Salaries are not going down but costs of living skyrocketed.
I am in the top 3% earning bracket as a dev in my country (Poland), I live in a relatively cheap area (south-east) and when I reached my 30s I could afford to buy just a ~100sqm city apartment which cost exactly 5x of my parents 200+sqm house which they bought without mortgage as factory workers without higher education.
And each year I can afford less and less with my relatively huge salary.
When your parents bought, your country had few highly-paid jobs, and places like that have low housing costs: the presence of many highly-paid workers is what causes housing prices to be high.
But “not as well paid as it used to be” is relative to other wage earner, not to cost of living. Two uneducated polish factory workers today won’t be able to buy your parents’ house either.
Idk, maybe it's not the exact book definition but I always thought about how well I'm paid in terms of the purchasing power, not the arbitrary value, and especially not by comparison with others (strictly speaking, because costs of living are kind of that, isn't it?).
The software jobs slowly go into the direction of not being worth the effort (I don't really believe that we will reach that point but that's the current direction).
> Two uneducated polish factory workers today won’t be able to buy your parents’ house either.
Of course - because from my point of view factory jobs are currently paid terrible. They used to be paid better (worth the effort due to being able to buy more).
Did you hear that, bruh, you should be totes cool with not being able to afford what your parents could because if they were where you are they wouldn't be able to afford shit either. You just need to understand economics is all. That makes it all ok.
I'm not saying we should be fine with it, just trying to understand what "doesn't even pay that well anymore" mean practically. E.g. if other careers have gotten better compensated while programming has gotten worse, it would have meant they'd be incentivized to change careers.
What I see locally is that cost of living has gone up but no other jobs (aside maybe real estate?) have improved compensation relatively to programming in that time.
There is a lot more value being produced, but the capitalist class has managed to capture a much higher percentage of it, leaving the worker bees with less and less. At least we have lots of toys to distract us!
Outsourcing everything is what's really destroying the salaries in "advanced" countries. And high inflation seems to go hand in hand with the domestic economic shutdown and trade imbalances.
Worry not we started to outsource to India as well...
My wife's company (low code domain-specific software creators) laid off 80% of their workforce and contracted a smaller amount of people from India.
It's not going well but I bet it's gonna take at least a year before anyone notices.
And each year I can afford less and less with my relatively huge salary.