They'll pay less when they stop making $2 million per year per engineer

> They'll pay less when they stop making $2 million per year per engineer

When a company makes 2 million USD per engineer and year and can afford to pay less, it will. :-)

When that happens, people will just go back into finance and other high pay fields that require less education and effort.

> When that happens, people will just go back into finance and other high pay fields that require less education and effort.

Straight from the horse's mouth I know that quite some very intelligent, insanely well-educated (in a relevant direction, say, doctoral degree in mathematics, physics, stochastics, ...) and hard-working people don't have the personality traits that finance is looking for.

I know quite some insanely talented people who could not, for example, get a permanent position in research (for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their research) who would, as mentioned, rather stand no chance of becoming hired in finance (if I had a startup, I would seriously consider hiring them).

So the whole advice of "go into finance" is in my opinion divorced from the reality.

Isn’t it a real phenomenon that’s even been observed in pop culture?

https://youtu.be/L_VFXM0mnR8

You are being too literal here. Firstly, there's a large number of software devs that would do just fine in finance. A common refrain is that many of those who would have gone into finance over the past decade or two want into tech instead. Secondly, there's many other fields people could go into. People follow the money. They adapt their skills to those fields. This idea that "well devs will just work for peanuts" is absurd. Intelligent and talented people will just go elsewhere if the field is no longer a source of high incomes.

Of course I expect it will continue to provide high incomes for quite some time. There are few things I can think of that wouldn't be improved by software, and as long as that holds true it means there's more demand for software.

You can go into finance with the mildest of personalities, write financial middleware or support existing code bases and still earn six digits.

Do you think you need to be a trigger happy real time shark to craft that HFT backend code on top of which the actual trading will take place?

Semiconductor salaries are still very low. Intel and co pay around 70-100k with marginal stock and bonus for most engineering staff. Even seed stage startups pay more. May as well become an accountant at that point.