I agree salary is correlated with demand, but I also believe there's a reason for that demand.
CSMs have no leverage. Engineers are powerful because their work can have an org-wide impact.
If we're talking about business value I think that sales (B2B), marketing (B2C/DTC) and engineers are the largest generators of business value in companies because of the leverage they have.
I have worked in b2b selling to enterprise or midmarket for my whole career, so individual customers are generally noticeable amounts of revenue. And our lowest end customers have CLVs in the 250k+ range. So that obviously influences my view of whether CSMs have org-wide impact.
I can see how that differs with a different business model, but I don't see how you can simultaneously believe CSMs don't have leverage, but salespeople do. In a business -- particularly in a saas model -- where you have CSMs and AEs, CSMs have more leverage, because you probably barely break even on year one of a customer.
If half of all software engineers suddenly died, the remaining software engineers would be able to negotiate higher salaries. But they wouldn't be adding any more value to any given company than they were previously. Conversely, if a spaceship landed with 10 million highly capable software engineers, we'd all be on minimum wage. It doesn't matter how much value you generate. If there are hundreds of other people who could do your job equally well, then you won't be able to negotiate a good salary.
But it's cute that serfs under the yoke of capitalist exploitation think that they are being paid in proportion to the value they generate!
CSMs have no leverage. Engineers are powerful because their work can have an org-wide impact.
If we're talking about business value I think that sales (B2B), marketing (B2C/DTC) and engineers are the largest generators of business value in companies because of the leverage they have.