This comment right here is proof of the bubble - normalising 300-500k per year salaries. Developers don't have a skillset that is harder to develop than university academics or mechanical/electrical engineers in industry. Out in the real world for equivalently skilled professionals in other industries, a 100k salary is great and a 150k salary is fabulous. I'm a 16-year-experienced engineering team leader responsible for process safety on multiple billion-dollar oil and gas facilities and I'm on a great base salary 140k, which is more than many of my peers. There are engineering professors who outstrip my skills level by a factor of ten who are on half my salary.
The exponential elevation of dev salaries into the stratosphere was a natural overshoot of demand vs supply of suitably skilled labour. Now the overshoot is resolving itself starting with decreased demand. Anyone who banked on 300k-500k salaries being the norm has made the same mistake as oil and gas folk have done in every boom throughout the 20th century.
$300k a year will not buy you a 3bd house in the geographies that pay $300k a year. That's a middle (not upper) class life milestone. That others are paid even less is a travesty and a sign of a deeply broken society. Again, the problem is not with those making $XXXk a year, it's those making $XXXM+ a year, or not working at all but controlling $XB. The problem is also that capital has distorted the housing, health and education markets to the point that basically no worker can afford what used to be a middle class lifestyle.
