What does surge of software engineer’s salary actually means ?

Recently, in my friend community slack, we discussed how much average salaries of software engineers in Japan have been raised in a recent few years. One of my friend, who owns his startup company says that his company has seen sudden increase in hiring cost these 2 years because the average salaries for software engineers has surged.

The conversation reminds me that, as a software engineer, I feel strong demands on new technology to dramatically increase the engineer productivity. I mean the surge in engineer’s salary indicates that software engineering is requiring specialized skill or real world experiences more and more. In other words, modern systems are much more complicated than the systems developed in old days. It seems very temporary solution to pay more salary to engineers and encourage them to work harder, study harder. This strategy will reach the limitation soon as there is limit of human ability.

Rather, we should invest same money for new technology to help people develop/manage the software system instead of just paying higher salary to engineers. I don’t have clear idea of how the technology looks like. It might be new programming language or framework or cloud service or something we couldn’t imagine now. But, we definitely need to invest new technology to catch up with modern system’s complexity, which might be already beyond the human intelligence.