The next high paying jobs
The compensation for a given job is a balance between how much value the person would provide and how difficult it is to find someone with the required skills. The reason why software engineerings jobs used to be pay so much was because
- The impact of their work could be massive – they can operate at a much larger scale than before and can automate manual work resulting in high productivity
- There is/was a lack of engineers to do the work
My guess is that moving forward, most software engineer jobs will pay well but won’t pay an absurd amount of money because:
- There will be enough applicants with the required skills – from bootcamps but also coming from more countries. Becoming a software engineer doesn’t require access to rare resources anymore
- As more and more libraries, tools and services are available, more and more software engineering positions will be “simpler” – you can operate at a much higher level and mostly “plug” things together. AI may also allow non tech people to do part of an engineer’s work today – e.g. writing SQL queries
My guess is that if you want a high paying job in the future, you should:
- Focus on a skillset that’s rare and needed in large successful companies – e.g. privacy infrastructure (since regulations are getting more complex and fines larger)
- Focus on AI – not developing AI models but using AI to increase your throughput. I’m not convinced you also need to be an engineer. I expect many jobs to have higher compensation if you can be X times more productive thanks to AI – the flip side is that less positions may be open
I’ve met quite a few engineers reluctant to use AI to write code because what they are doing is too smart for AI – but the truth is that 90% of the work an engineer does are boring tasks that AI can do well. As much as AI models can be polished and Copilot blunders every now and then, it helps me write code faster than before – it’s an autocomplete on steroid. I believe I used to be a fairly efficient engineer before and I’m fairly confident I’m more productive now.
You shouldn’t miss the AI train in my opinion.