Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

Honestly I think its more down to experience.

I know relatively inexperienced developers chasing every new tech on the hype train. And I know others that have been around a while and recognise the new tech as a rehash of something from 20 years ago, with some new marketing.

(To be fair I think you need some enthusiasm as well as the experience otherwise you get the "1 year of experience ten times" developers).

I'm too tired at the moment to look this up, but the NY Times had a piece sometime in the last couple of years where they were discussing income distributions, and had an interactive, and what they looked like, almost across the board, was a bigger lower mode, and then a second, smaller, more spiked mode much higher.

What struck me about that piece was that it was framed in terms of skewed incomes, but the bimodality of it didn't get discussed much at all, nor the fact it was so widespread across different disciplines.

To me it was very disturbing, because it suggested that there was a growth, across disciplines, of two "classes", one established, with a relatively large income, and another, larger class, with a much smaller income.

I was very curious about this, and have wondered what the groups are--if it's because of older, senior individuals and younger, junior individuals. Maybe the latter are trainees? Maybe the latter came into the labor market at a less favorable time? Maybe there's just a kind of winner-takes-all sort of phenomenon?

It was really disturbing to me, and seems difficult to explain in terms of any specific features of any field, because it was so, so widespread across labor areas. It was partially disturbing that it was sitting right here in these graphs at a major news outlet about income distributions, and was not being acknowledged even then. It was probably more disturbing to me than the general long-tailed skewed income distribution that gets discussed, because it suggested (at least to me) very unnatural about how incomes were being allocated, even more so than the stereotypical long-tailed but unimodal curve.

Because in scenario A the main skill being applied is mechanical engineering and in scenario B the main skill being applied is RoR.

If everyone who ever writes a line of code is a "software developer" would you include an Excel VBA 10-liner writer? Probably not, and nor would that person include themselves, they're an accountant (or whatever).

What I found really interesting was going one step further and using programming to solve "higher order" problems, such as data science or artificial intelligence related problems. I'm not talking about implementing something in Tensorflow. That again is just programming. I'm talking about implementing something in Tensorflow to solve a specific problem and seeing the result of that. The programming part is beside the point, it is a means to an end.

I think you really need to dig deep and ask yourself why you are writing code at all. The act of writing software itself is not that intellectually stimulating once you've mastered it well enough. It is just one layer of abstraction. Think about what is the next layer of abstraction you can build on top of your programming layer.

It's the expectation that you need to demonstrate it at all, is the problem. How many lawyers sue people for fun so they can blog about it, how many doctors do surgery at home and stream "live cutting"?

We have created a treadmill that we can't step off