Developer compensation is high because developers produce more valuable work, and in the short term the labor market isn't that efficient. People don't make ver

Developer compensation is high because developers produce more valuable work, and in the short term the labor market isn't that efficient. People don't make very efficient initial choices of career, and their initial choices are fairly sticky. In the middle of a gold rush, how does it happen that people change their plans, and go out and mine the gold, sell the pick-axes etc? Dropping your plans generally sucks. All else being equal, you'd rather not. And you probably know less about the opportunity than the one you're pursuing. Because not everyone is going to drop everything and go mine gold, if the gold mining is profitable, the people who do pursue the opportunity are going to do very well. And that'll continue to be true for a long time — because people just don't respond to these opportunities that efficiently. As a comparison: in Australia during the mining boom, the salaries available for work in the mining industry compared very favourably to other industries. And yet I knew lots of smart high-school grads starting degrees in fields like chemical engineering, aerospace engineering, computer engineering...Smart kids would eagerly enroll to study fields where there was no industry to speak of in Australia; even though a lot of them weren't planning to move overseas. In the meantime, salaries for mining-related fields were sky high. My hand-wavey, empathic read on this is that following price signals into a field you don't have a particular affinity for feels somehow wrong. I think smart kids are very vulnerable to this sensation. They feel like simply going into the high-paying field is somehow too "obvious". It's an affront to their sense of individuality. I think the small/large company thing is in part a similar effect.