Wondering how the displaced engineers will impact the rest of the job market
So I don't know how much this will really change comp levels? Especially with how frequently software people change jobs anyway.
That dream of making local (San Francisco) pay while living wherever you want will quickly evaporate.
I survived as a software engineer through the dot-com crash. This isn't even a crash, this is just seems like a minor correction to "normal" for most of these companies with head-counts through the roof.
But SV salaries were abnormal, and that should be taken into account. There are a lot of us, doing a lot of the same stuff, for a lot less pay out there.
Why? For all sorts of various reasons. And this is now rapidly taking into account the entire globe.
We’ve barely seen the start of layoffs yet, and the Fed is pedal to the metal on engineering a recession. Tech falls first due to highest discount rate sensitivity
If you have 10 engineers of roughly equal skill competing for the same role, the company has more leverage to offer lower comp than if there’s just 1, or less than one.
Profitability just sets a cap on what can be paid.
That being said, I do agree that the best of the best will likely be able to maintain mid 6 figure comps. But it won’t be the norm as it has been.
There’s also theory vs practice. In practice very few companies have a high level of confidence about being able to quantify how much one engineer is worth vs another. Which is why 10x engineers can’t capture significantly higher comp than the median, even in the current (recent) market
Similar for Big 3 consulting firms (BCG, Bain, McKinsey) in that there is a huge application pool for positions but they are difficult to get and provide high pay.
But in those cases the number of jobs is much more limited than was the case in tech in recent years.
Finance is a similar example. Bankers get paid a lot, but the number of them has been pretty static.
https://www.law.com/law-firm-profile/?id=178&name=Latham-%26...
To be honest the total comps for some FAANG companies had gone into the crazy territory, there was no way for a up and coming startup to compete against comps of 500-600k (or so I had read) that decent engineers were getting.
I mean, there was a way, but in exchange those start-ups had to promise the world and then some, which was not ideal, to say the least. That's how we got lots of "fake" unicorns, which only now are beginning to get back to Earth.