TC at Big Tech is generally dominated by equity at the outlier end. Everywhere else it doesn’t look like pay is all that different to 5 or even 10 years ago. So either the effects haven’t shown up yet or else this was just an opportune time to stack rank and yank.

If you go on levels.fyi you’ll find that fixed cash (“base”) is the same mid-100s to mid-300s that it was the throughout the last decade for L3/new-grad and L7/L8/principle/staff respectively.

Discretionary cash (“bonus”) is the same 10k-100k, though 100k is rare and always was.

Fixed equity (“initial grant”) is about what it’s been.

People making crazy money were always doing it with discretionary equity (“long-term incentive” or LTI). That’s where you get engineers making 7 figures, and those people are not remotely worried about being laid off, or getting hired through a hiring freeze somewhere else with another great package. It would be pretty nice to be one of those people :P

Too many people got into software without being truly passionate about it because money, Big Tech absorbed a bunch of people who crammed the standardized test but weren’t really producers, and a soft macro situation is a great excuse to clear cut for tech CEOs looking at weak market caps and need to show shareholders and the street that they’re doing something.

I very much doubt that the folks left have lost much bargaining power, but time will tell.