I think you've got cause and effect backwards. The rocket-ship rise of IT salaries is what has everyone in the field discussing salaries. The topic wouldn't eve

I think you've got cause and effect backwards. The rocket-ship rise of IT salaries is what has everyone in the field discussing salaries. The topic wouldn't even come up if it was pretty well-bounded to $80k/year for a SWE with 5 years of experience. However, in our field you end up with people who have sat around in their same SWE job at DuPont/Lockheed or some other boomer company for 10 years and are making $80k while new grads are hitting $150k+ TC going into Google and 7 years experienced engineers can hit $450k TC at the big tech companies. A tech company with a good moat can easily extract millions in value out of the work of SWEs building more crap for them. That's why they are willing to compete for competent engineers. If they didn't bring in that kind of cash, the companies just wouldn't pay for it, period. Employees talking money with each other has zero bearing on what a company is willing to offer. I worked at a hotel in high school and everyone knew the hourly pay of every position in the hotel. It didn't get us raises.