If you could breathe on a keyboard, you could land a high-paying job.
Demand was that high.
That era of tech minted way, way, way more millionaires on average.
To the managerial class, tech people used to be literal wizards conjuring the impossible and now we're regular commoditized office labor like any other.
Tech and people versed in it were not common (to people outside tech) and so the high salaries would reflect that. Now is not the case. It was always going to be temporary. As people become acquainted with tech people, the magic vanishes, you see the code behind the pixels. At the same time, tech people themselves did cause this by making tech easier to understand and manipulate.
It's like a magician, the first few times, it is enticing and mysterious but after a while it becomes ordinary. Tech wizards are just like that.
Todays SWEs tend to know far less about how computers operate and how protocols work than in the old days.
The same kind of "I just love to code" tech wizard that builds an amazing service/library/product, overworks itself while letting big companies extract max value out of it and contribute nothing or extremely little to the open source world.
Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily. This should be in the mind of every dev imo.
Tech wizards wrote their fate on code, compiled it and served it to the market. This is the result
To be fair, he does not come across as the kind of person you would want to work with, no matter what kind of software he is able to produce. Once hired, others actually have to work with him in such companies. In fact, Apple did end up hiring him soon after said rejection but quickly determined he wasn't a good fit there either. No wizard is worth having by your side if they make your life miserable.
Sure, there is a slim chance that Google could have found the right fit for him in the end with the right accommodations[1], but why take the risk[2] when there are others lined up that are far less risky?
Of course there are no guarantees in life, but when playing the odds...
[1] That would have to be invented. Now you are also relying on the implementer at Google, which brings great risk on the employer getting things right even if the worker somehow magically came risk-free.
[2] Especially when the tests designed to try and estimate that risk raised red flags.
Why does this surprise you? Google didn’t even employ the chefs that made the food consumed by the employees daily either.
Just because you made a thing that was useful doesn’t mean you have the skills that Google is looking for.
Homebrew was very useful because Mac osx didn’t have a good package ecosystem for one-liner installs. The tech behind it though wasn’t particularly unique or groundbreaking. So the author’s skill here was finding a market with unmet demand for a free package manager. That’s not what Google was looking for.
In a really condensed and simplified version: Big money was placing $50-100MM bets everywhere because the house was lending for basically free, and you only need a few hits to come out on top.
But now that money is expensive again, they game has been crashing down.