The overall value of a software engineer is higher now than in the past. I think companies recognize this and are paying for it. An engineer that builds a system that controls 1000 machines in some distributed system, that serves content to 100 million people has massive leverage, and is worth paying an extra few hundred grand.
> An engineer that builds a system that controls 1000 machines in some distributed system, that serves content to 100 million people has massive leverage
The idea of individual engineers shipping services on their own is long gone, though. Big companies have an almost unthinkably large army of engineers working on everything these days. It’s never just one person doing the magic that makes a service go. OTOH, decades ago it wasn’t too uncommon to find just a couple key engineers at the helm of key services.
I think the real driver is the amount of money pouring into the tech space. Companies have to pay more to compete with each other for talent because there are so many tech companies trying to do tech things now. It’s as simple as that.
Right, but the market caps have gone up so much. If you run some basic metric like market cap/number of engineers, places like facebook have an insane incentive to pay huge money for talent. The relative scope may have gone down (many people on one project/api), but the wide ranging impact on PnL/Profitability/Money generated by those individual engineers changes have gone up