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How many developers are making 2 million a year?

400k isn’t crazy for the FANG set but it’s still a subset of the developer market and hundreds of thousands of those jobs have been cut in the last few years as they all collectively work to lower SWE pay.

60k a year it needs to be a full irreplaceable part of the infrastructure for I think. There are very few kinds of software that meet that bar right now (certain design tools etc that have no replacement). 12k/year is in the expensive but reasonable for the right tooling category (Matlab etc.).

I don’t know what the future holds. I know the big AI companies are banking on being able to charge for a replacement SWE that works 24/7. Still not convinced these are it yet, as useful as they can be under the right circumstances.



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