The article doesn't mention two very important things working in the programmers favor - leverage and margin. A software product can scale to hundreds of milli

The article doesn't mention two very important things working in the programmers favor - leverage and margin. A software product can scale to hundreds of millions of customers with just a few employees (ex. WhatsApp). This increases revenue per employee. Software companies have much higher margins compared to other industries. You can attribute this to network effects and stickiness from lack of easy data interop between different vendors. This limits competition that drive down margins. Hardware engineers in chip design command decent salaries also from leverage but the ability for a company to switch vendors limits margins, unless you have IP like qualcomm.