Yes, excluding outliers, finance has always paid better. I'd guess the brief migration from finance to tech was simply because finance became very unfashionable

Yes, excluding outliers, finance has always paid better. I'd guess the brief migration from finance to tech was simply because finance became very unfashionable for a little while. Meanwhile, headline-grabbing IPOs were making it seem like everyone in Silicon Valley was making easy money. As an equation it would look like: finance_pay - judgement_of_society > tech_pay + lottery*Pr[winning_lottery] where judgement_of_society has rapidly declined, and people are realizing that the true value of Pr[winning_lottery] is smaller than their estimate.