Thank the Bangalore office for that.

How much online shopping could you do from your PC in 1980? How many people had smartphones in 1980?

That's why sw devs salaries went up like crazy in our time and not in 1980.

But what new tech will we have, that will push the SW dev market demand up like internet connected PCs and smartphones did? All I see is stagnation in the near future, just maintaining or rewriting the existing shit that we have, not expanding into new markets.

Maintaining and rewriting existing shit is quite well paying though, and also something that AI seems to struggle with. (Funnily enough, AI seems to struggles even more with refactoring vibecoded projects than with refactoring human-written apps. What that says about the quality of the vibe coded code I don't know.)

Tech salaries grew because beyond rewriting and maintaining shit, even more new shit was being built from scratch.

How will the job market look like when it's all rewriting and maintaining the existing shit?

And the quality of what they develop is in the gutter, on average.

It was in 1980, too.

Absolutely not, not to the same extent. That's a really illogical statement on your part, considering that the technical barrier to entry to even begin to think about developing a program in 1980 was much, much higher than what it's been for more than a decade now.