this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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Hey so just to be clear: a 200k comp package nowadays is the equivalent of about 81k in 1990.
Put another way: I am doing a good bit worse than my dad was at my age, despite being a pretty solid and experienced software engineer, with an EECS degree, and a lot of devops and system design experience.
This is the collapse of the American social contract. Even people like me who are ostensibly in “great” jobs are treated like code monkeys, and adjusted for inflation, it’s flat or worse than 30-35 years ago. We are doing worse than the generation before us. The American Dream is a nightmare.
Were people getting paid $81k in 1990? This site shows that 95th percentile in 1990 was $58k, and doesn't have more granular data than that above the 95th percentile. So someone making $81k was definitely a 5 percenter, maybe even a 2 percenter.
That site is talking about averages, assembly across the board. The person you’re talking to is explicitly talking about CS jobs, like software developer or system engineer.
You can’t really compare the two.
No, but it is a starting point for passing some kind of sanity check. Someone who was making $81k in 1990 was making an exceedingly high salary in the general population, and computer-related professions weren't exactly known for high salaries until maybe the 2000's.
[This report] (https://www.bls.gov/ocs/publications/pdf/white-collar-pay-private-goods-producing-industries-march-1990.pdf) has government statistics showing that in March 1990, entry level programmers were making on average about $27k. Senior programmers were making about $34k. Systems analysts (which I understand to have primarily been mainframe programmers in 1990) were making low 30s at the entry level and high 60s at the most senior level. Going up the management track, only the fourth and highest level was making above $80k, and it seems to me that those are going to be high level executives.
So yeah, $81k is a very senior level in the 1990s tech industry, probably significantly less common than today's $200k tech jobs.