Superficially, FAANG offering massive compensation packages to anyone who fits their model of "Stanford/MIT degree, willing to suffer through LeetCode challenges", which has a massive effect on the market for SWE, as it changes the bar for what's _possible_ in the realm of compensation, and ensures that the cartel gets its pick of SWE talent, simply because it can offer substantially more than most other companies.
Interestingly, those companies are also the ones that I think have put the most effort into quantifying the value of a software developer to the business as a whole. The salaries look obscene to many people, but the cartel pays them because it believes it's getting more value than it's paying for.
