Living wage? haha, more like 100 peoples living wage.
Point is, maybe 10 people. And that’s if you like ramen.
Moderately skilled it engineers other of backgrounds and devs can make much more than $200k, just go check levels.fyi
To the parent comments point
> It's a bit wild that the sum total money spent on salaries for engineers handling potential problems stemming from this or defending against the possibility in the future could probably have covered paying the maintainer a living wage many times over.
The collective effort across numerous companies is much more than just $200k and you can bet your butt on that.
Even in America outside of the coasts and outside of FAANG, making $140-$150+ as a senior developer is very good (and compared to almost all other industries is absurd) - salary.com which doesn't just rely on self-reported info as levels does reports the median salary + bonus for senior software engineers as $120k
https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/senior-softwa...
Outside of the US, even in more expensive places in the EU, even the equivalent of $100k for a super senior lead architect would be Very Good - I don't know a single SWE in the midwest in the US - including senior embedded systems engineers working on medical devices, senior firmware devs working on networking equipment, or any web engineer that makes more than $175k and I know plenty of Very Good senior full-stack web devs that make $125-$150
$125k a year is still a top of the top salary in the US, so don't cry for them tho
That's why the number they used for a living wage is so low too.
Dumb comments saying software engineers make 100x a living wage (as if this would be a bad thing) are the flavor du jour. It’s hard not to respond in kind.
But thank you, for what it’s worth. I remember you from 2010. It was quite a time.