It would be interesting to see what that looks like adjusted for location/COL. It's possible the comp due to cost of living with a high concentration of devs in one area might be enough to influence this. Until we understand that and compare it to the distribution for physicians, it would be hard to draw any conclusions from it.

Bay Area bias is almost certainly skewing this entire conversation thread. In my average non-coastal metro area, all the nice homes in the nice areas are owned by classes of people like lawyers and doctors, not software developers. Most developers I meet here drive average cars and live in average housing.

> Bay Area bias is almost certainly skewing this entire conversation thread

Definitely.

> In my average non-coastal metro area, all the nice homes in the nice areas are owned by classes of people like lawyers and doctors, not software developers.

Is the area benefiting from brain gain or suffering from brain drain?

I am sorry but I have to inform you that you are a forced assumption.

> adjusted for location/COL

Isn't the majority of COL housing? Of course, with a mortgage, you actually build equity into an asset (the house) that you can later resell.

From my experience, SV caliber devs command SV comp pretty much worldwide.

I'm not sure how that can be true. I would expect the if there were demand for the higher quality devs then we would see them skewing the distribution locally (like on Glassdoor). There are certainly some higher paid devs in the distribution, but the overall distribution is lower than SV. If the demand is low, then I would also assume the pay would be lower.

> I would expect the if there were demand for the higher quality devs then we would see them skewing the distribution locally (like on Glassdoor).

Glassdoor or salary surveys aren't the most reliable source of information for outliers. There's a proportion of devs that are flying completely under the radar and who are completely invisible to most local companies, even if they are in the same "local market" [0]. Because they are extremely valuable, they don't interview a lot and tend to hop between companies where they know people (or get fast tracked internally). When hiring is red hot, they might completely disappear from the hiring pool by junior year.

[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

Like I said, they're too small of group to really effect the numbers. They would still be included in the BLS data though.

Something else to factor in is stock compensation. That probably won't be reflected in the BLS data.

What I've also been told is that due to the legal complexity of hiring international folks remotely, a lot of the people working remotely for US companies are legally contractor in their home country (so they would be reported in the local stats as self-employed and not necessary in the same category as other software devs).