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Comment by dkonofalski | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind, though, that tech also has a much faster life-cycle than most professions of the day. We're already seeing large drops in average salary for many tech positions. The average developer salary today is not even close to what a similarly "skilled" profession was even 20 years ago. Now, obviously developers didn't exist 20 years ago, but that's taken from a study that compared population sizes in the US to job percentages in the population. Yesterday's electrician is today's developer and they're not paid similarly at all.

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> Now, obviously developers didn't exist 20 years ago

i've got some perhaps surprising news for you, my young friend... 20 years ago was 1995.

sure we didn't have broadband and fancypants angular.js but i'm pretty certain developers were around waaaay back during web 1.0 (to use a turn of phrase).

Ahhh, crap. I'm old. Are you trying to suggest that 20 years ago wasn't the 1970's?

I was a software developer in the 1970s, too :-) I wrote a cartridge game for Mattel Intellivision, for example.

Ahhh, crap. I'm old. Are you trying to suggest that 20 years ago wasn't the 1960's?

it used to be!

Yeah. I tend to forget too. Then I realize that StarCraft is about to hit 20, and given that I vividly remember playing it for the first time around 1997, I freak out. Where did all those years go? :(.

Like that old meme: I thought it would take longer to get old.

> We're already seeing large drops in average salary for many tech positions.

Are we?

Why would the big companies of SV conspire to fix wages if they didn't want to decrease the cost of labor?

Yes, tech workers are very underpaid, even if their pay is good relative to the rest of the economy right now.

I'm not sure that's connected - if wage fixing were to blame we wouldn't be seeing salary drops, they wouldn't have risen in the first place.

My question is more that I would be very interested to see data supporting the idea that there has been a large drop in developer salaries.

We are seeing large drops relative to inflation.

This report outlines how STEM wages have stagnated since about 2000[0]

2015[1] CS graduates have starting salaries that are about 4% lower than 2014[2] graduates. Do that for a few years and it adds up.

Anecdotally, I am a "Senior" software engineer that has been writing software for nearly 20 years (professionally 10), work for a household name software company on the east coast, and having trouble affording any real estate in the area without an insane commute.

[0] http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi...

[1] https://www.naceweb.org/uploadedFiles/Content/static-assets/...

[2] https://www.naceweb.org/uploadedFiles/Content/static-assets/...

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