Pay always comes down to supply and demand of labor, not value added. If you have a button that earns $1m a press, its a pretty valuable role to press it, but

Pay always comes down to supply and demand of labor, not value added. If you have a button that earns $1m a press, its a pretty valuable role to press it, but you can also hire literally anyone to do it. So pay for pressing the button can be quite low despite large value creation. Now, if only one person is eligible to press the button, he can easily negotiate up to $1m a press for himself. Same work, lower supply of labor. For a long time, in person work and demand for people in SF Bay area led to major wage inflation in US tech jobs. I was there through the 2010s and saw firsthand what seemed to be 15-20% wage inflation YoY for many years. With remote work that future is looking more tenuous. There are lower cultural barriers to having teams collocated in different timezones now that most people are remote in general. So wages are likely to normalize somewhat over time… likely flatish in nominal terms for US workers, but down in real terms until other locales catch up. There’s still going to be a preference to hire US workers in a remote world, but the effect is going to weaken a lot. Such high pay in real terms for people with minimal YoE is going to be considered an aberration in retrospect