For the high end it’s more complicated:
Comp (not salaries) took a huge upward swing because of an influx of VC money as well as a bull market. People at FAANG type companies could leverage their unvested stock to get higher comp at new companies. Let me explain.
Bob joins Amazon in 2016. His initial comp was targeting 250k but by year 3 he was going to make 350k due to stock appreciation on his 4 year stock grant.
Bob has a smashing interview at Google and they know he won't take less than 350k. So they offer 370k PER YEAR (with an initial stock grant) even though Bob wasn't going to always make that much at Amazon.
Bob works at Google for a bit, his stock goes up even MORE, bob is bored and interviews at Uber/Databricks/Snowflake who has billions in VC money and they offer him 450k (sure some is less liquid, but maybe he knows there's a secondary market).
Without a bull market and without the VC market, comp is going to be a LOT less for the top of band offers.
However, it's probably not going to be a lot lower than the bottom of band offers, because Jim who cracked google but didn't have a boatload of unvested stock and competing offers wasn't getting near as much as Bob anyway.
Finally, Software Engineer fuck ups are still very expensive for companies. So any profitable company that can afford it is going to to to pay close to top of market because paying 2x as much for an engineer who is even 20% better is WORTH IT for them.
It's just likely top of market is down a bit.
I definitely see AI causing a hit too, since unfortunately, a lot of people's needs when it comes to tech are fairly limited. Yeah, it can't compete with a good programmer in terms of quality or efficient system design, but many people and companies don't need that. They just need something that does what they need it to, quality be damned. So a lot of companies feel like they'll either offer less (since some guy playing around with prompts is good enough to do what they want) or not hire programmers at all.
I've definitely noticed this myself when I was working my last job (quant finance in London, startup fund). We were getting premium talent applying for roles that we never dreamt of getting before then. A lot of them were ex Meta, ex google, ex Palantir etc. Guys who were very good but went to work mindless jobs for big tech for that 300k pay package. Now they're asking for half that, and desperate for a job.
This time around, though, companies are much more comfortable with remote work, and Zoom/Meet/etc. has gotten much, much better than options from 15+ years ago. I've already seen an explosion of outsourcing to Latin America and Eastern Europe - the developers I've worked with from those locales have been great, usually great English skills, and much better time zone overlap. This trend has absolutely been pushing down dev salaries in the US, especially for more junior devs.
All the companies I have worked for in a remote fashion were offering remote within the country and also on the countries they have a legal presence (which were 2 or 3 at most)
At least 50% of the positions that I come across on hiring boards that allow for fully remote still have a qualifying regional clarification (U.S. only). It's probably a combination of complexities around accounting/taxes and time zones.
However if a company can support outsourcing they can facilitate much easier communication between the onshore and offshore dev teams by restricting offshore hires by LONGITUDE not LATITUDE - e.g. United States companies hiring from Central and South America for example.
Not sure about Claude and "coding ui widgets", but a while ago I tried getting ChatGPT to make a simple demo program in C using some relatively new Linux-specific APIs. It spat out a piece of code that would not even compile, let alone work.
It was remarkably wrong. In the specifically interesting part, that is where it was supposed to use the relatively new Linux-specific APIs, it failed completely and used some POSIX-standard APIs (and used them wrong).
Dunno but it seems to me that some jobs are more at risk than others.
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Also: I routinely have to work with software that is supposed to do A, B and C according to its documentation but does B, Ç, Σ in practice. If an LLM was to "read" the documentation and act on production according to that, production would burn in a couple of hours. I think I'll be fine for a while.
My previous employer didn't give people raises and then later laid off me and most of my department. My new employer didn't give people raises and then laid people off, but not me.
My salary didn't decrease, but with inflation my buying power is lower.
What are LLMs actually good at?
Copycat code and copycat ideas.
IMO we are going to see a massive wave of interoperability, and "good enough" software to compete and drop the value of software dramatically.
This will drop profitability drastically, and put downward pressure on salaries.
I constantly amazed at the stupid stuff software engineers get paid big bucks to do.
There are plenty of possibilities and what-ifs. Nobody has a crystal ball.
But as of now, there’s no reason to think our pay will permanently crash.
Software development is vastly overpaid compared to how complex it is, imagine a 6 month Bootcamp for becoming a civil engineer. High wages are purely the result of the enormous and continually increasing demand for the profession.
If anything, I think the past couple years have belied the idea that you can become a competent software developer in 6 months. It is this "lowest level" dev work anyway that I see under the most pressure from outsourcing.
I think Software development is vastly overpaid for junior profiles but largely underpaid for senior profiles.
If you think how central some key people are to some companies and how much those companies make (gross product)... You'll see that some key developers are probably worth even more than CEOs.
This has been largely not understood, in my opinion.
Of course there are also things which you absolutely need significantly more knowledge for. But pretending that these two are the same thing, have the same title and roles is the actual issue.
