Title: The web (including this site) is full of discussions&#x2F;articles about how the job market for software engineers is hot, and getting hotter after the pandemic. People say it&#x27;s a seller&#x27;s market.<p>Some other people say it&#x27;s actually a sucker shortage, meaning that employers do not compete on salary.<p>Then Triplebyte wrote (1): &quot;Engineers are almost completely unique as a labor force. There is far more demand for engineers than there is supply, and that makes engineers powerful in a way other professions are not.&quot;<p>A handful of software engineers produce software used by millions, and therefore generate an immense amount of value.<p>Open source contributors give away a lot of value, since if everyone had to re-create their work (including its dependencies, its dependencies&#x27; dependencies, and so on), there would be 1,000,000 times the demand for software engineers than there is today and innovation progress would be much much slower.<p>Do software engineers really have leverage?<p>How could we increase our leverage?<p>Why don&#x27;t we choose to use our rare skills for our own profit (as everyone else does), and instead many of us give away immense value (and power&#x2F;leverage) by open sourcing our work?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;triplebyte.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;rethinking-triplebyte" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;triplebyte.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;rethinking-triplebyte</a>
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