From my experiences, twice monthly payments are nearly universal. From what I gathered, the reason is that for a lot of employees, some states require payments to happen twice a month. For example, this is the respective CA state law: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Now, this CA law actually does not apply to most tech-employees (which will be consider "exempt employees" - which also means that they do not have to be paid overtime). But in my experiences, employers don't want to run separate payment processes for exempt/non-exempt employees - so everyone gets paid twice a month.
Now, this CA law actually does not apply to most tech-employees (which will be consider "exempt employees" - which also means that they do not have to be paid overtime). But in my experiences, employers don't want to run separate payment processes for exempt/non-exempt employees - so everyone gets paid twice a month.