Tech "treated employees right" because for awhile software engineers had a "monopoly on skill". If you rewind to around 2008 and earlier there really were more getting work done, building real things jobs out there than people who could do it. There were a lot of startups that hand a hard time getting people to just build the initial CRUD apps to start their business.
Startups and smart companies realized that if you couldn't compete on pay you could compete on how you treated employees. In the years leading up to the start of the current boom the pay differential between big companies and startups was't as vast as it is now.
Then industry started pushing hard to create more software engineers from the traditional path of increased undergrad comp sci enrollments to the development and expansion of the bootcamp industry. Then the money started to go up and more and more people started rushing into the industry for the money. When I started in tech ~2005 almost every software person I knew got into the field because they loved to write code and build things, when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today.
Now anyone hiring today (or let's say 3 months prior to today) will claim that it's still really hard to find good devs. However the amount of work being done that is essential and productive has dramatically decreased. Head counts have been expanding because money was flowing and managers need more people under them to get promoted (this logic flows even to the CEO level).
But now this long, long tech bubble is starting to burst and we'll companies across the board start asking "how much of this work is really necessary? how can we become profitable?" and we'll realize as an industry that we are way over indexed on software engineers.
This is exactly what happened during the dotcom era, I guess most people are just too young to remember. Anyone who could use a computer got hired to work in tech, paid ridiculous for the time, there were tons of people enrolling in EE and CS, a huge number of software engineers. The the bubble burst and a lot of the engineers disappeared, CS enrollments dropped radically, salaries went way down, and the only people left in the industry were people who just really like writing code and building things.
There's parts of what you wrote that are somewhat accurate but for the most part this is nonsense.
> when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today.
I don't really understand what you're saying here. If you're trying to imply that folks are getting into the industry solely to make money, there is some truth to that but it's hardly the majority. That being said it's foolish to imagine that if the money dried up that everyone writing software would keep doing it. But software isn't going anywhere, so neither will the money.
Outside of a few areas, the global situation is that software engineers make decent salaries but are far from the top, especially outside of North America.
Startups and smart companies realized that if you couldn't compete on pay you could compete on how you treated employees. In the years leading up to the start of the current boom the pay differential between big companies and startups was't as vast as it is now.
Then industry started pushing hard to create more software engineers from the traditional path of increased undergrad comp sci enrollments to the development and expansion of the bootcamp industry. Then the money started to go up and more and more people started rushing into the industry for the money. When I started in tech ~2005 almost every software person I knew got into the field because they loved to write code and build things, when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today.
Now anyone hiring today (or let's say 3 months prior to today) will claim that it's still really hard to find good devs. However the amount of work being done that is essential and productive has dramatically decreased. Head counts have been expanding because money was flowing and managers need more people under them to get promoted (this logic flows even to the CEO level).
But now this long, long tech bubble is starting to burst and we'll companies across the board start asking "how much of this work is really necessary? how can we become profitable?" and we'll realize as an industry that we are way over indexed on software engineers.
This is exactly what happened during the dotcom era, I guess most people are just too young to remember. Anyone who could use a computer got hired to work in tech, paid ridiculous for the time, there were tons of people enrolling in EE and CS, a huge number of software engineers. The the bubble burst and a lot of the engineers disappeared, CS enrollments dropped radically, salaries went way down, and the only people left in the industry were people who just really like writing code and building things.