The Big Five in tech are paying like the Big Four in sports

The salaries will be there so long as the profit and margin is there to pay them, versus the relative scarcity of labor supply. It's that simple.

Microsoft, for one example, will double in size in the next ten years and they're already generating ~$50 billion per year in operating income (next four quarters).

They're going to fire people while doubling in size, from their already extreme scale? Nope.

Adobe is now worth as much as SAP. They're booming, extracting vast profit from their global cloud business. They'll more than double in size in the next ten years, their operating income will zoom from $3b to $6b or more. They're going to fire people in that environment? Nope.

The same is true of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple.

Apple will fire people while generating $60-$70 billion per year in operating income? Nope.

So where will the labor slack come from in tech to reset salaries lower? It's not going to.

Plus, the Fed has its hands all over the financial system in several ways that it didn't in 2007. Rates will stay perma low by necessity, they'll drown everyone in inflation before they allow rates to ever rise beyond 3% again for a consequential duration of time (it'll bankrupt the US Government, they can't allow it for the same reason Japan couldn't). Those perma low rates will provide a very large support base under valuations and will persistently push money to chase greater risk (public multiple expansion; and VC capital flowing very freely).

When there is inevitably a large downturn or correction, the low rates and massive QE injections will make the bottom higher than it otherwise would be. The next downturn will be far more gentle than the great recession (and the bounce back to prime conditions also might be even slower).

The only way any of this changes substantially, is if US tech is decimated by foreign competition. US tech can pay so well because they dominate globally, extracting vast global profit and paying a relatively small number of employees (vs the profit scale) from that big haul. That's the equation that has to change to drain US tech salaries.

Google had nothing to do with 2008 indeed, but look at where tech salaries are today. Clearly that unrelated disaster was not going to impede tech's climb. I considered the parent poster's question within the context of uniquely big tech risks. Global economic risks impact all industries; there's nothing particularly unique there. If we have another global crisis, we could tank for a bit, then recover, and FANG staff salaries could end up exceeding the $500-600k mark. When implying these "golden years" could end, do we mean a local maximum or an absolute maximum? We could be quantifying this a bit more precisely to uncover more insightful reasoning.

You can have a talk with your manager to move to the next level on the Tarifftable, but these are extremely well defined. Another option is to move out of the agreement and get a free lease on a car, but it is not a very good idea.

There's enough people in the software industry for long enough to know if routinely subjecting your brain to deep analytical thought 40 hours a week would be in any way brain damaging. If health data is attached to employment data, it could be teased out. But there are studies that absolutely confirm the brain damage incurred from an NFL career.

It's definitely a mix. You can't hire just juniors because you need seniors to mentor/train them. You also probably don't want just seniors because as you said, they need the bodies. Add to that the fact that you must expect people to leave, so you have to plan for the future.

If you can manage a balance of both, depending on the individuals in the team it can end up being beneficial as juniors level-up and seniors tackle the higher-level stuff.

Don't forget internships.. it's essentially a hiring pipeline that is only available on students..

It's a lot easier to get hired when you are given a multi-month internship to prove yourself. Instead of having to prove yourself in 5x45min interviews.

(On the other hand students don't have experience to draw on)

Not sure if it’s true, but I heard Facebook did a hiring freeze on junior engineers for a while. Too much technical debt accumulating too fast.

I haven't seen many junior engineers write code I was particularly impressed by, or that could stand the test of time. It's more tech debt, but it's also learning. Others here have said a mix of junior + senior is ideal, and I agree. But for some things, you need speed and low tech debt: those projects are when you should lean more heavily on your senior staff.

Junior engineers willing to burn themselves out doesn't bode well for the quality of work you're getting.

Precision in thought and expression can often hinge on such pedantry. A word itself deriving from pedante, "teacher": https://www.etymonline.com/word/pedant

The roots of average come from shipping, "any small charge over freight cost", from French avarie "damage to ship".

The notion of which average specifically is meant varies, the association with "mean" dates only to the late 18th or early 19th century.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/average

What's ironic in the argument between mean and median is that they do in fact share the same root of the Latin medius

https://www.etymonline.com/word/mean

https://www.etymonline.com/word/median

And again, in current dictionary usage (as well as my several uni stats courses), you'll find that "average" applies to any of the measures of central tendency, though yes, "mean" is probably most commonly (and ferverantly, as you demonstrate) understood.

Merriam Webster, first defintion:

average: 1 a : a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/average

Which makes the argument of your initial comment, that the median is not a meaning of "average", again, false.