I struggle with this - I tend to agree they will trend lower, but will still be high for the best engineers. Most high paying jobs pay well because of leverage

I struggle with this - I tend to agree they will trend lower, but will still be high for the best engineers. Most high paying jobs pay well because of leverage. Private equity/investment bankers make decisions to invest huge sums of money. The people who make those decisions get a small cut. Similarly, consultants make decisions that steer entire companies, in exchange for a small cut. Software is unique vs many other jobs because it has a lot of leverage. An afternoon where I write a few lines of code can impact billions of people - this is why software engineers get paid a lot. Where it breaks down is that only select few software engineers work at Google. There is a lot of software that does not impact a lot of people. I could see either a) A shift toward long hours, like finance, where software engineering is a commodity and the highest paid engineers are simply the ones who are willing to work the most b) A shift of the median downward, but comp among the 95+ percentile of engineers staying the same with competition among the highest leveraged companies.