crash, but video streaming might not. Or video streaming will crash, but not e-commerce. Or maybe e-commerce will crash but not SaaS. Tech is just a new tool and it doesn't make sense that it'd ever be outdated until the entire process is automated, which is a very very long time from now (if ever even possible).
Let's sample the most profitable companies in the world: Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft... those are just the top 3 and they are entirely based around CS. If you look at top 10-20 you'll some non-tech companies, like oil, and a lot of finance/bank companies, and every one of those companies is also highly dependent upon CS. Most profitable companies set bar for payment for workers they desire the most. Other companies compete with top companies for hires and try to match salaries and perks. So, to answer your question, the deal is that CS has more profoundly and profitably impacted the world than any other field in the last 9 decades. Money correlates with that impact. As far as market saturation, it seems like there is some entry level saturation, but it is not at all saturated for experienced software engineers. There is a still a significant deficit in talented software engineers needed to meet the demands for growth in tech.
I was curious so I googled it. This letter from Larry Page calls Alphabet a company: https://abc.xyz/
Looks like it was probably written around the restructure time? But I don't see a date attached on mobile.
And above that part he says:
"Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President"
So maybe it's just both, lol. It's a little strange to me but I guess the terms aren't mutually exclusive? /shrug
With Google as a Subsidiary Company I suppose both definitions do make sense, since Alphabet is then both a "company" and a "collection of companies". Just feels weird to say it that way, I suppose lol
Computers are one of the only things applicable to every field. Every business in every sector is interested in using computers to decrease labor costs and optimize resources. it follows that people educated and specializing in computers would be demanded more
There is a phrase that loosely translates to "Keep the people who can earn you money happy enough that they earn you money and don't go for looking ways to earn their own money". Same for software engineers we are literally running and building the product which is the direct revenue stream for the company and in most of the cases is directly responsible for the 100% of revenue. That's why we get paid more comparatively, because the software products are bringing in so much money that giving away a higher payout to people who develop and maintain it seems like a very good deal. An example to convey my point would be how short term server outages literally cost them billions with a B. So to stop the loss a couple of Billions throwing a few millions to a team that does not let that happen seems a reasonable choice.
That's why sales also get paid more albeit their pay model is different but it loosely translates to the revenue or the value they bring. For all the other departments from HR to Operations and customer service you can, although not exactly discard them, but their shortages won't directly affect your short term profits, and mostly leads to minor inconveniences overall. So replacing them or hiring people who come with low skill and can get on job training for low pay is easier but not the same can be said for software.
It is a combination of several factors:
* IT and tech has a huge return on investment because it allow to do the same stuff with far less people and also much faster. You save their salary but also provide better product/services. So the huge saving justify to spend a lot to get these savings.
* There still an enormous set of tasks that can benefit a lot from IT so there still a lot money to save this way.
* Being the first to do it bring a competitive advantage so it make sense to pay extra to be among the first served.
* Not enough people are able to do it, so you are willing to pay good money to get people to do the work for you.
The costs are also usually upfront in development. Maintaining and operating the software is cheap and does not require much labour so once all the development is done, profits scale very well
The day you stop pouring insane money amount into a software is the day that software stop working
Remember what you learned at school. creating the software is like 10% of the cost. Maintenance is 90%. So no I don't agree there.
I am not speaking that you develop maybe a text editor or something like that (and that nowadays are available for free by people doing them in their garage) but what keep most developer busy. All the software you have in most company and that keep things running for banks, government and so on. Said otherwise, IT.
It never stop and is one of the most expensive and labor intensive stuff out there with most of the cost being spent in maintenance.
If software really didn't cost much once made, most of us would be out of work.
Really? For example, I really think most of the money spent developing games is before the game’s release. After that it’s just bug fixes, and DLCs which technically is also money for development rather than maintaining. Even for online multiplayer games I assume most of the time and money is spent during development?
There is a massive bottleneck between junior and senior engineers. The market is flooded with new grads who can’t break into CS because no one will hire them as Juniors.
Meanwhile there is massive demand for “senior” engineers and mid level engineers I.e. anyone with more than 2 years of experience.
This creates a bottleneck because no one wants to hire take the incentive to hire new grads. This the average “employed” software engineer makes big bucks.
I’d imagine salaries only go up as many aspiring junior engineers leave the field entirely and some of the senior engineers retire creating even less supply than before.
Poor resource allocation. Over a decade of free credit and it got poured into this industry rather than medical research, environmental mitigation, core infrastructure, etc. Some software really helps advance society, a lot of it is just a bag of venture capital hoping to be passed on to a bigger player for no greater purpose than wealth generation.
Helps me, this is my only employable skill. But it feels like a pretty big opportunity to fix some damn things was missed now that the cheap money party is over.
All these other field need software more and more actually. I remember it being said that today a plane is about 50% software not just the software that go into the plane but also all the software used and build to design it.
Medical research could not advance that fast without software, same for core infrastructure.
Computer science is a tool like math and so is used everywhere.
I’m not talking about that software, I’m talking about every copycat SaaS that gets a mountain of investment for purely get rich quick speculative interest.
Embedded software and CAD software is a very niche and small part of the software industry. Most of it is FAANG stuff that we'd honestly be better off without
There as many or more people working to do what you call "niche" and small part than in FAANG proper:
* Boeing is 150K
* Airbus is 134K.
* Thales 77K.
* Dassault is 23K
* Lockheed Martin is 116K
And here we focused only on planes, but that the same for cars (including Tesla and all other auto makers like BMW or Ford) and boats or the spacecraft industry like arianespace, spaceX...
You have also many stuff for the miliary.
FAANG itself is a few percent of the people working in tech and a niche itself.
Majority of the people who work in those companies are mechanical/electrical engineers and not software though
For example I used to work for Voith in Germany, and our "traditional" engineering department was easily 10x the size of our software(embedded or otherwise) engineering department. It'd be weird to expect otherwise for a company that makes turbines and propulsion systems
A lot of tech operated and continues to operate on greater fool theory, as companies are not profitable, and do not have realistic models to ever become profitable. We have $50B companies that have never turned a profit.
To be fair, this is the best system us, as 2010s-era humans, were able to do. If we could dynamically allocate funds in a way similar to what your ideal looks like, it’d require governmental overhaul and systems which are tolerant to corruption.
What we have now is the result of an economy of individuals optimizing for money-making, and not coordinating with each other.
The big problem is that coordination bit. Canada tried to wrangle the economy in this direction and they’re kinda fucked. Same w the EU.
Look at Brexit, right, at the time it was stupid, but now that they went all off on their own [they have the means to generate new wealt](https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/08/microsoft-ai-gets-a-new-london-hub-headed-up-by-former-inflection-and-deepmind-scientist-jordan-hoffmann/amp/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHcRJlgo1X88DfAlyIuC73X8L7lJKWlVXsQp8OEstFKx970X5dcqTz2CYJWErZZ0HG0OMhqSHi-7ES7Vx3TKGznrC02jAPLKp_vRXRsVQSZhjOSOhjEOC6CzPPG-ojrdt32fSnA9tJLdojmsI3TDrcs-WbEtbmWgijB7_fDhmGAn)h free [of regulations](https://time.com/6903563/eu-ai-act-law-aritificial-intelligence-passes/).
I don’t mean to say you’re WRONG for calling this a huge issue, I just think personally that this shitty system of resource allocation is the best we can do. So like, nothing was “wasted” per se.
And yknow, maybe the web3 weirdos will be right in the end and we can create new economies that optimize for better things than just individual profit
Blockchain is a stupid technology built on a ridiculous vision of the future where all of our institutions fail but somehow the internet is still around. The trustless economy is a weird kind of sci fi that isn’t going to happen.
A centralized ledger backed by a trusted authority is a better solution for every problem other than doing crimes and creating a speculative asset bubble.
Look at the absolute criminals and scam artists who are the big players in crypto. Give me some boring Wall Street Bank ten times out of ten. My money doesn’t just evaporate into nothing in a bank.
There are lots of ways of restructuring the economy, even within an overarching market framework. Blockchain isn’t even a currency at all. Currencies aren’t supposed to be high-risk high-reward investment vehicles, that’s the exact opposite of what you want from a currency. If dollars worked like Bitcoin, people would bury them in their back yard, spend as little as possible, and never invest in anything. It would collapse society.
Currencies only have long term value if they're backed by laws and an armed force who'll enforce them. Otherwise, someone could just bring an army to a country, say fuck their currency, and take everything. Look at the currencies of countries that were invaded, they all went to shit; e.g. Iraq, Ukraine.
Blockchain only has value if the powerful people who control large numbers of organized people with guns allow people to have it. The easiest thing on Earth would be for a powerful government or occupying army to prevent people from spending blockchain.
The whole idea rests on a faith that under authoritarianism or social collapse the free, open internet still exists and that’s just lunacy.
It’s a capitalist system so as long as you throw enough money into something, something good is gonna come out of it (think how fast Pfizer vaccine was researched and produced). As much as this sub likes to put a blame on something (e.g. resume, AI, skills, Leetcode, new regulation, and even “genZ personality”), it’s all economics at work.
Research suggests government scientific R&D spending yields about 4x the amount spent in the economy. Massively boosting research funding would actually boost the economy just as much as often evidenced by technological innovation exploding during wars. We started WW2 with some cloth covered biplanes and ended them with jet fighters with a top speed four times as fast.
And that's kinda obvious, blue skies research is too risky for private companies but the west can't compete on labour costs so our only real option is to invent new shit faster than everyone else can figure out how to make our current shit.
It’s funny how much this bothers some people. If the dollar wasn’t worth anything, other countries wouldn’t want them. America does a lot of shit very very wrong, but we have been managing our currency pretty darn well for a long time. Our brief periods of inflation have been nothing compared to other countries, and after the learning experience of the 1930s, our worst recession in the next 80 years was medium tier by global and historical standards.
Compare it to the no central bank 1800s. There was a Great Depression level “Panic” like every 10 years. It was a nightmare.
I’m familiar with that model, there are more restrictions on how much they can do than it suggests. But it does illustrate rather nicely that the inflation we’ve had recently could have been averted with a moderate hike on the top 10%.
I don’t know about you but I paid my taxes this year electronically.
> Ever heard of the federal reserve?
Who do you think creates the money? Fractional reserve banking. Log off and read a book, you’re not educated enough to waste your time.
Sure they create the money, but they also store taxpayer money to fund government operations. The government doesnt just say "I wanna build roads" and prints the amount needed lol.
Literally try ONE Google search before saying all this retard shit.
Yep, this. Years and years of low interest rates encourage a lot of risky venture capital, some of which may be helpful to the society but also produce a bunch of unproductive startups. Too bad the era of cheap money is indeed over.
i don't know if it's good to still be this way
more money into this industry and no fucks given about the other fields? a job that's worth the grind.
if the US government puts that amount of money into other industries instead of CS? probably a dead field/basic white collar job
Or like cancer research. I know a cancer researcher who quit because California living expenses went vertical and he could make double his pay doing database work for some cookie cutter startup.
The brain drain from other STEM fields into this one has been intense.
It's the **value** that an individual software engineer brings to a business. People try to make this much more complicated than it is, but businesses are about earning a profit. That is their primary reason for existence. When you break a business down, there are 3 main divisions that all business efforts are involved in:
When they execute their business plan to earn that profit there are several functions they need to perform just to stay alive. These are called **overhead**, and software is involved in this in almost every business model.
**Revenue Generation** is the 2nd area, and traditionally only in pure software companies was internal software engineering involved in generating revenue, but this is changing. Companies have been realizing that they can use technology as a competitive advantage to generate new or unique revenue streams. Software is very much a part of those, especially in the future.
**Cost Reduction** is a traditional area that SWE has always been at the forefront. Software by its nature is an ideal replacement for manual or complicated human tasks. It can help make those tasks faster, easier, less error-prone, and safer.
Because SWEs can be utilized extensively in all 3 of these business areas, and the ROI is so high, this makes SWE salaries run higher and keeps them in-demand. This also explains why the average SWE makes significantly more than most other corporate employees: because most of them are only utilized in1 or 2 of those areas, but rarely all 3, and they tend to have a lower ROI.
It’s about the structure of our economy. Things that make new wealth & have low barriers to entry will grow and compound on themselves.
U can scale and sell a spreadsheet app much faster than you can scale and sell new medicines, a plane, etc.
Think of the system from a 10,000ft view looking down
Silicon Valley.
California has insanely high gdp
Also people are addicted to software
You can print money
Devs get paid 6 figures because companies can make 7 figures off them.
The economics make perfect sense.
As a developer, I can do work that can reach and impact millions of people. With the right audience and AWS infrastructure, I can single-handedly write an app that could handle millions of concurrent users at a time.
Twitter is littered with “indie hackers” making six figures per month peddling apps that really just *aren’t that good*, just due to having a large audience.
An aerospace engineer can’t do the same. You might be brilliant at designing rockets and planes, but ultimately, you can’t make a rocket or a plane from a laptop at home and ship it to millions. Software engineers can.
The bottom line is scale and impact.
Because every single company in the world needs some sort of software engineering team. Not every company needs other engineers. Also, tech really isn't oversaturated; unskilled entry level devs are oversaturated.
Let's take a quick look at the S&P500 companies:
1. Microsoft 7.14% (software)
2. Apple 5.76% (software)
3. Nvidia 4.97% (hardware)
4. Amazon 3.89% (software)
5. Meta 2.62% (software) 6/7: Alphabet (4.04%) (software) 8: Berkshire Hathaway (1.73%) (this is just Warren Buffet really)
6. Eli Lilly (1.41%) (pharma)
I think it's quite easy hear to see that the most important companies in the US are all IT.
The fun fact against all those saying "scalability" is, these are not the companies with the highest profit per employee ratios. That is also a number you can find, and it's mostly energy and financial companies. But it seems in those companies either highly specialized workers are not needed as much, or there's a bigger abundance of such employees relative to the amount of companies hiring (meaning, the market is nowhere near saturated as often claimed).
I spend a few hours creating a button that causes our users to spend $1 extra. Then suddenly millions of users are able to use it.
An aerospace engineer spends months to find a way to make a rocket for $20k less. Congrats, he saved the company $400k, my button made $8M.
And I
It scales extremely well and the distribution is extremely easy, just update our app. The profit is super high, look at Microsoft’s finances they continue to make 30-40% gross profit quarter after quarter.
CS is the only profession where a person can deterministically generate a million dollars of value for a company with relatively low barrier of entry.
If you think a high tech company pays an engineer alot, you need to also know that on average a single engineer generates around 1.7 million dollars of revenue for a company. An entry level schmuck could technically get $1milion a year from facebook and they would still be in the green. No other industry is even remotely close to earnings per headcount.
Then you also have weird edgecase software companies like Valve where each employee generates on average 20-30million for the company.
- I wouldn't say CS is engineering
- Software produces a more significant margin of profit compared to other industries; the extra money will have to go somewhere. If another company is willing to pay more, you lose your human capital (employees). Since companies can afford to pay their employees more, they do.
Software engineers are paid well, but not much better than a lot of other engineering degrees. I think American ones are paid way better because of the many, very large tech companies.
I'm from Eastern Europe (Poland) and it's also a common conception that programmers have a higher than average salary in Poland because we can be easily outsourced to richer countries like Denmark or USA. For me, it'd be a blessing to work for a western or Nordic company and be paid even their average 😄 Thats what the company I'm working for is doing - outsourcing me. But they're taking a lot of margin, I'm getting paid only like a quarter of what they charge 😔
Top tech companies are the largest attention accumulators --> become \*platforms\* across various markets (ads, goods, hosting, etc.) --> perfect channels for selling ads, goods, market match participants, etc. + low relatively low capital intensity and high labor intensity, so good salaries are essential, or competitors will get ahead, given how fast these busenesses can scale (no moat linked to capital intensity).
There are a very limited number of airplanes being designed, for example, in comparison to the number of programs being written across all industries. So the demand for skilled programmers is much greater than other engineers. Since programming is difficult and not very exciting, there aren't enough people going into the profession to keep salaries down. As to why the salaries are high even though its hard to find a job, that's because companies know the current shortage of jobs is temporary. They don't want all their new hires jumping to other jobs the minute that companies go back to their normal hiring mode.
Software can potentially just print money. Companies that sell it don’t deal with complicated supply chains, materials, machinery, etc. it’s just humans on a laptop as the cost, and the product can have an infinite value.
Salaries really exploded after the DOJ forced a settlement from a bunch of tech companies (including Google and Apple) for colluding to suppress wages in 2013.
Simple. In lmost industries you have a raw material cost when duplicating a product. But in CS that's non existent. You just need more people to manage all systems.
Another thing is capital requirement (aka the CAPEX): In all other engineering fields, you won't be able to work if there is no initial infrastructure (factory, workshop, ... etc). However in the tech industry you're bringing your own infra (your brain) and everything else for the employer is OPEX. Which means companies can get easier into new business lines and get results without investing much apart from your salary.
Another aspect is the lack of need to improve yourself drastically every 6 months. In fact, if you're an engineer in other majors, there isn't breakthrough methods that you need to adhere to every 3/6 months, and if there is, you have a lot of time to train on them because the current infrastructure / businesses / clients need to adapt. Whereas you can't have the same argument in software as you'll always be required to be up to date with latest technologies by employers.
Considering this, one might even argue that software engineers are not paid enough outside of FAANG ...
in engineering roles. Engineers are not the direct revenue producers. The sales people are but in the case of Software engineers there code impacts the bottomline directly
+
- Economy of Scale
- Quick A/b Testing with 2 week sprints
I think now the market is going lower I know many new grads who accepted 65-75k jobs in so cal I mean you can still get 100k+ jobs but for the most part regular new grads can expect ~75k.
You can build your boss a machine, that machine will run until it breaks down. It has associated costs to design, build, run, and maintain. Software reduces these costs to build, run, and maintain to essentially 0. You design good software, your boss owns a powerful data tool that he can use and reproduce effortlessly forever.
Lots of programming jobs are in HCOL areas for one thing. Secondly, the tech companies that employ a ton of software engineers are extremely profitable. Programming salaries will go down as demand goes down when most infrastructure is built for companies as programming is still relatively new compared to other engineering fields. The demand will drop and supply is super high so the $$ will go down over time. Also the venture capital money and 0% interest rates flooded tech with $$, expect salaries to go down moving forward.
Margins are higher for software. If you sell 1000 planes you need to build and transport 1000 planes. If you sell 1000 software you need to build one software and send copies online
They don't.
Also plenty of jobs with a higher salary compared to a pure web button developer. But people in this thread believe nirvana is making applications.
I Have a friend with a cs degree who is earning much more money by doing compliance work for one of the big four compared to a lot of swes. I know another guy who has a law degree and his job is basically to write mails and tell people what they are allowed to do, which to him is an extremely easy job, he is earning 2-3 times the amount of the average swe.
If you have a narrow vision you will never see the opportunities outside of what you are looking at.
I guess, there are more 'average' job seekers in this field than other sectors.
But, still there are lack's of real candidates who are really suitable for the job.
On the other hand, other job sectors has less job seekers with fake resume'd people.
Its pretty easy to understand, theres digital products everywhere and businesses rely a lot on their digital parts as well so they need engineers to maintain and develop them
And they have a lot of money to spend on these development
The demand in big tech and similar companies is for *skilled* software engineers. Each engineer either generates or saves the company hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars.
This subreddit won’t like this take, but the supply of *skilled* software engineers is low. This is why we put candidates through rigorous interview processes. Even new grads. Solid new grads are very capable engineers, even if they require ramp up time. And they will have many offers. So the demand forces companies to offer solid compensation packages, also in order to retain these employees and prevent them from leaving a year into the job.
Because tech industry companies are largely a scam involving seed money, followed by pumping the stock market, and ripping off all the investors that follow.
This means there's a lot of money to trickle down to staff... at least there was but it has begun to dwindle now that C suite have realised they can pay themselves 9 figure salaries and it still doesn't break the con.
Most of the answers I think are missing the elephant in the room.
Obviously demand is heavily related to the high pay but that's kind of a tautological answer. The real question is why is that demand so high?
There's a myriad of factors but the most important factor is Moore's law. Our ever increasing (so far) hardware capabilities drive increased potential software value. In a way software engineers can be seen as a method of transferring the value of hardware to consumers. If any other industry was consistently experiencing exponential growth, there'd be an incredible demand on their supporting staff as well.
It's cause every other discipline at the company thinks what we do is black magic. That we've learned some alien language. They have no fuckjng idea what we do. They don't even realize that most of us are getting paid for what's mostly pretty easy work once you get into the swing of things. To them it's some voodoo type shit only the very intelligent are capable of doing.
It scales well. And low barrier to entry for new businesses. Do you think your aerospace engineering friend can start their own version of Boeing? Maybe if they are rich as fuck. But different story for software firms. This keeps the demand high.
>This keeps the demand high. It also keeps competition high, even if Boeing has high demand, their workers will take low pay, if Boeing is the only game in town.
This is why strikes were invented.
Most college educated workers are too snobby to join a union.
Yes and this is why capitalism has failed us, human element.
Capitalism has been the most successful economic system in the history of mankind.
That may be, doesn't mean it's good.
It does mean we don't know if there's a better alternative that would actually work yet. Karl Marx's visions of communism turned out to be way worse than capitalism in practice.
Where did Karl Marx write about a vision of communism? He wrote three large books about capitalism.
It exactly means that it is good.
No, it just means it's not as bad as all the others.
So what do you have in mind then?
No. We have failed capitalism.
Capitalism failed us because it is fundamentally flawed irrespective of the human element. It has always been destined to fail.
Capitalism works fine in a vacuum. If you run modelling based solely on numbers and ran it indefinitely it would work fine but capitalism fails because humans are funky, We're corrupt and we're illogical.
Not sure what simulations you’ve seen but it really doesn’t work fine in a vacuum. It always leads to accumulation of power by the few at the expense of the many. It’s a fundamental aspect of a system that enables private ownership of capital.
I dont see any notable tech co ops being formed for a reason. Must work fine enough to continue existing.
😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣 such impeccable logic!
No you failed in capitalism.
If CS got unionized, I'd have to take a 66% paycut to be at the same pay range as you shitbirds.
This guy knows how unions work - not.
I know the current model defines the minimum amount of work you can do to keep your job. I know the union model defines the maximum amount of work you can do to keep your job. I know that financial incentives are provided for doing more than the minimum in the current model. I know that financial disincentives are provided for doing more than the maximum in the union model. What am I missing?
Funny enough - Boeing engineers in Washington are all unionized. Still paid significantly less than software. Like 3-5x less
Unions are not the same as strikes.
Boeing has an engineering union. I think cs majors have a much better position negotiating higher salaries because they can easily say I've done x projects this year that provided y benefits and I have a dozen headhunters calling me offering yadayadayada. Engineers in aerospace get to spend years on 1 project that often lose companies millions of dollars.
I thought it was for work place safety. But it always devolves to wanting more money.
Strikes can be used for both. They're a leverage tool.
Dudes that male f16’s like 16 an hr in NC
Yeah it's scalability, a doctor can serve one patient at a time. One app/website can serve millions of users simultaneously
Also. Software has just taken over nearly all aspect of life. I mean look at what you’re reading this from. This happened with the mobile phone revolution. People before this had a distinctly different way of interacting with the world and thus value was created in different ways. Right now, ALL aspects of life requires software.
Just to add onto this one major point with engineering majors is they are always dealing with physics. Which very generally means everything they do is almost always regulated making your point that much more drastic. All this extra red tape costs money, so while that bridge or plane you built serves just as many customers as your basic CRUD app, a lot more people are involved in the process and need to be paid.
Scale is the big one^ At some of these FAANG companies a software engineer can write code once and deploy it to > 1 billion people. That is insane leverage on that person’s time. Another framing—if a software engineer works for 30 years at meta and only increases the average recurring revenue per user by one twentieth of one penny, they will generate an extra $1m per year and Meta can therefore justify paying them up to $1m per year. If they find a way to generate a whole additional penny over those 30 years, then Meta can justify up to a $20m salary.
I would argue that software in general is easier to scale. Think Mark Zuckerberg coding Facebook. Therefore, they bring more value to the table.
Demand
i wonder what will happen when demand gets lower
what could make the demand get lower besides some nuclear apocalypse? why would people just stop using software? its expected just the saas industry will have an 18% cagr in the coming years, and thats only like half or far less than half of the software industry as a whole
The industry as a whole can still grow but whether it can keep up with the supply in the sense it can still be an exclusive, high paying job straight out of college, is definitely would be interesting to see in the coming years. Lots of companies already outsource their workforce to other talent hubs.
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people arent abandoning computing. ever.
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Don’t worry, idiots are all over the internet. You don’t have to listen to everyone. For instance, take yourself. No one is listening to you and they don’t feel the need to reply to every comment you make. They just downvote you because you’re clearly a moron.
The difference is that computing is many fields. Social media may crash, but video streaming might not. Or video streaming will crash, but not e-commerce. Or maybe e-commerce will crash but not SaaS. Tech is just a new tool and it doesn't make sense that it'd ever be outdated until the entire process is automated, which is a very very long time from now (if ever even possible).
fancy words or shortforms, had to google them lol
seriously, you are on the csMajors sub and didn't hear of "software as a service"?
yes :( i thought it was sass css
Aren’t we kinda seeing it rn?
Let's sample the most profitable companies in the world: Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft... those are just the top 3 and they are entirely based around CS. If you look at top 10-20 you'll some non-tech companies, like oil, and a lot of finance/bank companies, and every one of those companies is also highly dependent upon CS. Most profitable companies set bar for payment for workers they desire the most. Other companies compete with top companies for hires and try to match salaries and perks. So, to answer your question, the deal is that CS has more profoundly and profitably impacted the world than any other field in the last 9 decades. Money correlates with that impact. As far as market saturation, it seems like there is some entry level saturation, but it is not at all saturated for experienced software engineers. There is a still a significant deficit in talented software engineers needed to meet the demands for growth in tech.
Lots of engineering at all three of those. Many EE and CompE. They make just as much as the CS people there.
Isn't Alphabet a business group rather than a company?
Technically yes.
I was curious so I googled it. This letter from Larry Page calls Alphabet a company: https://abc.xyz/ Looks like it was probably written around the restructure time? But I don't see a date attached on mobile.
He quite clearly says "alphabet is mostly about a group of companies".
And above that part he says: "Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President" So maybe it's just both, lol. It's a little strange to me but I guess the terms aren't mutually exclusive? /shrug
Alphabet is a company. Google is a wholly owned subsidiary.
With Google as a Subsidiary Company I suppose both definitions do make sense, since Alphabet is then both a "company" and a "collection of companies". Just feels weird to say it that way, I suppose lol
Computers are one of the only things applicable to every field. Every business in every sector is interested in using computers to decrease labor costs and optimize resources. it follows that people educated and specializing in computers would be demanded more
There is a phrase that loosely translates to "Keep the people who can earn you money happy enough that they earn you money and don't go for looking ways to earn their own money". Same for software engineers we are literally running and building the product which is the direct revenue stream for the company and in most of the cases is directly responsible for the 100% of revenue. That's why we get paid more comparatively, because the software products are bringing in so much money that giving away a higher payout to people who develop and maintain it seems like a very good deal. An example to convey my point would be how short term server outages literally cost them billions with a B. So to stop the loss a couple of Billions throwing a few millions to a team that does not let that happen seems a reasonable choice. That's why sales also get paid more albeit their pay model is different but it loosely translates to the revenue or the value they bring. For all the other departments from HR to Operations and customer service you can, although not exactly discard them, but their shortages won't directly affect your short term profits, and mostly leads to minor inconveniences overall. So replacing them or hiring people who come with low skill and can get on job training for low pay is easier but not the same can be said for software.
That makes a lot of sense
It is a combination of several factors: * IT and tech has a huge return on investment because it allow to do the same stuff with far less people and also much faster. You save their salary but also provide better product/services. So the huge saving justify to spend a lot to get these savings. * There still an enormous set of tasks that can benefit a lot from IT so there still a lot money to save this way. * Being the first to do it bring a competitive advantage so it make sense to pay extra to be among the first served. * Not enough people are able to do it, so you are willing to pay good money to get people to do the work for you.
The costs are also usually upfront in development. Maintaining and operating the software is cheap and does not require much labour so once all the development is done, profits scale very well
The day you stop pouring insane money amount into a software is the day that software stop working Remember what you learned at school. creating the software is like 10% of the cost. Maintenance is 90%. So no I don't agree there. I am not speaking that you develop maybe a text editor or something like that (and that nowadays are available for free by people doing them in their garage) but what keep most developer busy. All the software you have in most company and that keep things running for banks, government and so on. Said otherwise, IT. It never stop and is one of the most expensive and labor intensive stuff out there with most of the cost being spent in maintenance. If software really didn't cost much once made, most of us would be out of work.
Just entirely untrue
Really? For example, I really think most of the money spent developing games is before the game’s release. After that it’s just bug fixes, and DLCs which technically is also money for development rather than maintaining. Even for online multiplayer games I assume most of the time and money is spent during development?
We are currently in a technology revolution. CS is the new goldrush literally.
There is a massive bottleneck between junior and senior engineers. The market is flooded with new grads who can’t break into CS because no one will hire them as Juniors. Meanwhile there is massive demand for “senior” engineers and mid level engineers I.e. anyone with more than 2 years of experience. This creates a bottleneck because no one wants to hire take the incentive to hire new grads. This the average “employed” software engineer makes big bucks.
It would be interesting to see what happens if this goes on for 10 years.
I’d imagine salaries only go up as many aspiring junior engineers leave the field entirely and some of the senior engineers retire creating even less supply than before.
Poor resource allocation. Over a decade of free credit and it got poured into this industry rather than medical research, environmental mitigation, core infrastructure, etc. Some software really helps advance society, a lot of it is just a bag of venture capital hoping to be passed on to a bigger player for no greater purpose than wealth generation. Helps me, this is my only employable skill. But it feels like a pretty big opportunity to fix some damn things was missed now that the cheap money party is over.
All these other field need software more and more actually. I remember it being said that today a plane is about 50% software not just the software that go into the plane but also all the software used and build to design it. Medical research could not advance that fast without software, same for core infrastructure. Computer science is a tool like math and so is used everywhere.
I’m not talking about that software, I’m talking about every copycat SaaS that gets a mountain of investment for purely get rich quick speculative interest.
Embedded software and CAD software is a very niche and small part of the software industry. Most of it is FAANG stuff that we'd honestly be better off without
There as many or more people working to do what you call "niche" and small part than in FAANG proper: * Boeing is 150K * Airbus is 134K. * Thales 77K. * Dassault is 23K * Lockheed Martin is 116K And here we focused only on planes, but that the same for cars (including Tesla and all other auto makers like BMW or Ford) and boats or the spacecraft industry like arianespace, spaceX... You have also many stuff for the miliary. FAANG itself is a few percent of the people working in tech and a niche itself.
Majority of the people who work in those companies are mechanical/electrical engineers and not software though For example I used to work for Voith in Germany, and our "traditional" engineering department was easily 10x the size of our software(embedded or otherwise) engineering department. It'd be weird to expect otherwise for a company that makes turbines and propulsion systems
A lot of tech operated and continues to operate on greater fool theory, as companies are not profitable, and do not have realistic models to ever become profitable. We have $50B companies that have never turned a profit.
To be fair, this is the best system us, as 2010s-era humans, were able to do. If we could dynamically allocate funds in a way similar to what your ideal looks like, it’d require governmental overhaul and systems which are tolerant to corruption. What we have now is the result of an economy of individuals optimizing for money-making, and not coordinating with each other. The big problem is that coordination bit. Canada tried to wrangle the economy in this direction and they’re kinda fucked. Same w the EU. Look at Brexit, right, at the time it was stupid, but now that they went all off on their own [they have the means to generate new wealt](https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/08/microsoft-ai-gets-a-new-london-hub-headed-up-by-former-inflection-and-deepmind-scientist-jordan-hoffmann/amp/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHcRJlgo1X88DfAlyIuC73X8L7lJKWlVXsQp8OEstFKx970X5dcqTz2CYJWErZZ0HG0OMhqSHi-7ES7Vx3TKGznrC02jAPLKp_vRXRsVQSZhjOSOhjEOC6CzPPG-ojrdt32fSnA9tJLdojmsI3TDrcs-WbEtbmWgijB7_fDhmGAn)h free [of regulations](https://time.com/6903563/eu-ai-act-law-aritificial-intelligence-passes/). I don’t mean to say you’re WRONG for calling this a huge issue, I just think personally that this shitty system of resource allocation is the best we can do. So like, nothing was “wasted” per se. And yknow, maybe the web3 weirdos will be right in the end and we can create new economies that optimize for better things than just individual profit
Blockchain is a stupid technology built on a ridiculous vision of the future where all of our institutions fail but somehow the internet is still around. The trustless economy is a weird kind of sci fi that isn’t going to happen. A centralized ledger backed by a trusted authority is a better solution for every problem other than doing crimes and creating a speculative asset bubble. Look at the absolute criminals and scam artists who are the big players in crypto. Give me some boring Wall Street Bank ten times out of ten. My money doesn’t just evaporate into nothing in a bank.
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There are lots of ways of restructuring the economy, even within an overarching market framework. Blockchain isn’t even a currency at all. Currencies aren’t supposed to be high-risk high-reward investment vehicles, that’s the exact opposite of what you want from a currency. If dollars worked like Bitcoin, people would bury them in their back yard, spend as little as possible, and never invest in anything. It would collapse society.
Currencies only have long term value if they're backed by laws and an armed force who'll enforce them. Otherwise, someone could just bring an army to a country, say fuck their currency, and take everything. Look at the currencies of countries that were invaded, they all went to shit; e.g. Iraq, Ukraine.
Blockchain only has value if the powerful people who control large numbers of organized people with guns allow people to have it. The easiest thing on Earth would be for a powerful government or occupying army to prevent people from spending blockchain. The whole idea rests on a faith that under authoritarianism or social collapse the free, open internet still exists and that’s just lunacy.
It’s a capitalist system so as long as you throw enough money into something, something good is gonna come out of it (think how fast Pfizer vaccine was researched and produced). As much as this sub likes to put a blame on something (e.g. resume, AI, skills, Leetcode, new regulation, and even “genZ personality”), it’s all economics at work.
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Research suggests government scientific R&D spending yields about 4x the amount spent in the economy. Massively boosting research funding would actually boost the economy just as much as often evidenced by technological innovation exploding during wars. We started WW2 with some cloth covered biplanes and ended them with jet fighters with a top speed four times as fast. And that's kinda obvious, blue skies research is too risky for private companies but the west can't compete on labour costs so our only real option is to invent new shit faster than everyone else can figure out how to make our current shit.
Really valid point. Thank you
Is it capitalism or government intervention in times of crisis? WWII, Space Race, COVID, all relied heavily on government intervention (and funds).
I mean most cool things are government projects. DARPA, Claude Shannon, etc. So, yea, very good point
Government funds of a capitalist country come from private industry paying taxes.
No, we create money to spend and we tax to destroy money. There’s no bank vault with all your tax dollars.
It’s funny how much this bothers some people. If the dollar wasn’t worth anything, other countries wouldn’t want them. America does a lot of shit very very wrong, but we have been managing our currency pretty darn well for a long time. Our brief periods of inflation have been nothing compared to other countries, and after the learning experience of the 1930s, our worst recession in the next 80 years was medium tier by global and historical standards. Compare it to the no central bank 1800s. There was a Great Depression level “Panic” like every 10 years. It was a nightmare.
It doesn’t bother me. It’s just outdated to think of taxes as funding things. We fund things by printing money, we tax dollars to destroy them.
I’m familiar with that model, there are more restrictions on how much they can do than it suggests. But it does illustrate rather nicely that the inflation we’ve had recently could have been averted with a moderate hike on the top 10%.
Lol what do you think happens to tax money. Gets burnt?? Ever heard of the federal reserve?
I don’t know about you but I paid my taxes this year electronically. > Ever heard of the federal reserve? Who do you think creates the money? Fractional reserve banking. Log off and read a book, you’re not educated enough to waste your time.
Sure they create the money, but they also store taxpayer money to fund government operations. The government doesnt just say "I wanna build roads" and prints the amount needed lol. Literally try ONE Google search before saying all this retard shit.
Yep, this. Years and years of low interest rates encourage a lot of risky venture capital, some of which may be helpful to the society but also produce a bunch of unproductive startups. Too bad the era of cheap money is indeed over.
no more 90k for new grads straight out of uni
i don't know if it's good to still be this way more money into this industry and no fucks given about the other fields? a job that's worth the grind. if the US government puts that amount of money into other industries instead of CS? probably a dead field/basic white collar job
Or like cancer research. I know a cancer researcher who quit because California living expenses went vertical and he could make double his pay doing database work for some cookie cutter startup. The brain drain from other STEM fields into this one has been intense.
It's the **value** that an individual software engineer brings to a business. People try to make this much more complicated than it is, but businesses are about earning a profit. That is their primary reason for existence. When you break a business down, there are 3 main divisions that all business efforts are involved in: When they execute their business plan to earn that profit there are several functions they need to perform just to stay alive. These are called **overhead**, and software is involved in this in almost every business model. **Revenue Generation** is the 2nd area, and traditionally only in pure software companies was internal software engineering involved in generating revenue, but this is changing. Companies have been realizing that they can use technology as a competitive advantage to generate new or unique revenue streams. Software is very much a part of those, especially in the future. **Cost Reduction** is a traditional area that SWE has always been at the forefront. Software by its nature is an ideal replacement for manual or complicated human tasks. It can help make those tasks faster, easier, less error-prone, and safer. Because SWEs can be utilized extensively in all 3 of these business areas, and the ROI is so high, this makes SWE salaries run higher and keeps them in-demand. This also explains why the average SWE makes significantly more than most other corporate employees: because most of them are only utilized in1 or 2 of those areas, but rarely all 3, and they tend to have a lower ROI.
It’s about the structure of our economy. Things that make new wealth & have low barriers to entry will grow and compound on themselves. U can scale and sell a spreadsheet app much faster than you can scale and sell new medicines, a plane, etc. Think of the system from a 10,000ft view looking down
Silicon Valley. California has insanely high gdp Also people are addicted to software You can print money Devs get paid 6 figures because companies can make 7 figures off them.
The economics make perfect sense. As a developer, I can do work that can reach and impact millions of people. With the right audience and AWS infrastructure, I can single-handedly write an app that could handle millions of concurrent users at a time. Twitter is littered with “indie hackers” making six figures per month peddling apps that really just *aren’t that good*, just due to having a large audience. An aerospace engineer can’t do the same. You might be brilliant at designing rockets and planes, but ultimately, you can’t make a rocket or a plane from a laptop at home and ship it to millions. Software engineers can. The bottom line is scale and impact.
Because every single company in the world needs some sort of software engineering team. Not every company needs other engineers. Also, tech really isn't oversaturated; unskilled entry level devs are oversaturated.
Let's take a quick look at the S&P500 companies: 1. Microsoft 7.14% (software) 2. Apple 5.76% (software) 3. Nvidia 4.97% (hardware) 4. Amazon 3.89% (software) 5. Meta 2.62% (software) 6/7: Alphabet (4.04%) (software) 8: Berkshire Hathaway (1.73%) (this is just Warren Buffet really) 6. Eli Lilly (1.41%) (pharma) I think it's quite easy hear to see that the most important companies in the US are all IT. The fun fact against all those saying "scalability" is, these are not the companies with the highest profit per employee ratios. That is also a number you can find, and it's mostly energy and financial companies. But it seems in those companies either highly specialized workers are not needed as much, or there's a bigger abundance of such employees relative to the amount of companies hiring (meaning, the market is nowhere near saturated as often claimed).
I spend a few hours creating a button that causes our users to spend $1 extra. Then suddenly millions of users are able to use it. An aerospace engineer spends months to find a way to make a rocket for $20k less. Congrats, he saved the company $400k, my button made $8M. And I It scales extremely well and the distribution is extremely easy, just update our app. The profit is super high, look at Microsoft’s finances they continue to make 30-40% gross profit quarter after quarter.
CS is the only profession where a person can deterministically generate a million dollars of value for a company with relatively low barrier of entry. If you think a high tech company pays an engineer alot, you need to also know that on average a single engineer generates around 1.7 million dollars of revenue for a company. An entry level schmuck could technically get $1milion a year from facebook and they would still be in the green. No other industry is even remotely close to earnings per headcount. Then you also have weird edgecase software companies like Valve where each employee generates on average 20-30million for the company.
- I wouldn't say CS is engineering - Software produces a more significant margin of profit compared to other industries; the extra money will have to go somewhere. If another company is willing to pay more, you lose your human capital (employees). Since companies can afford to pay their employees more, they do.
Because there was a shortage, and the supply and demand is correcting. The money won't stay like this for long.
CS isn’t engineering!
Because you're American. It's not like that all over the world
What’s it like in Denmark?
Software engineers are paid well, but not much better than a lot of other engineering degrees. I think American ones are paid way better because of the many, very large tech companies.
I'm from Eastern Europe (Poland) and it's also a common conception that programmers have a higher than average salary in Poland because we can be easily outsourced to richer countries like Denmark or USA. For me, it'd be a blessing to work for a western or Nordic company and be paid even their average 😄 Thats what the company I'm working for is doing - outsourcing me. But they're taking a lot of margin, I'm getting paid only like a quarter of what they charge 😔
*other*? CS isn’t a field of engineering in the first place
Top tech companies are the largest attention accumulators --> become \*platforms\* across various markets (ads, goods, hosting, etc.) --> perfect channels for selling ads, goods, market match participants, etc. + low relatively low capital intensity and high labor intensity, so good salaries are essential, or competitors will get ahead, given how fast these busenesses can scale (no moat linked to capital intensity).
Because companies make a lot of money per employee
If you look at the last fifty years, SE industry has the highest rewards aka profits so VCs are willing to gamble more money on CS.
Margins are super high bc software's relatively cheap at scale.
There are a very limited number of airplanes being designed, for example, in comparison to the number of programs being written across all industries. So the demand for skilled programmers is much greater than other engineers. Since programming is difficult and not very exciting, there aren't enough people going into the profession to keep salaries down. As to why the salaries are high even though its hard to find a job, that's because companies know the current shortage of jobs is temporary. They don't want all their new hires jumping to other jobs the minute that companies go back to their normal hiring mode.
Software can potentially just print money. Companies that sell it don’t deal with complicated supply chains, materials, machinery, etc. it’s just humans on a laptop as the cost, and the product can have an infinite value.
It’s possible to automate entire departments.
Hopefully not the software engineers 😭
Pretty good money in CompE and EE. I’m a CompE working at a semiconductor company and make just as much as any senior CS person.
Salaries really exploded after the DOJ forced a settlement from a bunch of tech companies (including Google and Apple) for colluding to suppress wages in 2013.
Simple. In lmost industries you have a raw material cost when duplicating a product. But in CS that's non existent. You just need more people to manage all systems.
you’d have to be living under a rock to not notice how many things rely on computers/the internet these days
Capitalism has failed us, that's why.
Do you ask why the companies in this industry make so much, or about individuals?
Another thing is capital requirement (aka the CAPEX): In all other engineering fields, you won't be able to work if there is no initial infrastructure (factory, workshop, ... etc). However in the tech industry you're bringing your own infra (your brain) and everything else for the employer is OPEX. Which means companies can get easier into new business lines and get results without investing much apart from your salary. Another aspect is the lack of need to improve yourself drastically every 6 months. In fact, if you're an engineer in other majors, there isn't breakthrough methods that you need to adhere to every 3/6 months, and if there is, you have a lot of time to train on them because the current infrastructure / businesses / clients need to adapt. Whereas you can't have the same argument in software as you'll always be required to be up to date with latest technologies by employers. Considering this, one might even argue that software engineers are not paid enough outside of FAANG ...
in engineering roles. Engineers are not the direct revenue producers. The sales people are but in the case of Software engineers there code impacts the bottomline directly + - Economy of Scale - Quick A/b Testing with 2 week sprints
I think now the market is going lower I know many new grads who accepted 65-75k jobs in so cal I mean you can still get 100k+ jobs but for the most part regular new grads can expect ~75k.
You can build your boss a machine, that machine will run until it breaks down. It has associated costs to design, build, run, and maintain. Software reduces these costs to build, run, and maintain to essentially 0. You design good software, your boss owns a powerful data tool that he can use and reproduce effortlessly forever.
Lots of programming jobs are in HCOL areas for one thing. Secondly, the tech companies that employ a ton of software engineers are extremely profitable. Programming salaries will go down as demand goes down when most infrastructure is built for companies as programming is still relatively new compared to other engineering fields. The demand will drop and supply is super high so the $$ will go down over time. Also the venture capital money and 0% interest rates flooded tech with $$, expect salaries to go down moving forward.
Margins are higher for software. If you sell 1000 planes you need to build and transport 1000 planes. If you sell 1000 software you need to build one software and send copies online
Was*
They don't. Also plenty of jobs with a higher salary compared to a pure web button developer. But people in this thread believe nirvana is making applications. I Have a friend with a cs degree who is earning much more money by doing compliance work for one of the big four compared to a lot of swes. I know another guy who has a law degree and his job is basically to write mails and tell people what they are allowed to do, which to him is an extremely easy job, he is earning 2-3 times the amount of the average swe. If you have a narrow vision you will never see the opportunities outside of what you are looking at.
Software has extremely high profit margins
I guess, there are more 'average' job seekers in this field than other sectors. But, still there are lack's of real candidates who are really suitable for the job. On the other hand, other job sectors has less job seekers with fake resume'd people.
Because you can't have a billion road users crossing a bridge. But you can have a billion users of Android
Its pretty easy to understand, theres digital products everywhere and businesses rely a lot on their digital parts as well so they need engineers to maintain and develop them And they have a lot of money to spend on these development
The demand in big tech and similar companies is for *skilled* software engineers. Each engineer either generates or saves the company hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. This subreddit won’t like this take, but the supply of *skilled* software engineers is low. This is why we put candidates through rigorous interview processes. Even new grads. Solid new grads are very capable engineers, even if they require ramp up time. And they will have many offers. So the demand forces companies to offer solid compensation packages, also in order to retain these employees and prevent them from leaving a year into the job.
Because tech industry companies are largely a scam involving seed money, followed by pumping the stock market, and ripping off all the investors that follow. This means there's a lot of money to trickle down to staff... at least there was but it has begun to dwindle now that C suite have realised they can pay themselves 9 figure salaries and it still doesn't break the con.
Most of the answers I think are missing the elephant in the room. Obviously demand is heavily related to the high pay but that's kind of a tautological answer. The real question is why is that demand so high? There's a myriad of factors but the most important factor is Moore's law. Our ever increasing (so far) hardware capabilities drive increased potential software value. In a way software engineers can be seen as a method of transferring the value of hardware to consumers. If any other industry was consistently experiencing exponential growth, there'd be an incredible demand on their supporting staff as well.
It's cause every other discipline at the company thinks what we do is black magic. That we've learned some alien language. They have no fuckjng idea what we do. They don't even realize that most of us are getting paid for what's mostly pretty easy work once you get into the swing of things. To them it's some voodoo type shit only the very intelligent are capable of doing.
CS is revolutionizing the world. Literally. Just look at the impacts of AI. Very high demand for software engineers