You’re conflating two things: earning a decent salary and having power with management. Current Google engineers have good salaries, but they hold no power with management. Their positions could eliminated without them having a say.
I highly recommend you look at other industries. How many people are earning 500K? Not many. Do you really believe software engineers are so special? No. We existed in a specific period of time: explosive economic growth, coupled with low interest rates, coupled with low supply of software engineers. The industry is maturing. Money is no longer free. Tens of thousands of software engineers are pumped out of universities every year. The writing is on the wall. The lifestyle software engineers have come to enjoy is under threat. Why will software look any different than any other professional industry?
Probably you’ll answer with something like: “software has 0 marginal cost so software engineers have extreme productivity numbers.” That’s true, but your wage, absent a union or scarcity of skill, is not tied to your productivity. Take construction nail production. Nails used to be made by hand. Now someone with some rolls of steel wire and a machine can make hundreds of thousands of nails in the time it took to make a few by hand. Yet the person making nails probably earns less than the person who made them by hand. The surplus value is captured by the owner of the machine.
You, as an engineer, are not special. You have no moat. From this conversation, I get the impression you’re not even particularly intelligent. Get over yourself.
