What is your definition of “very well”?

Does it need a definition? "A salary in the upper quartile per sector, location and experience level"?

Compensation for software developers in the US is mostly bimodal. You either end up in enterprise dev (banks, government, other non tech companies) where you start out at around $60K and then on average max out at the mid $100s - ie the “Dark Matter developers” - or you end up working for a tech company where you start out in the mid 100s and max out at 400K-$500K+.

The “1000s of jobs” are the enterprise dev jobs. And I’m not judging those. That’s what I did all of my career until a couple of years ago.

If we are talking in the context of software engineers being paid “very well”, I don’t consider those to be a substitution

That's an interesting perspective actually, thanks. Being UK based it's not really a thing here. Or maybe it is and I'm oblivious!

In which case, point taken re the difference between simply 'well paid' and that very top tier.

This is the concept. These numbers are not US centric in the article.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

Maybe ours is more: London / not London.