Is it true that pay for soft eng. was high so it made them avoid creating comp?

1 points by user90131313 ↗ HN
is it true that pay for soft eng. was high so it made most of them avoid creating companies and competition in SV? few startups happened but many real talent gets hired by big tech. good enough to make them avoid creating many real competition, which they are perfectly capable at 20-40y old range? so instead they get few M. and big tech grows with their help? So their all salary and stocks cost is few $10B and returns for big tech are at least 10 times of that or maybe 50x

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I doubt it, at least as a common industry-wide tactic, for two reasons.

The first is that starting and running a business is an entirely different skillset from software development. Just because someone may be a genius dev doesn't mean they'll be any good at business, or even want to. Only a tiny fraction of devs will ever be meaningful competition to the established players regardless of technical skill.

The second is economics -- on the whole, it would be cheaper to simply buy out or squash up-and-coming companies than to overpay devs as a tactic to keep them from starting businesses.

But I don't know. This is just me speculating.

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