The last time engineers (with barely a real degree) were making more dollars than licensed MD brain surgeons, the nasdaq crashed 80% to wipe out fortunes and ship the jobs over to India, making TC questions the last thing on their minds. It took 15 years for engineers to shed the shame of dotcom bubble. Question: how can these ludicrous valuations and salaries hold up much longer? Is the guy bragging about 20 LC under his belt, a shitty degree, and 600KTC worth anywhere close to a brain surgeon?🤔🤔......I'm sure we all feel overpaid...but any thought otherwise?? #tech
So long as there is such intense competition and demand for engineers, I don't think this is going to change.
I dunno.... engineer is such a loose term....cs grads , math grad, physics, EE, mechanical, drama major.... really anyone and everyone can just do leetcode (it's easy)....they take Coursera, and become instant experts!.... there's nothing stopping joe blow from taking your job
If it was the case that anyone could just go in and become an SWE, why do you think it hasn't happened? Why do FANG+ companies still pay >$200k for newly graduated CS students?
Nah
What goes up must come down sometime.. could be 1 year, or 50 years.
But it's a random walk, right? So it's also true that what goes down must come up :)
TC or GTFO
Don’t be so naive. Your normative understanding of pay scales between industries won’t always be, and there aren’t any moral laws governing that hierarchy, only supply and demand. Being rare is what makes you expensive. Also brain surgeons or whatever are cream of the crop of MDs. They’re like the fangs of the doctor world. All industries have tiers within.
Doesn't matter if it's an engineer, a bootcamp graduate, a brain surgeon or a plumber. They will continue to be worth their price if: - They're consistently capable of solving problems that are sold at a price tenfolds higher than their salary (e.g. scale) - Qualified professionals are relatively scarce It's not about what you or society think about what they "deserve", how difficult their work or how long they spent practicing. It's about the price of the problems they solve reliably again and again.
I guess my question is "what's different now compared to 2000, to make such high salaries/valuations sustainable"?..... especially given low barrier to entry for CS jobs?
Tech companies are making money this time. Would you buy 3 million for 50k? Definitely. Would you buy 3 million for 400k? Still a great deal. It has nothing to do with barriers of entry, because the scarcity is for a certain level of quality. For salaries to crash you need companies to stop making money. ads and cloud are eating the world right now.
The GDP of the internet has increased enormously since the dotcom boom. Also, when's the last time a team of neurosurgeons got paid to make something worth a billion dollars?
Let me guess - you have been at Microsoft forever and just discovered Levels.fyi? 😂
I assure you brain surgeons make more than $600k
Median is $395k, according to Google...... and MDs are usually way smarter than techies (on average)...they might as well do 20 leetcode and join faang....I'm sure it's easy for them
And if you Google median software engineer salary you get median income of $100,690. You’re comparing the top software engineer (people who work at FAANG type companies) to their salaries rather than SDE positions as a whole