That’s also my experience in Europe. I used to work for an industrial company in the defense sector. We were working on very complex problems with difficult re

That’s also my experience in Europe. I used to work for an industrial company in the defense sector. We were working on very complex problems with difficult requirements in term of resilience and performance. It was extremely interesting: complex algorithms, redondant architecture, hard real time development, most of it in C++ or Ada. Deadlines were tight. It was quite stressful and the pay was miserable. I left the field entirely but most of my former colleagues now work as fullstack developers for companies building SaaS solutions. They all complain about how boring it is but they all have doubled their total comp. Meanwhile, I heard from my former boss that the company still complain that the part of the org doing software is more expensive on average per employee that the ones doing production (apparently no one has realised we don’t hire blue collar workers in this part of the company) and keeps grumbling about how talent is too hard to retain in my city.