There are two macro trends here: 1. More software is needed in almost every part of life (i.e. think of cars, now over 20% of a car's R&D goes to software for

There are two macro trends here: 1. More software is needed in almost every part of life (i.e. think of cars, now over 20% of a car's R&D goes to software for its systems, compare it to the same type of car 10 years ago), and so on. 2. Due to the low central bank's rates there has been a divulge of money, a lot of which has ended up on startups/seed investing. Most will go no where, but they need engineers, yet they can't afford them as they are not profitable, or really just speculations. So, more engineers are needed, yet a lot of these companies can't afford to go to bidding wars for them as they don't have solid financial footing, hence you see so many of these "there are not enough engineers" articles, yet salaries are only increasing few percent a year at best. So, this extra engineering demand is created by companies (i.e. startups) that have a great chance of failure, and will just go away as soon as money starts becoming tight again. Which means, one the longer term the larger companies (the ones that actually make money) will dictate the salaries of engineers. Since they tend to move slowly, compensation of engineers will do so, only few percentage a year, probably a bit over the inflation, reflecting the long term Macro trends on more software being used everywhere. I haven't heard any of the crazy 1999-2001 stories yet, so I'd say this feels a lot like 2006-2007 (the Web 2.0 boom), which ended up with a soft 2008-2009 period.