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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I suspect we are going to see some turmoil in the tech hiring space with stock prices taking a beating in recent months. Large companies have gotten away with paying under market price for talent because employees have seen massive gains from stock appreciation over the last decade. If total comp starts going down year over year, suddenly the more traditional, no-frills system at places like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon isn't going to look nearly as attractive, especially compared to companies one tier below that are already offering higher comp and more flexible work options.

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>I suspect we are going to see some turmoil in the tech hiring space

I agree, but I don't think the disruption will go the way you or I hope it would.

Many of the companies that is "one tier" below were able to offer higher comp only because of sky high valuation from the recent bubble. Most of them aren't in the kind of cashflow positions that can sustain such high cost if the stock value correct. If we enter an economic situation where stock value go down for companies like MSFT, Google and Apple, what do you think would happen to the stock price of high flying growth companies that don't even make a profit?

And guess what, most of them are coming to the realization that you don't need to actually pay $300k+/yr to hire some IC just to build React components or spin up another Node.js microservice. I know of quite a few companies (especially the ones that took a beating on the market recently) that's already starting to pivot more aggressively to foreign developers and starting to look at engineering offices outside of the country. If anything, the past two years only made a global workforce to be easier than ever to adopt.

Basically I think given the macroeconomic that's going on, the days when barely profitable or even cashflow negative "growth" companies offering FAANG-beating compensation packages will soon be gone. The numbers just won't add up anymore.

Thing is, we've had a unique situation in recent years where trillion dollar companies have seen startup-like growth quarter after quarter. Of course no one can predict the future, but I personally think this growth will stabilize to more traditional levels (see the history of the tech industry up until ~2010 for example). This does not mean that the VC industry will disappear and startup bubbles will stop being a thing. It will just be slightly more "boring" to get a job at Google or Apple the same way it was at Cisco or IBM back in the day, and top talent will want to look elsewhere for more risk and reward.

> ... what do you think would happen to the stock price of high flying growth companies that don't even make a profit?

They're already down as much as 80%. If I were looking around today, I'd kill to join one of those high growth tech startups with a solid balance sheet that just got the crap kicked out of its stock.

Any names? Besides SQ I don't see many

That's the big one I had in mind.

In addition to Block there's Pinterest, Coinbase, and Roblox.

Pretty much none of them have a solid balance sheet, though. They are all selling hopes and dreams. When something is overvalued by a factor of 100 and goes down 80% it's still overvalued by a factor of 20.

That's what I'm seeing as a hiring manager at one of the FAANGs. A lot of our candidates are interested in us simply because we provide stability and profitability that they can't get in the hot growth companies they already work at.

Can confirm, Google was really stingy with their RSUs compared to Apple, but the perks really aren't that good with the exception of the food, which, when speaking to current Googlers, they say the food quality has fallen precipitously. Google at the time I worked there seemed to lean heavily on its reputation to reduce total comp.

At least according to levels.fyi, Google is paying people at equivalent titles quite a bit more than Apple is. For example a senior engineer at Google is listed as having an average total comp of $380k, whereas at Apple it's only $310k.

Now it's entirely possible that there is title inflation at Apple, so that a "senior" engineer at Apple is less senior than a senior engineer at Google. Or perhaps the samples are skewed differently per company. But when I lived in the Valley, the word on the street was that Apple paid less well than Google as a general rule. So the observed data on levels.fyi does match with whatever I heard in real life.

we need small companies to publish their compensation data on sites like levels.fyi, so people stop dreaming about big corps expecting huge salaries and rewards. There are many companies out there, with freedom to experiment fast, learn new tech, have a great work-life balance, without the huge tech debt of these corps, and they deserve a chance to have "rockstars" "ninjas" and so forth in their ranks

I don't know if that will have the effect you desire. It's not a secret that there are a lot of companies that pay less money than big tech. That doesn't stop people hungering for those big tech jobs. Having specific salary numbers doesn't seem likely to change the situation.

Must disagree. As someone working in an MBB, the total comp of a potential exit is 100% a daily topic of conversation.

IMO initially it's possible that folks will not be deterred but that is truly a matter of time and space for the knowledge to be available, make its way through and then impact people's behavior.

It sounds like you're disagreeing with something I didn't say. The person I replied to said that if small and medium businesses published compensation information, it would cause job seekers to prefer FAANG companies less. I said that was not true -- FAANG companies will still be very attractive to job seekers even if other businesses publish their salary info. Job seekers already know that smaller companies cannot match FAANG pay, and the exact amount of the deficit is not very important.

At least for the subset of small that are startups, small companies vs big companies isn’t a comp discussion. You will win on comp going to the smaller guys. It’s whether you want to burn for the moon or you want to live a comfortable upper middle class life.

FAANG is 70% retirees, 30% dipole candle burners. And the 30% provide the value, while the 70% are along for the ride.

> FAANG is 70% retirees, 30% dipole candle burners. And the 30% provide the value, while the 70% are along for the ride.

See in 2005 when Google was gaining traction and notoriety, it was because they had the reputation of not suffering driftwood.

I was working for a giant transnational (full-on archaic org like that in "Office Space") at the time and found it really hard to fathom a company without apathy and drifters. I (foolishly) thought it ironic and dangerous that a company so determined not to suffers fools had free food, coffee, video games, table tennis, etc in the office. My office had an old crappy second-hand foosball table that was removed because it was "too much of a distraction" despite most people not using it from fear of a reprimand.

Fast foward nearly 20 years and I guess "corporate entropy" gets everyone, eventually.

Scott Locklin memorably declared Google to be in its "Fat Elvis" stage as early as 2011: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/google-as-fat-...

I work in a FAANG and I can tell you than nobody in my team is slacking. Quite the opposite. Everybody is smart and working hard, there's no way you can cruise. I think all new members work even on weekends. A colleague of mine got fired because he didn't meet expectations for his level. He would have been totally fine in other companies. Turnover is high despite the high compensation.

I'm sure it depends on the company/team, but 70% of retirees, I think it's a myth.

Oh I have lots of friends at FAANGs. I also have lots of friends no longer there. The one thing I’ve learned is that people still at the company always assume that their team is fairly typical.

So all the hard workers describe the place as hard working. All the slackers describe it as relaxing.

Among the ex-FAANG, the hard workers describe their team as slacking. I don’t have any ex-FAANG slacker friends. They just stayed.

I’ve got 10 years of friends here and I’m fairly social so I think I’ve gotten a somewhat large sample, at least (if not unbiased).

Sounds like you're at the "N" company.

Yes, there are way less slackers in FAANG. In the regular marketplace, a slacker who gets on the wrong side of management or just stale can usually find a comparable gig. FAANG, given recent stock market gains, pays at least twice the US average and matching that can be a serious stretch, particularly outside Bay Area.

As someone who left Apple for Google, I can say that Apple was even more stingy for all but the most senior levels, where they were competitive. Their TC could come close to matching Google because the stock appreciation was greater with AAPL than GOOG, but the offer letters had lower salary and usually no performance based cash bonuses when I was there.

It’s funny to read all of these contradictory comments about which company pays better (or is more “stingy”) than others. This comment and the parent comment are saying the exact opposite of each other, but I fully believe each person’s experience.

So what explains it? I would guess both commenters got higher offers at the other company because they did so as part of the job search process instead of via the within-company promotion process.

> I would guess both commenters got higher offers at the other company because they did so as part of the job search process instead of via the within-company promotion process.

Either this, or they may be looking at the value of RSUs at vesting (vs. at grant date) to calculate their (perceived) total compensation.

In the latter case they may see wild swings depending on how much the stock went up / down since the grant, and have the perception that they are "underpaid" vs. a friend in other company.

Apple’s cafe charges for food, and gives its interns very outdated machines. They’re much stingier than Google, or at least they were.

The food is heavily subsidized though and really good iirc.

Google's food is good too, but people bitch about it. Arguably they bitch about it partly because it's free which commoditizes its value to zero so they don't value it. At least that's why I suspect Apple charges a subsidized rate.

I saw the same thing where I used to work which also had incredible food. When something is free entitled employees whine about it.

When I was an intern I got a new, latest model (for the time) MacBook Pro. At one point I also got a maxed-out trashcan Mac Pro too that they just had hanging around, which made WebKit builds far more pleasant.

Interns often get extra perks. Regular employees didn’t get the privilege of attending executive speaker series.

Maybe I was on the wrong team :-) This was also before the trashcan debuted (Jobs was still CEO), so maybe things changed with time, new grads were still getting <$100k offers from eg Google at the time.

Current Googler. Everything you say is correct.

> Large companies have gotten away with paying under market price

This doesn’t make any sense.

What the large companies are paying is the market price. By definition.

It’s literally not possible for all of the big companies to be paying under market price at the same time. That implies some other prevailing market price somewhere else, yet we’ve clearly seen the highest salaries come from the big companies.

The big companies are paying whatever it takes to get the talent they need. That’s market price.

I think what they're saying is that base comp was artificially lower because of rapidly growing RSU value

> It’s literally not possible for all of the big companies to be paying under market price at the same time.

They did and there was a lawsuit about it…

> Large companies have gotten away with paying under market price for talent because employees have seen massive gains from stock appreciation over the last decade.

Are you sure these places pay "below market price"? Just curious, what companies would pay significantly more than FAANG?

Look at sites like levels.fyi. The usual FAANG suspects aren't anywhere near the top of these comp lists these days.

I just did (in London), mostly Google/Amazon/Meta at the top, plus a few hedge funds, including Jane Street which pays insane amounts of money but who's also much more selective than FAANG.

Check entry level pay for SF and throw Lyft/Stripe/Snap on that chart.

Agree. It doesn’t make sense.

If they aren’t struggling to hire and retain, they’re paying market rate. It’s as simple as that.

In the month it will the best time to look for software job ever. With Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian developers cut off, companies, that used to rely on remote teams, are going to be in the hiring frenzy to replace them.

Smart ones are already in the hiring frenzy.

Under market???

This sounds incredibly disconnected from reality.

Yes, under market for top level engineers. They have relied on stock growth to make up a large part of total compensation.

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