High Salaries Are "Not Some Birthright": Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu Warns Software Engineers 

In a social media post on Sunday, founder and Chief Scientist of Zoho Corporation Sridhar Vembu warned software engineers that the higher salaries for tech roles may not last forever. His cautionary note addressed to software engineers that high pay is “not some birthright” and therefore cannot be taken for granted.

“I have often said this to our employees: the fact that software engineers get paid better than mechanical engineers or civil engineers or chemists or school teachers is not some birthright and we cannot take that for granted, and we cannot assume it will last forever,” Vembu said in a X post.

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He also said that the “customers pay for our products also cannot be taken for granted.”

I have often said this to our employees: the fact that software engineers get paid better than mechanical engineers or civil engineers or chemists or school teachers is not some birthright and we cannot take that for granted, and we cannot assume it will last forever.

The fact…

— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) May 18, 2025

Zoho chief scientist further added: “This is to remind ourselves that we can be “disrupted” – and the more we assume we won’t be, the more likely we will be. Or as Andy Grove of Intel said “Only the paranoid survive”. The productivity revolution I see coming to software development (LLMs + tooling) could destroy a lot of software jobs. This is sobering but necessary to internalize.”

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Vembu’s concerns about AI came amid increasing discussion over the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in reshaping white-collar work, with International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) January 2024 reports suggesting that nearly 40% of global employment will be impacted by AI.