Ask HN: Does really every software engineer in the US earn ~100000?

Post by Bucephalus355 » Wed, Jun 06, 2018, 1:52 AM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #37

Bucephalus355 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in Austin, Texas. I’m 26, graduated with a BA in Sociology, and make $140,000 as an AWS Engineer. There’s tons of money in engineering in the United States, but I would say it has come with a cost. The only reason so much money has been able to be plowed into software and hardware was because of financial products developed by Wall Street since the 1970’s. Obviously we’ve seen great results in software and hardwa…

Financial products? Fintech is but a small portion of the overall software industry. Neither Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, nor Amazon specialize in fintech, and the big 5 are as much a driver of high salaries as anything else. We get paid highly because, while software is expensive to build, it's basically free to distribute and so you have huge economies of scale where sometimes as few as 50 employees can make…