The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)
I found this fascinatingly counterintuitive.<p>I would normally expect that a broader market leads to lower prices for commodity goods.  If I can only buy candy from the vendor at the movie theater, I expect to pay a higher price than if I can buy it from all the stores in the region, which I expect to be higher again than if I can import it from anywhere in the world.  The reverse is true for developers?  The companies with global reach instead pay the <i>most</i>?<p>And then it occurred to me that the efforts of good developers scale.<p>If I imagine a widget that makes a company 10% more efficient, a small lemonade stand might be willing to pay $20 for it, while a large company might find a price in tens of millions to be a bargain.  Developers are more like this. Not <i>only</i> developers, mind you, but automation scales to the size of the problem almost for free!<p>If you give a good developer a hard problem and scale it across global markets, the return for that developer being <i>good</i> absolutely dwarfs any reasonable salary on a human scale. Therefore, it makes sense that for companies solving a certain class of problems, in markets above a certain size, that <i>any</i> reasonable salary is a bargain if it improves the quality of the developers the company can attract. I suppose the idea that software scales is the intuition upon which this site was founded in the first place.<p>I appreciate that the analysis in the article is good and much more complex than this.  I just enjoyed the unexpected observation, and it left me feeling confident about my place in the world.  There are never enough talented people to solve all the problems that need them, and if there ever is so much talent that I have trouble finding a job -- well, that&#x27;s a world I&#x27;d like to live in anyway.