Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

As others said, those numbers are outdated and low. As a 2018 grad from a non top 10 CS school who had a dozen or so offers (BigCo + startups), I’ve personally seen that the numbers reported on teamblind.com and levels.fyi are very, very accurate.

Crowd sourcing personal data + those from friends, median total comp (base+stock+bonus+refreshers) for a CS undergrad degree was ~160k in high cost of living areas. Competitive students (a few internships at FAANG or similar) get offers in the 180-200k range.

No. I do not believe we are in a bubble. At least for skilled professions that keep learning, the likelihood is the reverse. As more layers of abstraction make it easier to produce business value, a smaller number of skilled professions will be able to generate more and more revenue with less time.

Programming is different than doctors or lawyers. Programming in terms of value can scale. Doctors can only see a certain number of patients or perform a certain number of surgeries. A lawyer can only take a certain number of cases. They produce value based on their time in each of these tasks. That amount of value is somewhat fixed.

However, a skilled software professional can complete one project that produces a large amount of business value, or the coder can develop a new product that generates a long-tail stream of revenue over time.

For example, a coder that built the Google Ads Platform has helped generate a tremendous amount of revenue for Google, and that revenue keeps pouring in.

The bubble is real, but for IT/SD professionals that tend to get complacent with their skills. Traditional IT is getting abstracted away entirely. SD is getting more and more complex as many more frameworks/knowledge is needed on a yearly basis to do modern software development. Building a simple monolith is no longer acceptable for many companies. One must learn modern distributed systems.

The sad truth is that it will continue to take less and less resources to accomplish the same business goals in the future. One must stay on top of the latest technologies to climb on top of the coding pyramid. Luckily, this pyramid is starting to segment based on Front-End, Back-End, DevOps, etc. which means the truly skilled professions in those domains will rise to the top and command salaries much higher than currently seen.

I make in the ballpark of these numbers for the last couple years, and while the giant stock grants have run out will still break or approach $300k for a few years I suspect. My take on this is as such...

On the one hand, I have outrageous impostor syndrome - nothing I do seems terribly complicated to me and I definitely don't put in 80 hour weeks unless I'm on call; many people I work with seem to be smarter than me.

On the other hand, I do usually acquire a reputation of being very productive everywhere I work, and having freelanced before I've seen loads of outrageously bad code - literally every other project I was "rescuing"/"optimizing performance" with an existing codebase could supply thedailywtf with material for a month or two, and some could just be zipped and published there. So it seems like the bar is (was? that was a long time ago) actually pretty low.

Also, it's not necessary to be 3x as productive to make 3x as much - if there are 1500 NFL players, then the best (more or less) 1500 football players are going to get NFL salaries, whether they are "3x" the next guy or 1.3x the next guy. If there are 100000 openings in companies that can make $1m per engineer, 100000 engineers are going to be rather well paid, even if the IBMs of the world can only make $500k per engineer and thus don't pay so well.

On the fourth hand, I cannot see market not responding, like it demonstrably did with lawyers (I have a couple lawyers in the extended family), with oversupply of labor for such lofty salaries - especially as unlike with doctors and to an extent lawyers, there are no medieval guilds in place artificially restricting said supply.

On the fifth hand (sortof a duplicate of the third), as some have said above, and as with lawyers, it's still possible to have elite earners with oversupply of labor.

On the meta level, I'm not good at predicting the future (and I grew up in a chaotic country), so I'm considering this an unique streak of luck and treating it accordingly. In particular, saving a lot for thinner days ahead should they materialize; not buying as much house as I can afford; and postponing the two-year sabbatical I've planned to take, while the going is good. The way I see it, if the luck never runs out I can retire early; if it does at least I will be somewhat prepared.

If you take a look at most schools CS is now one of the most popular majors. When I graduated ~3 years ago the class was ~100 per grade. I went back to recruit and class size was ~600 per grade. Talking to profs I know all over the country this seems to be thematic. The supply curve is about to shift.

It is like exercise... you are shaping your brain to the problem. The US military actually tests for this in what's called the Army GT score of the ASVAB test.

When I took the ASVAB in high school I scored a 107. That score is too low to become a warrant officer so I had to retake it a couple of years ago for my officer packet and I scored a 129 out of a maximum 130. That puts me in the top 0.1% of testers. I am not smarter or more intelligent than when I was in high school. I do write software though. Every couple of years I look back on my software and algorithms realizing how I continue to improve and see the solutions more clearly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Apti...