So the question becomes, are CEOs pay commensurate with their added value? Put differently, is the rise in production mainly attributable to the CEO (as wages were largely stagnant prior to 2020, yet CEO wages increased rather dramatically.) Are they adding more value now than they did before and, if so, can we actually measure it?
Try again.
Do you have a source supporting your comment that SWE comp in 2005 was the same as it is today?
But sure, from a super simple query on any search engine:
https://insights.dice.com/2018/02/09/tech-pro-jobs-pay-2018/
Feel free to gate your query to anytime between 2003ish to now, the results are all the same with a few exceptions (MLE and DeFi jobs, for instance): stagnant or decreasing.
They absolutely did not with just a BS. Perhaps a few companies paid that high, but 100K would be an easy outlier.
To give you an idea, even in 2010 most non-big names outside of SV and Seattle paid under $100K right out of school. Many companies in my city were offering $70-80K. Even my big name company paid under $100K in those days.
According to BLS data [1], the median computer scientist salary in 1997 was $82k, adjusted for inflation [2]. The same data has software developers median salary today at $121k. It seems SWE are getting paid much, much better today.
Granted, the occupation titles don't align perfectly. There was no "software developer" role in the 1997 dataset, but most of the computer science positions have a median salary in the low $80k-range in todays dollars. Also note that the timeframe you chose was at the peak of a tech bubble. Probably not the best for comparison, just like you wouldn't want to use 2006 or 2021 for a gauge on housing costs.
And yet, SW professionals did just fine for decades when making anywhere from a quarter to a third of today's FAANG salaries (inflation adjusted).