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Comment by iaw | Hacker News Reader

A trend I've seen is using salary consultation services that peg the company compensation to rest of market. When enough of an industry does this it has the same result as price fixing but without collusion.

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^^^^ This. There seems to be a built in incentive for these "salary surveys" for corporate sites like Dice to do this which is why actual salaries tend to be higher. It is funny to watch companies that rely on these and low ball surveys struggle to get good people.

Thats not how it works. You cant put prices unilaterally in a market: a single company offering more would capture all talent.

That's not how it works. Educated, creative workers look for more than just salary. Increases in autonomy, purpose, and opportunity for mastery are often viewed as more valuable than money (once threshold levels of income have been crossed)[1]

[1] Drive by Daniel Pink

That is captured by the word 'more'

BS. in a comment about pricing "more" does not include complex concepts like autonomy - it clearly only referred to money.

I don't buy it. FAANG pays X, so other companies know they need to pay 1.3X to hire FAANG level engineers. So the info sharing may help FAANG collude, but it won't suppress wages for those who can be poached from FAANG. That's assuming there aren't any behind the scenes no-poaching agreements.

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...

I'm not so sure... plenty of software engineers will gladly accept less than X to NOT work at a FAANG company.

True, but another problem is that there are woefully few companies outside of FAANG that will even come close to a FAANG compensation.

not to mention there's quite a few companies who don't want FAANG type of engineers

What is the aspect of FAANG engineers they don't want?

Are there many companies that can pay 1.3x of FAANG compensation? One of the big reasons people go work at the big 5 is the pay.

Just SV unicorns usually, and even then a lot of it is speculated value.

But the unicorns definitely pay if you're above a certain experience level - and if you build the correct professional network you can basically demand it.

Decacorns more accurately. Lots of mediocre paying startups out there with 1-2 billion valuations.

Google is famous for lowballing and downlevelling so at least in G case it’s not always the case.

>I don't buy it. FAANG pays X, so other companies know they need to pay 1.3X to hire FAANG level engineers.

no. The rest knows that they can pay 0.3-0.5X to hire the rest of the engineers. C people hire C people and there are always more than enough C people around. Our BigCo has no talent shortage for example(we'll even be cutting 5-10% in the next few months - just fat trimming, the company has no financial issues forcing to do it), and i have hard time imagining what would a FAANG level engineer would be doing around here - try to imagine a Stanford CS MS grad with the thesis in deep learning helping a huge enterprise customer through 6 stages of grief during the escalation call :)

The overall stagnation is only overall. Inside the tech salaries distribution there is a structural change of it becoming strongly bi-modal. So there is very high competition for talent and very high salaries (Google L5/6/7 medians being like 550/650/750 with the rest of FAANG being similar) at the high segment, and the rest just happily chugging along with 2% yearly CPI increase at best which actually means slowly sliding downhill instead of mere stagnation.

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