The software salary debate usually turns into two groups yelling past each other. One side sees a junior developer making $90k or $100k and says tech is overpaid, while the other side sees a staff engineer keeping a giant system alive and says developers are underpaid compared to the money they help companies make. Both sides can be right depending on what kind of developer they are talking about, but the conversation usually falls apart because people use one job title to describe a bunch of completely different jobs. A junior dev building admin screens, a mid-level dev fixing production bugs, a staff engineer designing systems across teams, and an AI engineer working near model infrastructure are all technically “developers,” but they are not living in the same labor market.…