> Competition for talent has fallen significantly in the tech industry, allowing alphabet to materially reduce compensation per employee. Particularly, alphabet should limit stock based compensation given depressed stock price.
https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...
The best analogy I've come up with is that hiring software engineers is like hiring a bunch of book authors and asking them to write a NY Times bestseller. While your competitors are also trying to do the same.
If anything, I'd argue tech compensation isn't high enough. Software has unprecedented reach and (as a corollary) a winner-takes-all flavor. A team of a few hundred tech workers could build a business that brings the company in the order of a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, justifying their own salary by several orders of magnitude. No other profession can do that. An accountant, plumber or lawyer can never create business value that is 1000x their own salary.
1. The widespread meme that Google and other likeminded tech giants snatch up talent for the sake of denying competitors that talent, rather than for developing their own businesses.
2. Google’s seeming inability for the last decade or so to launch new products that stick around, as well as questionable decisions with existing products- with their chat messenger strategy being the intersection of both failings.
Maybe the previous post only applies to SWE and not PMs.
Of course over a course of a longer period, this drives up competition and new startups capitalize on the opportunity, but in the short term it resets the wages until the cycle starts again.
If I was being offered what European companies offer swe, i’d be out the door. I might even go take a job that’s enjoyable since the pay isn’t there.
I actually hope this is a broad movement for big tech companies to pay less. I’d love to see an exodus of power from them.
There are many dimensions in the calculus of layoffs:
- An opportunity to get rid of staff they don't like
- Trim down for the particular economic environment (Meta went insane the past 5-10 years, zooming up in head count like a hockey stick. Google has some bloated departments.)
- Virtue signal to investors that they're "using their money well"
- And, tamp down on wages
If high impact engineers had any sense, they would:
0. unionize
1. form worker-owned co-ops to capture the market value for their labor rather than whatever crumbs a corporation decides to grant them.
There's a word for that - "startup"
Like who? "Software" in and of itself doesn't accomplish anything. Nobody today is selling CDs in boxes that run entirely offline with no dependencies.
What is Airbnb without a giant network of IRL brokers that actually make inventory available? What is Uber without thousands of real people running ID checks, lobbying politicians, and negotiating down AWS and Google Maps API bills ?
Figma, everybody's favourite unicorn, only made $190m in revenue. It's only in bizarro world Silicon Valley that that results in a $20bn acquisition.
Marginal Cost to Manufacture - Not in terms of cardboard boxes and CDs, but you can't scale up your user base without paying hefty fees to cloud providers or payment processors these days. In any case, software companies aren't valued on the basis of gross margin but recurring revenue and operating cash flow.
Barriers to Distribution - OK, this is still mostly true. I will say that "enterprise" type software tends to require RFPs, SSO integration and regulatory compliance that can let monopolies fester, like Microsoft (and Adobe).
I wouldn't say software is displaced at all though. Companies are simply buying the competition as in the case of Figma, (or Instagram, or Activision) or pouring money into developing vertically integrated solutions to strengthen their moats further.
Figma was pretty much acting like the whatsapp to core parts of adobe business based on adoption. If they let it go on further, a similar thing would've happened.
Why is keeping salary in check valued? Simply for the sake of cruelty?
"because cruelty is the point" was a pretty common refrain in political discourse last year, so at least some people believe that.
It just seems to hey disingenuous and thoughtless saying to avoid actually engaging with a topic in good faith