Actually I think the quality of engineers now, atleast at the top 5% level is the highest its ever been. There's more money to be made as an elite software engi

Actually I think the quality of engineers now, atleast at the top 5% level is the highest its ever been. There's more money to be made as an elite software engineer now than ever. Top graduates who previously would have went into banking or consulting may now go into software engineering (if math is their preference). I think we are seeing instead an explosion of open source software, some of which has dubious quality, but other pieces done very well. The lego style engineering culture exists because of great open source, the top 5% of engineers are writing all the code, everyone else is just gluing together their results.