sarchertech parent
There are far more programmers now than in 1980, yet the average programmer makes far more (inflation adjusted) now.
And the quality of what they develop is in the gutter, on average.
How much online shopping could you do from your PC in 1980? How many people had smartphones in 1980?
That's why sw devs salaries went up like crazy in our time and not in 1980.
But what new tech will we have, that will push the SW dev market demand up like internet connected PCs and smartphones did? All I see is stagnation in the near future, just maintaining or rewriting the existing shit that we have, not expanding into new markets.
Maintaining and rewriting existing shit is quite well paying though, and also something that AI seems to struggle with. (Funnily enough, AI seems to struggles even more with refactoring vibecoded projects than with refactoring human-written apps. What that says about the quality of the vibe coded code I don't know.)