Yes, no, maybe. For people who are just doing glue code with no real understanding, yes. That market is going south.

For the high end it’s more complicated:

Comp (not salaries) took a huge upward swing because of an influx of VC money as well as a bull market. People at FAANG type companies could leverage their unvested stock to get higher comp at new companies. Let me explain.

Bob joins Amazon in 2016. His initial comp was targeting 250k but by year 3 he was going to make 350k due to stock appreciation on his 4 year stock grant.

Bob has a smashing interview at Google and they know he won't take less than 350k. So they offer 370k PER YEAR (with an initial stock grant) even though Bob wasn't going to always make that much at Amazon.

Bob works at Google for a bit, his stock goes up even MORE, bob is bored and interviews at Uber/Databricks/Snowflake who has billions in VC money and they offer him 450k (sure some is less liquid, but maybe he knows there's a secondary market).

Without a bull market and without the VC market, comp is going to be a LOT less for the top of band offers.

However, it's probably not going to be a lot lower than the bottom of band offers, because Jim who cracked google but didn't have a boatload of unvested stock and competing offers wasn't getting near as much as Bob anyway.

Finally, Software Engineer fuck ups are still very expensive for companies. So any profitable company that can afford it is going to to to pay close to top of market because paying 2x as much for an engineer who is even 20% better is WORTH IT for them.

It's just likely top of market is down a bit.

To a degree it feels like they are already. The increasing number of engineers looking for work means that companies don't have to offer as much to get good candidates, and it seems like salaries in many advertised jobs are going down because of it.

I definitely see AI causing a hit too, since unfortunately, a lot of people's needs when it comes to tech are fairly limited. Yeah, it can't compete with a good programmer in terms of quality or efficient system design, but many people and companies don't need that. They just need something that does what they need it to, quality be damned. So a lot of companies feel like they'll either offer less (since some guy playing around with prompts is good enough to do what they want) or not hire programmers at all.

They very much are, right now. Lots and lots of big layoffs, the FAANG/MAGMA companies have completely dropped the halo effect they had over the industry. Everyone had to chase them on comp to get the best people; now they're ejecting people left, right and centre and there's no incentive for the smaller players to try and keep up with the competition anymore, because the competition in gone.

I've definitely noticed this myself when I was working my last job (quant finance in London, startup fund). We were getting premium talent applying for roles that we never dreamt of getting before then. A lot of them were ex Meta, ex google, ex Palantir etc. Guys who were very good but went to work mindless jobs for big tech for that 300k pay package. Now they're asking for half that, and desperate for a job.

In addition to the great points in the other comments, I'd also point out that remote work is a double edged sword. I remember in the early 00s when the .com bubble burst, and there was huge talk of software work being outsourced to India and China. It never really happened, for lots of different reasons.

This time around, though, companies are much more comfortable with remote work, and Zoom/Meet/etc. has gotten much, much better than options from 15+ years ago. I've already seen an explosion of outsourcing to Latin America and Eastern Europe - the developers I've worked with from those locales have been great, usually great English skills, and much better time zone overlap. This trend has absolutely been pushing down dev salaries in the US, especially for more junior devs.

I think it depends on the region and just looking at salaries is too narrow. In the US, the salaries are high. I don't think the salaries will decrease. However, the number of jobs will. More companies will outsource to other countries. Developer salaries in those countries will increase.

Yes, depending on the state of the economy and more importantly the VC scene. I do not think LLMs will have any major impact to "Software Engineers". Software Engineers will have better tooling than stack overflow. So they will become more efficient. So we will build better softwares.

In the US, in general? I believe so, yes. For a couple of years at least. In many European countries the salaries are already much lower (than US), so perhaps not as much wiggle room there.

With remote work and Globalization, it may not regress but will definitely continue to become more competitive. An "Average" engineer even in a LCOL area in US will cost a lot more than an "average" engineer in say South America and of course in Asia. Companies that have figured this out are already using the global market to their advantage.

I've been coding for 12+ years at some top tech companies. I think salaries will drop like a rock for anyone that is not absolutely top knotch. Claude 3.5 Sonnet can code a near perfect UI widget from a screen shot. The game is over on this whole thing, software development as we know it is over.

In my case it froze instead of regressing.

My previous employer didn't give people raises and then later laid off me and most of my department. My new employer didn't give people raises and then laid people off, but not me.

My salary didn't decrease, but with inflation my buying power is lower.

Certainly they won't keep up with inflation. So it's possible they won't exactly regress, but they will fall back as things get more expensive, and salaries don't go up.

That's the whole purpose of mass layoffs, right? Some of it seemed unnecessary; it seemed to be something everyone did in solidarity because salaries were going up unchecked.

IMO they will.

What are LLMs actually good at?

Copycat code and copycat ideas.

IMO we are going to see a massive wave of interoperability, and "good enough" software to compete and drop the value of software dramatically.

This will drop profitability drastically, and put downward pressure on salaries.

Not in any predictable time frame.

I constantly amazed at the stupid stuff software engineers get paid big bucks to do.

There are plenty of possibilities and what-ifs. Nobody has a crystal ball.

But as of now, there’s no reason to think our pay will permanently crash.

Obviously. At some point supply will catch up with demand.

Software development is vastly overpaid compared to how complex it is, imagine a 6 month Bootcamp for becoming a civil engineer. High wages are purely the result of the enormous and continually increasing demand for the profession.