That doesn't scan. In which Western European country is that massive difference?
Either you have a FANG wage or your friend has a poverty wage because here's how it's in Austria SW Dev wage 3k net/month, bus driver 2,5k. There's no 6x difference here.
So you're proving my point that it works for you when income distribution is not egalitarian because you wouldn't be very happy if you earned the same as your friend.
My salary is quite good, my friends in the field earn a bit less, but the gap is still there.
To put things in perspective, according to this website[0], bus drivers earn ca. €20 per hour, within some quite limited margin. I don't know if this data reflects reality. However, the data for SWE show a much, much wider margin[1]. So it would make much more sense to compare the medians, and this gives only 2x difference. A big gap still, but not enormous as in my case.
You're comparing apples to oranges here. Dataset of levels.fyi heavily skews towards FAANGs and big-tech, not entire SW sector of a nation.
Granted, I was also guilty of that since I was comparing the salary of a tram driver for the local state public transport company where they get great benefits and the union always negotiates top salaries since they have a monopoly and can just increase the bus fare to their customers whenever they need a raise.
But my point still stands. Why bother going to uni to become and engineer in the competitive private sector, if you're gonna net only 500 Euros more than a driver or any other government annex union job?
I would insist something is wrong here. 3k a month for an SWE seems on the lower end, really. I'm pretty sure you could get 4k just by switching jobs without too much effort and staying at the mid lever. 5k should be possible for senior positions. If you take this into account, it changes the dynamics.
But even if we assumed for a moment that 3k is some kind of upper limit: remuneration reflects demand. If nobody wants to do jobs that are necessary for the society, the related wages go up. From this perspective, things might be working as expected in a society with too many SWEs and too few bus drivers.
>I would insist something is wrong here. 3k a month for an SWE seems on the lower end, really.
3K NETTO(post-tax) is the norm for mid positions in Austria for SW devs, not on the lower end. Where do you live if this is too low?
> 5k should be possible for senior positions.
5k NETTO is the norm?! In this market? WHERE? Survivorship bias maybe?
>From this perspective, things might be working as expected in a society with too many SWEs and too few bus drivers.
There's no "too few bus drivers", there's the unions of bus drivers (and other jobs) who can push their salary and cost increases into the prices of the general public, as they please (kind of like government workers) since they have a monopoly on public transit and that's what people need to get to work so they don't need to compete on the free market. You're comparing free market labor with a union monopoly.
Maybe a good strategy if you want to have a country where everyone is a government worker and you have no private sector innovation. Would you still be SW devs for the same wages?
I guess it depends on the type of contract. I checked the job offers on https://germantechjobs.de/en and it seems 80k/year is in the middle for many for these (I ignored job offers where they start with 45k for a senior position, this is just ridiculous).
And it seems I was wrong, because according to this page https://salaryaftertax.com/de/salary-calculator 80k actually gives you only 4k/month, not 5k, because of almost 40% tax. Sorry for that (on the other hand, I learned something new...).
So you're proving my point that it works for you when income distribution is not egalitarian because you wouldn't be very happy if you earned the same as your friend.