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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, fine. Honestly I think most of us have been overpaid our entire career. But I'm not sure I see it necessarily. Take these stats, which can cut either way on this topic:

In USA there are more software engineers than all other engineers combined.

There are 10x more software engineers than the next highest engineering discipline.

If you could subdivide s/w engs into 10 equal categories ("I'm not just a run of the mill s/w eng"), each of those would be the top engineering employment category.

The top 10% of software engineers outnumber the next highest engineer class.

At 10% unemployment, there are more unemployed software engineers than the next highest employed engineer category.

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I don't think you'll find this community welcoming the idea of lower pay (and hence a more volatile employment).

Overall if in the next 12 months I fully expect compensation on average to be down 30-50%. It's impossible for it not to, given the sudden exodus of talent from US to open up remote consultancies that can offer same skill at 1/4th the price.

Of course not. I am preparing for a 30% cut in 3 years, but don't necessarily expect it. It's not a guarantee that any demand at all will go down, or that AI will do anything whatsoever to our job. Demand is up lately for senior devs (and junior devs probably have more of an evaluation issue than closed job reqs[1]).

[1]: Sorry for the blog post: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-signalling.html

I don't think this is surprising given that the US has also lost so much manufacturing due to cost cutting. A service economy is going to need a lot of software engineering. A nice big factory takes a lot of mechanical and electrical engineers.

Hard disagree about being overpaid. These are some of the most profitable companies in the world, what else should they do if not pay their workers well?

So is walmart. If you can understand that system, the answer to your question is revealed.

Are there not 10x the need of software engineers compared to other engineers, particularly in the US?

It would seem there are! The question is: Will there continue to be?

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