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I wonder why when s*it hits the fan, the most senior and experienced are always on the line fixing stuff. I am in my 40 and the only thing I have noticed is steady increase of my paycheck and responsibilities. I can't really complain.

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The software industry is now in a somewhat unique historical position in that software is now bigger and more complex than ever before and written in largely the same manner as it was ~20 years ago. Many companies are built through backend web services running on commodity or cloud hardware running linux. Historically the kind of software that was being written at the largest firms changed every 10 years from mainframes to PCs to mobile etc.

While I haven't seen it formally studied, I'd expect software salaries to keep pace with the scale/value provided by the technology and how influential an engineer can be on a given software stack.

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