Very few companies make more than a million per employee. And that is inherently deceptive because you have products (FB and Google Search) that could actually

Very few companies make more than a million per employee. And that is inherently deceptive because you have products (FB and Google Search) that could actually make a lot more but don't. And you need to consider the return, NFLX has the highest revenue per employee and likely isn't profitable once you actually look at capitalized costs. Their spending on tech is certainly very profitable, but that is because they are a media company...not because they are a tech one (the same is true at Disney, at Warner Discovery, etc. This kind of measure overstates the economics because they have huge non-employee costs)...so that leaves AAPL (profitable, but also substantial non-employee costs), GOOGL and FB...both protected by corporate governance abnormalities that allow insiders to skim off huge amounts from monopoly products. Ultimately, your salary is limited by what you are able to charge. Most devs do not have real agency with the product, that is why salespeople make more. It isn't like finance where you can get paid based on revenue. > But companies have largely seen that the more developers they hire the more money they make. I haven't seen this. Almost every tech company I have researched (I worked as an equity analyst for a decade) is massively overstaffed. Sales spending is far more accretive. Devs and cloud are a black hole caused by the lack of business knowledge amongst senior managers (even in the C-suite, tech companies have unusually bad managers). The industry is nowhere remotely close to where it needs to be, and won't be for a long time because most people don't have skills that will generate profit. Prices going down won't mean more looking to hire because the market is going to shrink overall. I think one area that is severely under-penetrated is tech spending by legacy companies, but that won't make up the gap. At large individual companies, the numbers are insane...some companies will cut thousands, and still need to do more (it isn't just devs either, it is data, managerial, support, project management, marketing...there is just bloat everywhere).