There is an eternal cycle between uncomfortable and productive and comfortable and lazy.
15-20 years ago SWE work was brutal and paid OKish, but not great if you calculated the hourly.
Then the era of free VC money came, culminating in the pandemic boom, where people were crash coursing JavaScript to land a remote job doing 4 hours of work a week for $170k.
The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction.
Before the first dotcom era, software jobs paid like most other professional office jobs. Decent money but nothing really remarkable.
With the dotcom boom and VC money, that changed. I doubled my salary going to a startup in 1998. I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it.
15-20 years ago software development was still very well paid compared to 30 years ago. And then the really insane FAANG money started flowing.
> I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it.
That's not the whole story, though. The Internet inherently changed the value prop for software work, where a small number of engineers could support a huge number of users. That leverage makes software work inherently waaaay more profitable than it was pre-Internet, which is why companies could afford to throw gobs of money at top engineering talent.
I worked in software 15-20 years ago. The work was not "brutal". I worked hard, but mostly because I enjoyed the work. I lived in a major American city and my pay was essentially the highest pay you could get outside of professions requiring professional degrees like doctor or lawyer, or some high finance positions. And even then, I made more than some doctors in lower-tier specialties.
15-20 years ago SWE work was brutal and paid OKish, but not great if you calculated the hourly.
Then the era of free VC money came, culminating in the pandemic boom, where people were crash coursing JavaScript to land a remote job doing 4 hours of work a week for $170k.
The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction.