No, I do mean overcompensated. I’m unemployed right now, and the salary ranges I see in descriptions for senior-level positions are absurd. I don’t think anyone needs to make more than $200k a year, whether they’re a CEO or writing code.
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I think at some point (probably the late 90s to early 00s), coding transitioned from something done as a public good to something engineered to make as much money as possible, and that’s when the market was flooded with devs who saw it that way too.
I imagine there’s a lot of overlap between these folks and the “you’ll get left behind” crowd.
Probably not a hot take: a lot of devs are overcompensated for a job that leaves them with quite a bit of free time during the day, or with a lot of overhead spent in ceremonies and design meetings that aren’t really necessary.
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At most companies, publicly campaigning to start a union is a great way to attract unofficial retaliation
I went to a great talk at CodeMash 2026 about how to successfully form a tech union, and rule #1 was don’t make your union campaign public, for this exact reason.
Unions can go a long way in addressing the AI-flavored anhedonia and uncertainty that tech workers are facing. We should be telling junior devs “unionize smarter” rather than “don’t unionize.”
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Some are what you describe, others are established, private non-big-tech corporations. A lot of banks and other fintech places.
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