It think it has to do with the pseudo-monopoly FAANGS. They make so much money that they reckon throwing a lot to the devs makes sense. They're less likely to l

It think it has to do with the pseudo-monopoly FAANGS. They make so much money that they reckon throwing a lot to the devs makes sense. They're less likely to leave if you pay them, but one should also emphasise the pseudo in that: these are firms that feel stuff needs to keep moving, and they want to foster a pro-dev culture to make that happen. By comparison you have Oracle, which is also entreched, but from what I can see are never mentioned as a dev-friendly place, and are not often lobbed into the FAANG salary debate. SV also has a load of startups that reckon they are gonna be a FAANG someday, so they figure they'll take on some of the business practices, such as paying devs a lot of money. The other lump is places that don't see devs as central to the business model, which is a lot of diverse places. About supply, I'm not sure even with that upward curve of CS grads, that there's enough. A fair few of the people who take CS during a bubble are not in there for the long run. How many people do you know who sat next to you in a coding course and now can't write a Hello World? Strip those out, and you still get an upward curve, but a few tens of thousands of grads doesn't seem like very many. I'm not so familiar with the other branches of engineering, but my impression is that many of them are in capital-intensive industries. If you need a chemical plant to be able to do your job, that will have an impact when you negotiate to get on the job ladder. You'll get more than your average wage slave, because the owner of the factory wants his capital utilized effectively, but he's also got a lot of leverage over the employees. So why don't the FAANGS think this? After all, you can't work in ML without a load of machines? Thoughts to ponder.