It would be great it I lived in a universe where the average blog post about the job market included a sketch of the supply curve ("number of qualified applican

It would be great it I lived in a universe where the average blog post about the job market included a sketch of the supply curve ("number of qualified applicants willing to work at salary X, for 0<X<$1 million per year") as well as the demand curve ("here's the number of people the world could profitably employ as programmers at a per-programmer salary of X"). But not only is such an estimate difficult to make - many of the relevant variables are literally unknowable, and there are way more dimensions than two - but nobody would understand it anyway. People in general are bad at functions. That's why they struggle with elementary calculus. If you can demonstrate to a company that you (but not your competitor) are reliably worth X plus five percent, they will pay you X. Unfortunately, there are few programmers on earth who can demonstrably, repeatably, and uniquely add $1.5 million per year to an organization. And we certainly don't have a recipe for scalably generating $1.5m per year per programmer. (If you do, for god's sake stop posting on HN and get moving. We'll all come work for you and be rich!) Whereas what we do know is that we can basically stand around at a conference and enumerate lots and lots of likely ways to use a talented web developer to generate, say, $75k of value per year. We just don't have many talented web developers who are willing to work for less than that. So most of those relatively-low-value tasks go undone, or get done less efficiently, as web developers hold out for higher-value positions that pay $100k or $125k and that earn their employers much more than that.