> It's not a trade, it's just a temporary result of a market imbalance.

That temporary result has been going on for a few decades now. And it's only getting better for the engineers, because more and more tech companies need more and more employees and for the most part, CS degrees still remain difficult to get (relative to some other degrees).

So I agree it's temporary, however it will probably last until after my retirement short of another .com bubble.

It depends on how old you are but I'd be careful assuming that things will last that long unless you're in your 50s now. There's a huge IT community which was employed to do commodity tasks (helpdesk, networking, PC management, etc.) or working on enterprise software which is increasingly outsourced, competing with cloud offerings, etc. anywhere companies see it as a high cost, low strategic value area – which is not an uncommon attitude even where that's not true.

Software developers at the top end are better positioned than many for that but even if your job isn't directly exposed that's going to contribute to pressure against wage increases and respect, especially since senior management is going to keep seeing comparatively high labor costs.

I'm a frontend engineer for the one of the big 4 tech companies, so I'm not really concerned. I'm in my 30's now, and don't expect to be coding for the rest of my life, but is the field going to become so constricted that 30 years from now wages will stagnate? I doubt it, at least not in the grand scheme of things.

At the end of the day, I'm not going to plan my life around my job suddenly becoming less valuable.

> That temporary result has been going on for a few decades now.

That really was not the case before the Netscape IPO or for about 5-6 years after the dot-com bust.

People were still making great money, just not the ones that lost their jobs.