Not true. The vast majority of startups hemorrhage money with inefficiencies. I routinely cut tens of thousands of dollars a month off a startup’s AWS bill. It takes me 30-45min. Why didn’t someone else do it? Too busy, didn’t know about it, didn’t know how.

I keep expecting to find a place that doesn’t need some sort of efficiency cost-saving. I’ve yet to find it.

The fact is there’s a crap-ton of beneficial work to be done anywhere you look. It’s not hard to justify a good salary in the software world.

For example: what if your company could double the speed of your CI/CD system and halve the price? If you move your runners to spot instances in an auto-scaling group you can do that. What’s the return on increasing the productivity of your eng team? Maybe eng salaries times percentage productivity improvement? That number is probably… large.

The vast majority of engineers earning these salaries work for "startups" like Google minting huge amounts of money on software built by these engineers. They are underpaid if anything. Do you really think management or shareholders (that get paid more for doing less) are the underpaid ones in this equation? Where else would the money go?

The amount of revenue per employees at some of these companies is in the 7 figures.

The "vast majority of startups" is not a useful unit of measure. Look at where all the people and the money actually are (FAANG).

Define FAANG.

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google employ <1M engineers in the US. There are 4.4M engineers in the US.

That does not change the point that most of the engineers earning insane salaries are working for FAANG

There are 4.4M engineers in the US, but almost all of them make far less than the one working for FAANG.

Fair point.

I didn't know we were talking exclusively about engineers in the top 5% of pay or so.

I thought this was about engineers in general.