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Well SWEs are plain old labor and they’re compensated as such because big tech (and startups) recognize the value provided by productive SWEs. They wouldn’t be paying those astronomical wages unless the returns were about as high. I don’t think anyone is rationalizing that it’s not labor; it’s well compensated labor. The current high compensation was driven by the market: senior engineers get poached by startups with similar base pay but higher equity, so FAANGs raced to match that. Keep in mind that some of the FAANGs themselves were startups not that long ago and used similar tactics to poach labor from other firms.

To address what you’re really getting at though: tech comp could absolutely take a hit if there is depression that hollows out demand for technology based products. It could happen if the unemployment persists for too long or if the Government stops providing Unemployment benefits. Remains to be seen.

No one is arguing that SWEs aren't compensated fairly for the value they produce. What GP is pointing out is that labor in general is not compensated at equal to the value they provide (pretty much by definition), in part because most labor is more easily replaced in a more competitive market. GP's point is that this is just SWE's first taste of the problem that the majority of labor faces.

> hell, a large portion of the SWE crowd is willing to distribute their labor /for free/ in the form of FLOSS

that's an incredibly un-nuanced view of the economics of FLOSS. even at just a first approximation, if you consider the existence of Linux as a "fully fledged" platform to be of economic value to you, then participating in the advancement of that goal represents participating in an exchange economy, not "distributing labor for free".

and there are other ways in which FLOSS developers receive benefits from their work on FLOSS, too numerous to mention here.

> a large portion of the SWE crowd is willing to distribute their labor /for free/ in the form of FLOSS

FLOSS can scratch a personal itch, like gaming or other hobbies, while also providing something for the resume. (Assuming it's not embarrassingly bad.) Still, I'm reluctant to release my personal work that way. Now I do encourage my employers to do it for non-core functionality because it will make my future life easier, no matter where I work.

I doubt middle america is going to benefit much from this. Once a company has bitten the remote workers bullet there are far cheaper alternatives that hiring a SWE in Ohio. There are huge numbers of highly capable devs right across the border in college towns in Mexico and farther south in multiple South American countries. All on US time zones and working at a fraction of the price of a US developer regardless of their location.

True. Why hire an American dev for remote work?

Timezones. It’s hard enough scheduling meetings across multiple timezones (and boy are there a lot of meetings in FAANG), but going more than +/- 6 is a huge pain (I meet with east asia and europe on a fairly regular basis).

ggp is specifically talking about Latin/South American companies, which have approximately the same time zones as the US.

What makes you think people won't start working with US timings if they get enough money for it?

I have unironically considered moving to, say, Montevideo. It has better weather than where I live (India), is close to the east coast time zone, and I could very easily make much more than most SW jobs here by getting an Americas-only remote job. Only downside would be living far away from family, and having to navigate immigration when I'd not actually be working for an Uruguayan company.

Huh? Have you been on Blind? SWE's know how the game works.

*SWEs who understand the value of being on blind know how the game works.

You're saying this like it's something new but _outsourcing_ has been a thing for decades. It has always been possible to get software built on the cheap abroad. You get what you pay for.

> You get what you pay for

This is hardly the case, speaking from experience as someone who hires programmers around the world.

There is no reason whatsoever why a programmer on $30k cannot compete in terms of productivity with a programmer on $300k.

Thats the 90s outsourcing model in a nutshell. It fails over time because it relies on a constant stream of good developers who don't realise their market value.

As soon as that guy realises he's worth $300k, he'll go get it on the open market and you'll need to find a new sucker.

The industry already used up the whole of India in the early 00's doing this, and by now they've scraped the bucket all the way back to Iowa.

The goal of the operation from our standpoint should be to get the rest of those remaining guys up to $300k. Not to resign ourselves to accepting $30k.

Why should that be the goal? Why $300k? That’s an enormous amount of money.

Also, the labour market is far wider than just India.

> As soon as that guy realises he's worth $300k, he'll go get it on the open market and you'll need to find a new sucker.

That’s an incredibly patronising take. I know that many programmers take higher relative income and freedom in lieu of a higher absolute income and the lifestyle typically associated with it.

Of course those people would rather take the $300k if they could work anywhere. That’s obvious. But who is offering that? Not FAANG, evidently.

Now the industry has access to talent from across the entire world, so perhaps the outsourcing model will come back. And these "suckers" are just applying for the best job they can land with their skills.

Can you point me to a consistent source of solid programmers who will accept $30k long term (keep in mind that hiring someone at $30k and having them quit after 6 months is probably worse than not hiring anyone at all) and produce as much as a $300k programmers? Though if you can do that you can also make a killing by setting up a software agency.

I’m not going to do that.

I will say though, that such astronomical salaries are only really the norm in Silicon Valley. And with that salary, you have to deal with the entire lifestyle that goes along with it.

Money isn’t everything, which many programmers recognise.

I don't think salaries that high are the norm even in Silicon Valley, unless you're counting "someone was hired with X shares in the company vesting over 4 years as part of their comp package" when those shares were worth $120,000 over 4 years when they were hired but are now worth $800,000. Which, while nice, is more a case of "stocks go up sometimes" than "companies are intentionally paying enormous salaries for people without exceptional skills."

Though I'm not actually in SV, and the last time I went on an interview circuit up there was 2015, so it's possible salaries have gone crazy since then.

If that were actually the case, there would be very very few programmers making $300k. Market forces (demand for talented software engineers) led to those high salaries. That's a tangible observation supporting the logic behind "you get what you pay for".

There are very few programmers making that kind of money, relatively speaking.

SV salaries are a statistical outlier in the global market.

In the global market, sure. American salaries in general for many fields are statistical outliers compared to the global market, even Europe.

Within the US however, while SV salaries are the highest, that's not the only city with 6 figure salaries as the norm for software engineers. Places like NYC, Boston, and Seattle have been there for a while, and Austin/Chicago/LA are close to, if not already averaging that too. This is especially true if you work for one of the major tech companies in those cities.

Go look at the salaries posted on www.levels.fyi in those cities and you'll see that SV is by no means an outlier when it comes to 6 figure salaries.

Working on FLOSS is nothing like working for a boss. The common denominator is git commits but apart from that one is a self directed pleasurable hobby and the other is getting stuff done for a business.

Coders want good money because they realise the value to businesses and if their good they realise how rare good coders are vs. gen pop of applicants.

We are far from coders on minimum wages.