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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

I suspect in the US there has been a shock effect of interest rates causing the big source of money for high tech salaries to fall off a cliff. Everywhere else VC is not as much of a big thing. You typically work for a bootstrapped company (all of mine have been, or taken their first investments at the $1bn valuation level) or a large bank or public sector job. These sorts of jobs are not impacted. You need a global crisis type recession like 2001 or 2008 to cause this.

You are slashing $80k. Over here (rest of the world, $80k is the TC typically, and often much less!)

This is going to be bad for SF real estate I suspect. People will leave to adjust to their new salaries.

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$180k -> $100k -> ??. Not FAANG level salary from the outset, not going to be able to reach a comfortable retirement at this rate while retaining my financial independence.

Ok ouch that is a drastic cut, and must be hard to deal with if you have set up your life based on $180k income.

Just for comparison, $180k would be out of range for anyone outside the US, unless in High Frequency Trading, managing a team of > 200 people, or working for a hot AI startup, Crypto or similar. It is quiet exceptional.

I say this as someone who is, compared to East Europe, Indonesia, Cuba, India, etc, earning a high salary. Same thing could happen to me quite easily if I am out of a job and looking again. It is scary.

$180k? I never worked FAANG, but my understanding is the jobs were in the $250k+ range. I have a sister in law that works for oracle cloud computing and pulls in $350k.

Most tech jobs are not FAANG or similarly massive, super profitable goliaths. It's something we should all remember all the time. Most tech workers are second rate staff working for [name any big company that is not primarily a tech company].

Examples on the far end of the extremes only serve to skew our perspectives, unless we remind ourselves these are the extremes, not the norm.

It’s also out of range for most people outside of SV. There are definitely jobs paying $180k where I am (Southeast US), but they aren’t anywhere near entry-level and also aren’t abundant.

> Just for comparison, $180k would be out of range for anyone outside the US

I don't think it's too far off the mark for Australia. Mind you, that's gross. US$180 is about AU$280k. Of that, you'd pay around AU$100k in income tax (and then there's a 10% sales tax).

The implicit problem here is that US tech salaries have been far higher than anywhere else in the world for the past decade. You had kids graduating and starting their first job with zero professional experience who were getting TC that was a multiple of what seniors with a decade of professional experience would earn in places like Europe or Australasia. Most of the world was never able to get a job as an IC doing development and expect to retire comfortably and turn into an angel investor before their 40th birthday.

That was always going to make the US less competitive once the economic foundations that supported those very high compensation levels broke. Unfortunately for those in the industry in the US that probably means there will be a sharp contraction in both the size of the market and the TC being offered. Those affected have my sympathy but pragmatically they also need to realise that what they're going to have to get used to for the next few years is probably still (slightly) better than what everyone else in the world doing the same jobs with the same skills and in some cases with a similar cost of living has had available all along.

U.S. doctors’ salaries have been higher than anywhere else in the world for the last 5+ decades.

It all depends how effectively you can lobby for your rights & prevent foreign competition (and control the pipeline of new entrants / gatekeep / keep your industry profitable)

It doesn't necessarily tell us much to make comparisons across industries like that though. US doctors' salaries are paid to people who literally save lives. US tech workers' salaries are often paid to people who are working at a big firm with big past investment that found its golden goose a long time ago and has business people who have successfully defended its moat since. These are very different situations in terms of bargaining power for both personal compensation and larger scale effects like unionisation and regulatory capture.

But we are not far now from Github being all you need to manage a global dev project. There is no “coders without borders” as there are no real borders to begin with. The only sticky things are legal issues / culture / time zones.

Bad and good comparison. The bad part: unlike tech, a doctor consultation is really hard to transfer across border. The good part: the US is not a destination for doctors’ (not medical) exports. If we consider medical tourism as doctors exporting their expertise. In this case, the industry has failed to attract this additional flow and actually lost some (since many Americans will go outside of the US to seek medical professionals). All of this for the profit of some doctor’s establishment.

>(since many Americans will go outside of the US to seek medical professionals)

No, they won't. They will go to Mexican border cities for a routine dental treatment. Nothing more serious than that.

Certainly no equivalent of what various Canadian politicians have received over the years in trekking to the US, such as Chretien's secret trips to the Mayo Clinic while PM. <https://web.archive.org/web/20160624132234/http://www.ezrale...>

well in CA at least, we have a situation with housing that grew to be stupidly expensive. So $180k is really not very much. So if companies want to keep people here, they would have to pay up.

Money is a claim on energy, materials, and/or labor. Given that none of these are growing more abundant (except perhaps labor, depending how hard you squint), it may not make sense to plan for the same retirement prospects as the currently retired generation. This is neither fair nor easy to accept but internalizing it now may save some pain later.

This is not to say one should accept injustice handed down from on high. There are some who will try to exploit contraction for their own short-term benefit at everyone else's expense. Be wary, and be prepared.

My current plan is to live with my parents as long as I need to to at least get out of debt, hopefully that doesn't take more than a year but yes you're not wrong. Of course that raises another question of who is going to accept a 70 year old cloud admin/devops engineer/whatever-it-is-in-40-years on their team when the time comes but hey, you never know.

> neither fair nor easy to accept but internalizing it now may save some pain later.

that's a bit of a defeatist attitude though.

I expect a better retirement than the current generation of retirees right now, and i expect to achieve that by purchasing as many assets as possible, while earning as much as possible, before i retire. Of course, one does not know what the future holds - so the method i am using may turn out fruitless.

> Given that none of these are growing more abundant (except perhaps labor, depending how hard you squint)

While that sounds obvious, it’s not necessarily true. Empirically the real price of many commodities has come down, even in the face of growing population.

https://www.aier.org/article/review-of-superabundance-by-mar...

> This is going to be bad for SF real estate I suspect. People will leave to adjust to their new salaries.

Everyone disagrees with me, but I believe we're already seeing it. I moved down to the Los Angeles area after college, as I took a job down here. The houses here that used to rent for $3000 10 years ago currently rent for $5000+. Meanwhile in the Bay Area, I can still find a number of comparable houses for $4000 or less. Granted, those are more like - outer sunset, fremont, concord, etc...

But those are still pretty nice areas!

If I moved right now I'd have to pay $1000/mo more in rent - at least. Probably more. The housing market in SoCal is basically stuck because nobody can afford to move, and so nobody's moving unless they have to lol. And that drove the prices up.

As far as I can tell, the rent market is still fairly healthy in the Bay. So the prices haven't escalated quite the same.

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