Would you bet on CS salaries over the next 10 years ?

 

I recently turned down a bet, but I felt it was an interesting one worth sharing here.

In an age of AI disruption and the over-hiring of software engineers over the past few years, my friend offered me a bet that, after 10 years, the salaries of Computer Science graduates would not keep pace with Singapore's inflation rate.

That's a very nice bet that if we have some kind of Polymarket in Singapore, I think readers of this blog can give it a try to see whether they are right.

Initially, I felt that a 10-year horizon was too long, and I actually offered the same bet with a 3-year horizon, but my friends refused to pick it up. So we ended in a stalemate.

So here's the funny thing. If we kept the 3-year horizon, my friend has a good chance of winning the bet because the NUS CS grad salary actually fell from 2024 to 2025. Tech overhiring is real. But if we tried a 10-year horizon, my odds would increase tremendously, simply because wage growth here exceeds the inflation rate. ( In small part due to the MAS approach to manage the SGD )

And I can go on. Some economists believe that the demand for software engineering would actually shoot up over the next few years because of this theory known as Jevons Paradox. With IT agents and cheaper tokens, many people will come to believe they can spin off companies and develop new SaaS solutions using an army of coding agents. One possibility is that a huge industry of software engineers is required to pick up the mess. Another is the rise of an agent maestro, a totally new career that requires domain expertise and software engineering skills. I strongly believe in this thesis because even Sheng Siong is looking to hire SWEs.

So after some examination, I think this is a good bet for me, provided we can narrow this down to NUS salaries. If we expand this to the median CS salary, there will be a serious problem because that represents a CS degree over 10 years. If the Arts faculty launches a Bachelor of Arts in Artificial Intelligence (which I consider an inevitable move to keep humanities relevant), do I need to include the income of an Arts major?

But at the end of the day, 10 years is too long. 

A good bet does not need to be financially significant, but it should exact a psychological cost or an actual ego boost.

I suspect the bet was set up because there was some animus against CS grads on my friend's part, and I can't provide an ego boost by losing because I'm basically a freelance hobo, but I also cannot gain an edge if I win. My only mischief is that I actually like CS grads because they debugged my trading algorithms and upped my Sharpe ratio from 1.2 to 2.

I think a better bet would be to consider the future of CS grads against some kind of Compliance career, which I think lies at the root of this animus. But this is not something I care to take up because I actually benefited a lot transitioning from IT support to IT governance. Harsh truth: Society does reward the box-tickers in the corporate world. 

I had more pay and less work.

The worthlessness of box-tickers in the corporate world is amply discussed in cultural anthropologist David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, and believe me, there's no way their remuneration is going down in the age of AI; they will start gaining expertise in AI governance and find some way to become consultants in some ISO-676767 AI certification - if ever to keep being a pain the ass for hapless engineer.

But the rage could be philosophical. 

In Ayn Rand's philosophy, I suspect she loves CS grads as much as I do because they seem closer to the hero in her books, like John Galt or Hank Rearden. But in her novels, compliance professionals are the hyenas and parasites; what have they produced other than getting in the way of the people who do the real work? 

While I'm not betting on this, I have secured teaching stints in both the Law and IT departments at a Polytechnic, and I'm a parent, too. So I might want to see how starting salaries for lawyers and CS grads will evolve over the next few years.

So expect some tracking on this blog moving forward.