alt Hacker NewsWell, not GP, but I do. Let’s look at the numbers:
Median senior SWE salaries in SF: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/senior/loc...
Median income in metro areas: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/11/the-median-salary-for-the-25...
Engineering salaries are significantly higher than nearly every other industry on average and on median. Much of this is driven by VC funding rather than sound, profitable, bootstrapped businesses with sustainable profit margins.
Engineering salaries have also been driven upwards significantly the past ~10 years (since the post-2008 crash recovery), while wage growth in the US is mostly stagnant. I don’t have a source handy for that, but there are plentiful studies.
Outside of the US this may be less true, but I took GP’s “most of us on HN” to mean people who work in US tech companies which are primarily concentrated in high COI areas.
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> Engineering salaries are significantly higher than nearly every other industry on average and on median
now compare the profit per employee at tech (software engineering) companies and those industries..
Thank you for saying it better than I could have. It’s probably an unnecessary jab but I know how well I benefited financially in an industry where not much was expected in terms of output, lavish perks and huge base salary and stock compensation. Absolutely some companies are extremely profitable per headcount but I look at the sea of failures and how well engineers have generally done. It sets the tone for this massive negativity I see around AI when so many of us have benefited from VC money that failed.
Isn't salary a proxy of how hard to replace one person or a group of persons is or how valuable they are?
There was a surge in demand for SWEs and scarcity brought salaries up. Are them too high? Hell no. On average, my colleagues and me generated ~2M$ each in 2025 for our company, while we get payed a fraction of that (grants and bonuses included). If you look at net income per employee we are at around 700k each in 2025.
Additionally, employers try their hardest to drive costs down (eg. offshoring as much as possible, everyone doing layoffs at the same time, ...) and average/median salaries remained high. If the salaries were overinflated those numbers should have came down I believe. The fact that they didn't makes me think that it still is a scarcity problem not an overinflation one.