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Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.

This data to me didn’t show much in the way of by-field statistics. If we’re comparing software development pay at the naîssance of the field to today, it should be complicated to do so. I’d expect to look at top 5% at the very least because of how new and niche computing and coding in general was in the 90s.

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GamingChairModel@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

You have to expect that OP, who is well established in his field, to compare accordingly, not with average pay of 1990.

I’m talking about a number that is 1.4x the 95th percentile generally. It’d be weird to assume that programmers were getting paid that much more than doctors and lawyers and bankers.

According to this survey series, median IEEE members were making about $58k (which was also the average for 35-year-olds in the survey. Electrical engineering is a closely related discipline to programming.

So yeah, an $81k salary was really, really high in 1990. I suspect the original comment was thinking of the 90’s in general, and chose a salary from later in the decade while running the inflation numbers back to 1990, using the wrong conversion factor for inflation.

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