I thought there was a shortage of software engineers right now? Although I just got an email from Glassdoor with estimated salary (in the Bay Area) being 5-10k lower than the last email, so who knows.
All of this is well orchestrated by large tech companies in an effort to drive down labor costs. The problem is, there's an assumption that the current labor market is just asking too much.
I think looking at the current labor market landscape, practices in place industry wide (e.g., agile, interview processes, etc.) were starting to see labor market feedback that this simply isn't the case. Development is hard, it's time consuming, expensive, and requires a lot of active practice--no matter how much you want to drive labor costs down.
Ultimately I hope the entire strategy backfires and we turn away talent industry wide to other sectors and then there truly are shortages resulting in businesses pushing these practices unable of maintaining their businesses and forcing them to scale back--wishful thinking though.
So at the end of the day you can build more complex software with lesser amount of developers but there is a catch, and that is developers now need to be much more talented.
Right now a good developer can easily develop what a team of 10 average developers could build 10 years ago. This is especially true in GameDev field. Right now there is a silent revolution going on with procedural art-work so that a good programmer/artist can create huge amount of content in very short-time but procedural art generation is really complicated.
So if you are a talented developer you can compete with mid-sized companies right now!
I believe it will get to a point in future that even a small team of talented developers will be able to out-compete companies with 100s of average developer.
Large companies will have no option but to scale back and change their HR practices but large companies, like large ships, are harder to turn, hence some of them will definitely go bankrupt in near future.
Which, in turn, drives the number of bugs and flaws way, way up, which drastically increases the number of developer hours and money spent trying to fix products that are constantly broken. This situation just gets worse over time because those "better" libraries/tools/knowledge-base make adding new bugs much, much faster than fixing them. Evernote is the best example of this I have ever seen.
> So if you are a talented developer you can compete with mid-sized companies right now!
If you're a talented developer, you can compete with what mid-sized companies were doing 10 years ago and large companies were doing 20 years ago. That's more than good enough to make a niche game that pays well, but it's still an order of magnitude or more off from what mid-sized companies make today, both in quality and revenue.
> Large companies will have no option but to scale back and change their HR practices but large companies, like large ships, are harder to turn, hence some of them will definitely go bankrupt in near future.
Unless they're being propped up. Twitter didn't turn a profit until 2018. They spent 12 years burning cash. Most companies would have gone under after their investors pulled their money when they hit year 5 without making a dime.
If there was, hiring and compensation practices would reflect it like in any other field.
Perhaps you should stop flocking to one location in the states and go somewhere else?