FTA: "One possibility is that we have a shortage of programmers. If that’s the case, you’d expect more programmers to enter the field, bringing down compensatio

FTA: "One possibility is that we have a shortage of programmers. If that’s the case, you’d expect more programmers to enter the field, bringing down compensation." This is imo a big part of why high-end salaries have skyrocketed, but the author's reasoning is total "let them eat cake." It's not that there's a shortage of programmers overall. There are lots of programmers working non-industry jobs for relatively piddly salaries who would leap at the opportunity to double or triple their compensation at a big name tech company - if they were qualified to do so. The problem is that there's a shortage of people who have the aptitude and skills to work in a big tech company with very high expectations for even their entry-level engineers. I don't doubt that there are intangibles at play: soft skills, "cultural fit" biases, to a lesser extent academic pedigree, but none of that trumps needing to be an actual honest-to-goodness engineer, rather than a "programmer". Plenty of other pieces (citation needed) have been written about the growing chasm between the two classifications of development jobs - engineers who can create software, vs. programmers who can write code - and I think the salary differences are just an aspect of that.