There are a bunch of not commonly stated factors for high SWE salaries: - Gender disparity in CS...women tend to avoid CS programs cutting out roughly half the

There are a bunch of not commonly stated factors for high SWE salaries: - Gender disparity in CS...women tend to avoid CS programs cutting out roughly half the potential talent pool particularly before 2015. - Gender disparity in education. Schooling and college admittance rates up to college tend to skew more female making the actual gender disparity even more pronounced. Software engineering is mostly men who have half the potential job market competition virtually drop out past college! - Programming languages are "English". English is virtually a prerequisite for programming (correct me if I'm wrong). This makes outsourcing to any country other than highly developed parts of India difficult. - It's changing constantly which diminishes the value of higher education and experience. Examples: kubernetes widespread adoption in 2017, JS frameworks that became popular after 2015, HTML5, wasm, transformers after 2018 (in ML). 16 year olds in 2017 can be more expierienced than college profs in newer tech. - American tech monopolies. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon each have in the order of 100,000 engineers. Do they need that many? Probably no. Can they AFFORD that many? Yes. Google makes an avg of 1.6 million in profit per employee. They can do that by charging tax on their network effect monopoly and overwhelmingly hire in the US. This drives wages up across the sector. - Programming is hard for many of the tech illiterate. Many of us grew up with a computer at the center of our homes. For the vast majority of people on earth this was not the case. It's actually getting worse with the usage of tablets and smartphones. Here's a couple of WRONG arguments for high salaries: - Software scales cheaply...this does not matter if you can hire cheap equivalently capable SWEs overseas. A McDonald's employee feeds many more people than a Michelin chef. Doesn't make one get paid more than the other. - "Good" software engineers should get paid more... This is fine, but I see plenty of shitty SWEs getting paid just fine. Wages are set by supply and demand - Programmers produce more value to society. Nope. Vaccine makers, bridge makers, factory builders..take your pick. All of these areas now DO involve software though, so the market for folks with mixed skills is getting ever bigger I expect to see pure SWE jobs diminish in value, but domain expertise SWE jobs increase!