How is this not true? Taking a Senior SWE @ ~$200K, even just the base salary cost / 2080 working hours is $100/hr. Fully loaded employer cost + accounting for non-coding time gets you to upper 100s easily.

Even for a junior making $100K, I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so.

Edit: Fine, "Senior" is not "Average". But naive salary is not the true numerator.

   I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so.

$15, where we're going.

An MBA's rule of thumb is that a full time employee's hourly cost to a business is at least 1.5x to 2x times their salary depending on employer taxes, benefits, offices, travel, training, hardware, perks, etc.

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I'd caution that some corrections become harder to make over time, rather than easier. A bad architecture now can become much harder to fix once other things have grown up around it.

Even as a self-contained unit, you can't step in the same river twice, and on [date] some important details may have seriously faded, both in terms of text that can be mined and also in terms of human "why did we do that" and "what was the reason we did it this way and not that way" etc.

That "cost" includes all the overhead provided by the company: benefits, rent for offices, utilities, equipment, etc. The average SWE is not taking home anything close to that, outside of Silicon Valley and a few other limited areas.

Whatever you are making this year as SWE you'll be making less next year if the current trend in improvement of AI coding aids is going to be sustained. Think about it : programmers used to derive a lot of their value from the fact that it was a hard skill to acquire. My kids can now 'vibe code' stuff faster (and better looking) than what I could come up with as the beginnings of a design plan. And then I still need to implement it.

Costs, not makes. That includes employer taxes, benefits, offices, travel, training, hardware, any perks.