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Comment by dbish | Hacker News Reader

Well the FAANG pay is heading in the other direction right now, so the oppurtunity cost math is shifting. I have a feeling it's not just temporary, average pay next year will be lower in FAANGs since there will be less job demand, stock based comp has dropped and is unlikely to go up, and they have very little incentive to bring TC back up to old numbers if there are a lot of people on the market after layoffs.

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>Well the FAANG pay is heading in the other direction right now, so the oppurtunity cost math is shifting.

Is it though? I haven't seen any proof of this whatsoever. Bands at my company are the same. Bands at Amazon were recently raised. I keep reading this, and one would expect solid evidence given layoffs, so where is that evidence?

There is a material change in comp when a 'growth stock' stops growing.

Yes, it is. Bands at Amazon (where the comp was lower compartively) were raised to at least compete with the other FAANGs, but that was before the layoffs/freeze situation when they thought they still had to do that. Comp is majority stock at most of these companies, TC has gone down by definition of stock dropping, and places like Amazon assume growth in fact when calculating your target comp and what to allocate. Refreshers are very unlikely to make up for this drop since they don't have to (supply/demand).

I assume when stock prices are down, then more stock is granted to make up for it no? Obviously, the stock continuing to fall after the grant will result in less tc.

They can and will give some stock refreshers (to those that aren't laid off or marked low performing) but I doubt they will make up for the large drops that happened this year, and the drops that are likely to keep happening over the next year. You have to do that when there is competition, but cross-industry reduction in demand and a want to actually shrink companies (attrition) for software developers means you don't have to do that to keep the number of people you want.

speaking of, does anybody know if layers and/or glassdoor have any temporal aspect to their numbers? For example, glassdoor has been around for 15 years, and back then a FAANG comp was very very different than now. Do they just average out the salaries for the last decade when they show average? or is there any way to look at the recent trends on either site? or anywhere else for that matter.

PS maybe worth "asking hn" for this one, note to self

Actually, I predict there will be a software engineer glut in Big Tech like never before in an year or so because:

1. Many visa workers will go back to their (big-tech-less) home countries. Many won't be coming back. Many who were planning to emigrate will not.

2. If you're a CS senior and on the fence about doing a PhD, maybe the headlines will nudge you towards staying in school. Same for career changers.

3. People will value the bird in hand more than ever before. If earlier 30% more money was enough to get someone to hop over, it will take more to make them throw away a stable situation.

That's a load of baloney, man

Those FAANGs are still pulling in a million or three per engineer per year, and there's still a very limited number of engineers who can operate at that scale. That's why Google pays $400k+, not because of cheap interest rates or greed or anything like that

I can almost promise TC will go down on average over at least the next year unless there is a miraculous recovery in the tech sector (as it did signficantly this year already, as I was one of the FAANG folks who saw my pay get cut a huge amount). There's a reason layoffs are happening and hiring freezes. There's also a simple supply/demand aspect here, they have very little demand when hiring is frozen.

Even if they’re down 30% on tc that’s still probably at least p90 for startup pay considering the fact most startups’ monopoly money is in even worse predicament facing inevitable dilution

TC is definitely going down, if for no other reason than unvested RSUs' values have all dropped across the board, but we aren't going to be in a situation where Google is paying remote senior engineers $150k the way that startups do

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