I wouldn't be so cocky about this. I agree with the value that software engineers bring, but you also have to look at the driving factors. Over the last 20 ye

I wouldn't be so cocky about this. I agree with the value that software engineers bring, but you also have to look at the driving factors. Over the last 20 years, the web + smart phone revolution created an unprecedented opportunity whose value was captured by the first wave of companies who figured out how to scale always on services to billions of concurrent customers (Amazon, Google, Facebook). They built their foundations lean in between the dotcom and real estate bubbles, then, over the last 12 years we then had an incredible tech bull run capped off with a pandemic which forced everything online in a way that further ballooned expectations. Ultimately software engineer salaries were driven by the competition for the elite talent, but the ceiling was created by the market dominance and stock performance of the biggest companies. FAANG hoovered up an incredible number of engineers because they could afford it, not because they could productively use all those engineers. The average FAANG engineer can not reliably generate the value they are paid—most of that comes from a tiny fraction of engineers running the revenue engines of the company. While I agree the best engineers will only become more valuable, there is good reason to believe that competition will force margins down and this will put downward pressure on the average engineer salary over time. We may well have already seen the high watermark mid-level software engineer salaries, as we did a while ago for stock options which the investor class has steadily whittled away via financial engineering that consistently stays one step ahead of the historic perception of the rank and file.