This is a pretty obvious misinterpretation. Protagonist bad ≠ antagonist good. This isn't even the law of the excluded middle because there was only ever a statistical relationship between the morality of narrative opponents.
There's a stark difference between being Extremely Online and sticking your head in the sand. The US is not fine. The US is waging an illegal war of aggression abroad, committing war crimes and threatening more. The US has invaded its own cities, mine included, with untrained goons who have shot and killed multiple US citizens.
If you're not aware of what's happening, how will that impact your political views? Your spending? Your habits? Your vote?
Edit - A few more:
- The war in Iran is triggering an energy and economic crisis globally. Fuel prices are skyrocketing globally as a result, with some countries mandating that people cannot work (thus, cannot get paid) more than a few days a week to preserve fuel. This is pushing up prices on groceries, materials and other goods that will disproportionately impact the global poor. Many will not be able to survive.
- The US has been intentionally and illegally embargoing oil and gas shipments to Cuba plunging the country into blackouts and instability, also against international law. People can't work, or cook, or refrigerate food, or turn on their lights.
You sure we're fine?
Edit 2: Downvotes already! Amazing. Good to see the right wing slant in Silicon Valley is alive and well. Looking forward to the day the market crashes and all of your RSUs and stock holdings are worth fuck all. You can't eat stocks, but you can eat the rich.
Not competition, but more like an opportunity for a startup to build a solution that fits in the new gap. A marketplace for people to sell their discounts.
> Software is or was one of the few remaining arenas wherein a person can find a consistently
Software salary inflation and expansion has made this the case. Tech’s accessibility to the educated has accelerated gentrification massively, rising up prices on rent and food. While the statement is correct, tech’s contribution to income inequality is part of the issue. If you’ve lived in Austin or Chicago (especially Austin) prior to ~2010 you’ll have seen this first hand.
I don't think there are enough well-paid tech workers to affect things like the (national) market for food. Local rent markets are at least partly explained by this; I agree that the $3M houses near Palo Alto, CA are because of Big Tech salaries, but not the price of ground beef.
Not at the nationally owned chain grocery store, but at local establishments it’s certainly an issue and prices out longtime residents who don’t work in this industry.
Rent prices push everything up in the local market. Housing rents impact business rents in an area, as well as what the business’ owners and employees need to maintain their own lifestyles. People who live there now can pay more and will, so prices go up. But the local shop owner isn’t getting rich, they’re still struggling as everything around them rises.
Engineering salaries are significantly higher than nearly every other industry on average and on median. Much of this is driven by VC funding rather than sound, profitable, bootstrapped businesses with sustainable profit margins.
Engineering salaries have also been driven upwards significantly the past ~10 years (since the post-2008 crash recovery), while wage growth in the US is mostly stagnant. I don’t have a source handy for that, but there are plentiful studies.
Outside of the US this may be less true, but I took GP’s “most of us on HN” to mean people who work in US tech companies which are primarily concentrated in high COI areas.
Isn't salary a proxy of how hard to replace one person or a group of persons is or how valuable they are?
There was a surge in demand for SWEs and scarcity brought salaries up. Are them too high? Hell no. On average, my colleagues and me generated ~2M$ each in 2025 for our company, while we get payed a fraction of that (grants and bonuses included). If you look at net income per employee we are at around 700k each in 2025.
Additionally, employers try their hardest to drive costs down (eg. offshoring as much as possible, everyone doing layoffs at the same time, ...) and average/median salaries remained high. If the salaries were overinflated those numbers should have came down I believe. The fact that they didn't makes me think that it still is a scarcity problem not an overinflation one.
>There was a surge in demand for SWEs and scarcity brought salaries up. Are them too high? Hell no. On average, my colleagues and me generated ~2M$ each in 2025 for our company, while we get payed a fraction of that (grants and bonuses included). If you look at net income per employee we are at around 700k each in 2025.
So by that logic, housing in coastal cities also aren't "overinflated"? After all, like SWEs, they're they're also scarce and in demand. They're also providing enormous value to the people buying/living in them, otherwise they'd be living in Oklahoma or whatever and paying a fraction of the cost.
Maybe we give different meanings to the overinflation word. I see it as something that is speculative/shady in nature. Is housing overinflated? Probably in some places for sure because those who already have a house or invested in real estate wants to cut down supply to raise prices.
Is the same on the job market? I don't think so. I never heard any SWE saying "let's scare people away from a CS career so we can bargain for higher salaries". The opposite is true though. Companies participate in career fairs, pre-uni events to make people gravitate towards a CS careers, ... so with a higher supply each employee loses a bit of bargaining power.
Small excursus, this very fact was taken to the extreme in 2022 when everyone did layoffs at the same time despite the numbers being still great. If you put 300k people on the street at around the same time you can hire some of them for way less money as they now lost all leverage (since there are other 299.999 people waiting in line for a job).
Ya, that sounds right to me. Coastal city housing is very supply constrained, part of why it's so expensive, but it is hugely in demand and provides tons of value to many by letting them live near high paying companies. Unless by "overinflated" you mean a constrained supply/demand curve?
At the top end (say, top 100 tech companies) it’s pretty high indeed. Public companies, for sure, as otherwise their stock price would tank. It’s not uncommon in this industry to have margins above 70-80%.
But there are thousands if not tens of thousands where the profit per employee is minimal or negative.
I can’t find a source for all tech (the data wouldn’t exist for private firms anyway) but I think it’s telling to look at this list, scroll down to about the middle and look around at salaries you or your colleagues are pulling. Software revenues are certainly high but the industry is afloat because of these high margin businesses creating returns so that low margin businesses can exist. Without the massive infusion in upfront capital, very uncommon in other industries, it’s simply not sustainable.
Typically a market that’s buoyed by its top performers but has significant amounts of capital tied up in under performers is called “a bubble”.
Thank you for saying it better than I could have. It’s probably an unnecessary jab but I know how well I benefited financially in an industry where not much was expected in terms of output, lavish perks and huge base salary and stock compensation. Absolutely some companies are extremely profitable per headcount but I look at the sea of failures and how well engineers have generally done. It sets the tone for this massive negativity I see around AI when so many of us have benefited from VC money that failed.
AI allows executives to spend R&D to create a flywheel which builds more, faster, without hiring more. It makes every individual employee able to deliver more.
ICs dislike this because it raises expectations and puts the spotlight on delivery velocity. In a manufacturing analogy, it’s the same as adding robots that enables workers to pack twice as many pallets per day. You work the same hours, but you’re more tired, and the company pockets the profits.
Software Engineers are experiencing, many for the first time in their careers, what happens when they lose individual bargaining power. Their jobs are being redefined, and they have no say in the matter - especially in the US where “Union” is a forbidden word.
ICs dislike this because executives haven't been shy that their goal in increasing productivity with LLMs is to reduce headcount. Additionally, we have 50 years of data showing that increased productivity only marginally increases pay, if at all - all the gains are captured by the executives.
The more appropriate tools for ICs are torches and pitchforks.
But what’s your expectations here? Should companies pretend LLMs don’t exist and just continue as before, or do we need some way of acknowledging there’s a new technology that, when put to good use, can increase productivity?
It remains to be seen whether LLMs actually increase productivity. The jury is far, FAR from delivering the verdict on this one. All I'm seeing out there is blind hope, hype and executive-level excitement about cutting staff.
No, they are captured disproportionately by the haut bourgeois capitalists. The two groups overlap to an extent (when major capitalist are nominally employed by a firm they invest in, it is usually as an executive), but executives qua executives (that is, in their role as top level managerial employees) are not the main beneficiaries of increased productivity.
Software engineers tried to unionise in the late 90s and early 2000s and people like Steve Jobs illegally colluded with other tech leaders to kill the movement. They ended up paying out huge undisclosed sums to settle the lawsuits.
After that programmers fell into the situation you are describing - relatively high bargaining power and salaries. Hopefully now with the push for AI we will finally see another pro labor organisation effort !
Sure, but perception is reality and the executives will aim to realize this by throwing considerable amounts of capital behind it. Whether it’s achievable is really not known, yet.
> Speaking as a developer, this becomes obvious the moment you step outside the romantic framing. I have been doing this for years, and the hardest parts of the job were never about typing out code. I have always struggled most with understanding systems, debugging things that made no sense, designing architectures that wouldn't collapse under heavy load, and making decisions that would save months of pain later.
> None of these problems can be solved LLMs. They can suggest code, help with boilerplate, sometimes can act as a sounding board. But they don't understand the system, they don't carry context in their "minds", and they certainly don't know why a decision is right or wrong.
It is becoming increasingly true that they do exactly this. In some cases, better than (some? many?) humans.
Also, the anti-Marxist Objectivism rant has no place in this article, as well as making no sense. Yes, the woodworker could continue working with their hands. But in society, today, they require money in order to have food and shelter, and that money needs to come from somewhere. If the market devalues the process of doing work by hand, and comes to value the speed and consistency of doing work through machines and automation, then the artisan cannot choose to simply continue spending dozens of hours per week working wood unless they are independently wealthy or have some other source of income. Individualism is not paramount in a society in which you are forced to participate for basic needs.
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