In this thread: SF engineers realize how well paid they are. Did not complain about 2x salary bump when moving to SF. Will complain about 0.5x when moving out of SF. Signs of realization that pay is only weakly correlated with skill yet to be seen.
The price a company is going to pay for your labor depends on how hard it is for them to replace you. If FB can replace a SWE in Atlanta with another for 90k$, that is what they will pay. It has nothing to do with the value of the work you're doing.
I largely agree with your comment, but I disagree with this sentence. Water is almost free in most civilized areas because it's not subject to free market economics (for good reason). Basic water supply is usually provided by the local government (and this applies to places where it is scarce). If water were treated the same way health is in the US, its price wouldn't be anywhere close to free.
If you want to know the realistic upper bound for local price of water see how much Coke costs. That’s not something the government much concerns itself with anywhere. Or look at the price of water in someplace like Gurgaon our Dubai, cities so hideously planned that drinking water and sewerage are transported by tanker.
Water can be provided for very low cost even with less than competent governments.
Companies that don't think this is an advantage should do what you're recommending, but the ones that do will continue to hire here, while also hiring in other markets. I don't know which group is more correct (it's pretty hard to make any authoritative claims about these things), but that does explain why there isn't a mass exodus from SF to ATL.
A point to note here is that labor markets vary not just by location, but also by what the job is. Many companies in the Bay Area do outsource some parts of their internal IT or Business Intel functions to Accenture and co, for example. What they're doing is exactly that - they're leaving this expensive market because they don't believe the benefits are worth the markup for those specific roles
This is of course the big problem. Facebook is admitting that developers elsewhere in the world are just as good as developers in Silicon Valley. Or if you want to put it another way: if Silicon Valley is special, it's NOT because the developers.
Now the market is crowded, scaling is a simple economic problem, the network effect is turning on its head and there isn't any revolutionary software to build on the horizon. Times have changed but the narrative hasn't caught up yet.. its going to suck when it does honestly. Software is just so commoditized and cookie cutter at this point i can't see it being a great career for much longer.
I've been trying to learn more about the dark corners of the linux kernel and graphics drivers for now. But its not 2015 and I don't have 3 years of experience in embedded/systems/C++ so no ones gonna hire me for that stuff because my resume just says "generic backend dev lol".
Software is the infrastructure of the 21st century and if you step out of the tech bubble to things like material science, biotech, etc. you'll see that their infrastructure is garbage despite there being really big returns available.
Developers who can marry modern software to those domains should remain in high demand for decades.
Anything related to public safety (including transportation) probably needs the most tech talent.
Spend a month with a tech stack of any passing complexity, even ones at $FAANGco...
We're nowhere close to solving all the hard problems.
When you already have architecture that is capable of serving the entire world, when everyone has a smartphone all that's left in that space is efficiency/cost optimization. Whatever shiny new programming language or framework comes out, the bedrock of computing is solid (and the shiny new programming language is really mashing together decades old ideas which is cool if you're new to them but boring if you're not) . Every company is a mess on the inside of course, but they do their core functions well enough. AWS did not exist 10 years ago, now it's big internet drama when it goes down for a few hours twice a YEAR.A detailed postmortem comes out (not standard before), revealing the problem was a configuration change (because everything has long since been automated, so it's driven purely by configuration) .
I know not everyone is interested in those same problems, but I thought they were interesting and what's left now in the guts of software is an adoption phase, people rediscovering lessons that others long since figured out. Perhaps people who work on higher layers of the stack think differently, I'm only interested in the deep tech below, and it's pretty solid at this point.
Now if you're a single person in SF, that's a different story.
Those companies are only paying this much because the cost of living there is so high.
It's so obvious that I now feel silly for not realizing this fully before experiencing it myself.
Then again if companies can still turn a profit offering these salaries, then perhaps the work is actually that valuable?
On the other hand there might be an upside to being paid half: you're unlikely to deliver less value than your cost.
Any corona-related layoffs start with the most expensive (comparing to value brought) employees.