That is how a market works.

I think the S&P is overvalued today. The market thinks otherwise. No matter how much I would like to purchase reasonable stocks at P/Es of 15, by and large, I can't. If someone else wants to buy them at P/Es of 21, they are going to attract every single seller.

And they conspired to keep wages down because... the market?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

What makes you think they are overpaying? If they offered less the employee would go to a competitor, and the company gets more value from the employee than they do from $200K/y.

True that Google itself sees value in paying 200K and they need to do that to attract the best talent compared to their competitors. But google has so much money that it almost makes it difficult for the little guys who could pay a good salary but not the inflated ones like google. I am not convinced that suddenly "market rate" is decided by FAANgs. No FAANG existed before 2004 (some did but weren't as powerful back then) and there were plenty of good developers/programmers even then.

I think it's a combination of:

a) These companies are much bigger than they were, which increases the impact a programmer can have. This means the amount of money a programmer can bring in for one of these companies is much higher than previously, and so they're willing to pay more.

b) Previously, programmers were capturing a much smaller share of the value they were creating for their employers. Either through explicit collusion to keep employee salaries down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...) or because the threat of startup founding (which is both easier and more normal relative to 10y ago) has pushed salaries up.

And then the developer switches jobs 1-3 years later to another FAANG or somewhere that pays in the FAANG range for $260-300k... seems like market rate to me