I personally think the entire dev industry earns strangely well. I’d expect wages to be like the rest of humanity: 2x to 4x minimum wage, up to 5x or 6x when you manage a department of hundreds of people after a career on coffee and antidepressants, chaining all-nighters at work and risking a stroke by 45.
Maybe Microsoft is the un-inflated wage expectancy.
We are paid so well because our work can scale to millions of people, that's all there is to it.
I've progressively through my career felt more ashamed of earning so much money for the comparable little societal benefit I generate. Surely, I work on products that hundreds of millions of people use daily, they even enjoy it, but I don't think the beneficial impact of my work to society is anywhere close to what teachers, nurses, doctors, and so on provide. At some points the impact of my work on society was probably a net negative, I just generated cash for the company in detriment of society's needs.
I just can create millions and millions of US$ for a company through my labour. And for that we are well paid. I know, I've just described capitalism but some folks probably need to be more aware of it.
This is a perplexing attitude that’s common in our field. Somehow the field at large is creating the best teacher, doctor, entertainer, communication tools, and makes it available to everyone for low cost and some think they are less important than the inferior things they replace en masse. In contrast, doctors, for instance, create artificial monopolies and ensure supply is limited and consistently pat themselves on their back.
Perhaps it is because the value created is done by large teams of specialized people who cannot individually attribute the revolution to their work directly. Perhaps it is that the value created is power law distributed and only certain individuals in our field produce the majority of value created thus the rest legitimately believe what you described.
Maybe Microsoft is the un-inflated wage expectancy.