Do you think software engineers are overpaid?
I'm a software engineer working in a leading payroll company for the past 8 years. I would like to share my personal experience on this topic. Not all the software engineers in the market are blindly overpaid. If at all a company feeds them more, they will easily be caught in another company if they switch job but don't have any skills. The software engineers are pushed to a situation where they have to always do a continuous learning to make sure their skills don't get outdated. I think this is the technology era and people are paid fairly for their contributions. The only fact here is that only few people who really do the software development and get paid. There are few roles in a company that just fill the seat and get paid without doing any work at all. I would say that they are the one who are overpaid. Even if they are kicked out of the company, they somehow find a place in a different country.
The life of a software engineer is not really easy. They undergo so many problems in a day to day life because of the software they build. Every problem that they face can really give them headache by not providing the expected outcome. Troubleshooting drains away most of the energy of the software engineers. Considering all these difficulties I guess people who really sit and code should really be paid well. In some companies there are these tech leads and architects who don't really sit and do the code.They extract the work out of their subordinates and show stats at the end of they to keep their job safe. Those people are the one who doesn't deserve good payment.
I completely agree that software development is one of the highly paid jobs all over the world. The reason for this is because there is more demand in this field. For the past few years supply is also increasing a lot because there are many new engineers emerging already with a good coding experience. When they are recruited directly into a company for their skills, they are highly paid. Their pay may be so great when they start working in a company but if it is identified that their performance is not so great, they will be cornered. But even there some people have some escape strategy where they keep switching from one company to another for a good pay.
There are also few other situations where some companies look forward to hire candidates with some specific software development skill sets. In that case, if they don't find candidates easily, they end up paying a lot to them to make sure they get the candidates. I have seen this happening in my company itself. One of the team in my company is recruiting software engineers. The roadmap of the project is to complete it in another two years. Unfortunately they are finding it difficult to get the right candidates. In that case, they look forward to get candidates with a high pay scale. In a way it can be said that the company is growing to be able to hire some great minds with good skill sets. At the same time, we can also say that these things set a high expectation on the newly emerging engineering candidates.
As blockchain technology and AI is gradually improving day by day, there are so many software engineering exploring these fields and trying to find good jobs. As these are some of the trending technologies, the pay scale provided to the software engineers working on these fields is also very high. There are also few start up companies funded by big companies that are ready to pay any amount to the software developers to make sure they deliver quality products to the clients.
So on a final note, I would like to say that not all the software engineers are overpaid. But As we are going in the path toward technological advancements, I think it is quite obvious to see many developers getting more preference and payment compared to other professions who work on different jobs.
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