This feels like an overreach of the risk premium concept. At the very least, it doesn't describe how AppAmaGooFaceSoft arrive at their compensation scheme. You

This feels like an overreach of the risk premium concept. At the very least, it doesn't describe how AppAmaGooFaceSoft arrive at their compensation scheme. You need to separate out uncertainty from the supply function (sell your time to the highest bidder). If the risk is someone might come along with a better offer, but the job market is too opaque to know for sure, there are systems we can set up to make it more transparent. Or at least lock in the current rate for a span of time with a contract. I'm relatively certain that if you established a clearing house for tech jobs the way the AEA does for economists, even if it removed all the uncertainty of who the highest bidder for an employee was, wages would remain high or possibly go higher. There's a lot of room for top tech firms to bid up wages yet, and even the small bootstrapped companies value programmer time pretty highly.