In my first job at a fancy tech company in the Bay Area, I saw more free food and drinks than I've ever seen outside of a grocery store. It was crazy. 30 different kinds of beers. Free drinks, snacks, lunch.
I jokingly said out loud, "what did we do to deserve this?". A coworkers overheard and replied, "speak for yourself".
> The entitlement was and probably still is crazy.
Google pays SWEs around $300k average total comp and gets $1.5 MILLION per employee (SWE or not) per year in revenue. With a profit margin of over 20%.
A single project can increase revenue by $100m/year so not sure if "I made the company $500m over the last five years" is entitlement. Tech companies should be paying more and not less.
Their special skill is ensuring they are the place where all ad money goes by being better at getting eyeballs for that money and being better at targeting ads to those eyeballs. Many many many companies have tried to usurp one or both sides of that without success.
You may not like their business model but they are objectively very good at what they do.
The above comment also completely sidesteps the monopolist and regulatory capture factors in difficulty to usurp Google, and thus incorrectly implies that a level playing field exists.
Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do?
Google has great research going on, but their products seem to be mostly coasting along. There's still some growth, but is that more than inertia and network effect?
Where the large innovation in their product that keeps them ahead?
Coasting is exactly how I'd describe increase revenue by 6x in 10 years. "Coasting."
> Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do?
So your bar for success is having a perceptual monopoly on the whole world? Or just the digital world?
You're jumping to mental gymnastic to not acknowledge that Google has consistently grown while being highly profitable. It's a massive success as a company.
> Coasting is exactly how I'd describe increase revenue by 6x in 10 years. "Coasting."
Again: inertia and network-effect.
> It's a massive success as a company.
Undoubtedly. And they appear to be great at not failing. Like any bureaucracy, that works until it doesn't. What new markets have they created or taken over in the past 10 years?
The problem is nobody knows if they are really better at targeting ads. They say so, of course, but who could prove it? Google is the main player in the ad industry and when they say that they are the best, everybody hears them. If a small player tried to say so, nobody would be aware of that, even if they were right.
This kind of math betrays a total lack of understanding of the way businesses earn money. With vanishingly few exceptions, no one developer makes the company $500m, and this is trivially testable with a quick thought exercise:
Would Google's bottom line drop by ($500m - $devSalary) if that developer were to quit this year?
Of course not! In most cases Google's bottom line wouldn't even notice if Google failed to replace them, but if their job was really important and they did have to replace them, they still wouldn't notice that it was someone else and not that one dev.
This suggests that the dev isn't actually what's making Google $500m/employee, it's the systems that make up Google that are making Google $500m/employee. Any one employee doesn't actually contribute nearly that much to the functioning of the system, otherwise every company would make $500m per developer.
So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
Okay, you're right, I grabbed the wrong number. Sub in $1.5m/year or $500m/5 years and replace "bottom line this year" with "bottom line over the next 5 years".
The exact numbers don't matter, the point is the same: with only a few exceptions, no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company. If they did, you could pick up your laptop and go to any other company and start earning them $N/year for whatever value of N you prefer.
First of all, Pareto Principle, so some employees contribute a ton and many contribute less. Second of all, having been in tech individual employees do drive projects that wouldn't have happened without them for a decent amount of time. In aggregate that moves the bottom line a ton
As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't. The general solution is to go into management (more visibility and no cap on comp), or to create (or join) your own startup (which doesn't have a rigid interview process and you can use "references"). Which many do given how many startups exist in the Bay Area. Companies also may give out large bonuses in RSUs to keep those employees.
> First of all, Pareto Principle, so some employees contribute a ton and many contribute less.
Correct. But with very few exceptions I don't believe that any one person contributes $500m in value over 5 years.
> Second of all, having been in tech individual employees do drive projects that wouldn't have happened without them for a decent amount of time. In aggregate that moves the bottom line a ton
In aggregate, yes. But it's the systems that aggregate the contributions of the employees and turn them into profits.
> As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't.
I'm assuming you mean omniscient, and no, I'm not assuming omniscience because I'm not actually talking about a company's ability to attribute value creation, I'm talking about the employee's ability to attribute it. Any random Google employee who thinks that they contributed $500m over 5 years can't just pick up their laptop and go work for a startup and expect that startup to make $500m over the next 5 years. It's not happening. The only way that their project made $500m was as a project embedded in the enormous money-making system that is Google, and absent that system they don't make that much money for the company.
And as the CEO he's one of the few people who can reasonably make the claim that he's instrumental in creating the money-making system that is Google. We can argue about whether or not that perception is accurate in his case, but CEO pay being totally out of line with most employee compensation is based on the idea that I'm talking about: the system makes money, employees contribute to the system, and the more systemic your role is the greater your contribution to the system.
I'm not interested in engaging with you further because you've now twice ignored the main point of my argument in favor of nitpicks and out of context quotes asserting that I said things I didn't say. There's no point in engaging with that style of argument. Have a nice day.
The main point of your argument is materially different if you mean $500m or $1.5m. I agree there's no point in responding if you're just going to flip flop to whichever is more convenient to that particular response and then get upset when called out for it. Either make a consistent argument or deal with it when called out.
edit: There's also a material difference between no one, a few, many and the majority. You made a specific claim that no employee provides more then $1.5m of value. I disproved that with Google's own comp. Not my problem you're butt hurt about being called out for being wrong with quotes you said yourself.
That framing doesn't change my logic at all: replace the direct earning of $N/year with the probability of earning $N/year and the same logic still applies. An employee doesn't contribute the probability, an employee working within the Google system contributes the probability. The system is doing the bulk of the work, and the per-employee probabilities of earning all that money are dramatically smaller in any other system.
The very well-compensated early employees, leaders, and executives, working together as a team to create something that was greater than the sum of the parts. The average Googler in 2025 wasn't even on the team that created the initial system, they're a cog in a machine that someone else designed years ago. A very well paid cog.
It's not lol. It's more akin to construction. If you need 100 people to do a job in a given amount of time, you might be able to get it done with 99 people without issue. But that one person might have had an insight that would save you a lot of money overall. And if you kept getting rid of people, at some point the others will not be able to pick up the slack and might even ruin the project unwittingly.
>So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
I see where you're coming from but I think you're missing the fact that large projects have lots of bullshit work that requires high skill but is technically lower value. There is a lower bound to what people will accept, as people with marginally better skills get lucky enough to get highly-visible and much more highly compensated roles. The pay stratification you wish for is already built in, and the average just reflects the fact that these companies DO make enough money to have competitive pay rates.
Labour doesn't make money until the labour is already provided, so how much money labour can produce is an unknown until hindsight is available. An established company with a stable business can make some pretty reasonable forecasts, but when it comes to startups and other new business ventures one is ultimately straight up guessing.
Demand being a function of how much investment money is available is going to be closer to reality, although that is not the whole story either.
Google’s economic model has been like that for decades and it’s paying for my early retirement. Being “exploited” in this way is nice work if you can get it. The companies with narrow profit margins don’t pay nearly so well.
my reply to you would’ve been: “oh, not much, we just made the founder the richest most powerful man on this planet. Right now he’s probably on a giant island in hawaii which he wholly owns, in a €200mm mansion, having an orgy with 25 escorts, while on lsd. Oh, right now he just took the jet, one of 6 €50mm jets he owns, to fly to the coast of italy. there, he will fly his giant helicopter to land on his giant 3 floor yatch with 3 pools where he will fuck 30 more chicks at once. But yeah, we get extra free food for having contributed to that”.
The point is that many tech companies in the Bay Area were not profitable, never going to be profitable, but they treated software developers like kings because of the distorted market supported by low interest rate environment.
10 years ago I was at an “innovation lab” of a big HR tech company that gave out free lunches and snacks. The best explanation I heard was a coworker originally from the big boring corporate HQ who said basically this is a software petting zoo for big investors to look at. “Good code monkey, here’s a banana!”
In a lot of cases, the companies leverage a large chunk of their employees' time to make very hefty returns. It's the least they can do. As someone who runs a company now (having been an employee previously), it is obvious to me that the cost of providing food is a rounding error in the overall company budget, and is well worth it, if it keeps people happy.
They got free snacks in exchange for labor utilized to capture billions of dollars of market value, which will generate cash flows far into the future. You need to understand the game you are playing.
It’s funny how impressed people are by food and beverages. Let’s be super conservative and say it was only for a mere 20 people. What percentage of wages do you think is being spent on that stuff?
Let me give you a hint - if the existence of snacks made people work a mere 20 minutes more a week it would’ve already paid for itself. The calculus is a bit more complicated for full service lunch, but you get the idea.
Yeah free food is a really good way to spend money on your employees. Just the cost of people walking to get food makes it worthwhile to provide on site.
I worked at place before that didn't have coffee so people would walk to the coffee place in groups that took 15-30 minutes. Sometimes twice a day. It became a routine part of the day, everyday.
Like literally throwing the cost of an invisible bag of Starbucks beans in the garbage everyday to save the visible cost of brewing a few cups.
I don't think it's the literal spending money on snacks that impresses people; it's more about the thought behind doing that.
For example I work in a company where the salary is pretty good, but they're also super stingy in general. No snacks, no socials, shitty laptop, etc. It betrays a lack of interest in making employees happy.
The absence of things like snacks is also an indication of how much the bean counters are in charge, because as you say it's probably good value for money in terms of morale, but as soon as the bean counters come in they see you spending £1k/month on snacks or coffee or whatever and that's an easy thing to cut.
Not only that, but if the company once had these things, and then took them away, it might be the wake-up call that snaps an otherwise satisfied employee out of his complacency and cause him to start looking around where the grass might be greener. Steve Blank wrote about this in [1]. Congratulations, you saved a couple of hundred dollars but caused three good employees to leave.
I worked at Facebook for half a decade during its golden period and there were a lot of people who shared your sentiment.
…in fact, when some folks suggested engineers organize, the types who complained about worker entitlement remarked: “we make enough, why would we organize?”
This perspective of worker entitlement is really harmful to labor, I assure you that the execs rarely talk about entitlement as they issue bonuses to themselves now while simultaneously embracing rolling layoffs.
Now engineers are working to obsolete themselves with AI and reduce their bargaining power permanently for the promise of a post-scarcity AGI facilitated future that is all but guaranteed. But they’re just entitled, that’s the problem.
Your salary is not about moral desserts but about how much value or money you bring to someone else.
That’s why a laborer gets paid a few dollars for a backbreaking day of work and Matt Damon makes a million dollars for holding a can of Pepsi and smiling for the camera for 15 minutes.
Watching the Bay Area from over the Atlantic was always a very bewildering experience. I honestly think you guys now get something closer to the reality of European startups, where we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€!
The sentiment of the OP resonates with me; it’s closer aligned with reality, and building a product that actually produces value, that needs to satisfy customers, is both a rewarding and a humbling experience.
> we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€!
Lucky! Here in Colombia I went for the `get investor` phase, and despite get 'great' interest and even win some competition where I go to a thousands event to get it, I get at then end US1500 (today money) that was restricted in what I can spend on (nothing in what I need that was get more developers!).
(The rest of the money, that was for the startups consultants)
I've always felt that the moral panic about food perks in Tech was weird. That's not free, it's part of your salary. Sure, you can't buy index funds with Pineapples but at the end of the day it's still remuneration.
The market TC is crazy high, do you add a minor bump in $$$ to attract some candidates that will go to Sweetgreen? Or you add flashy food while taking advantage of economies of scale? Bonus, the very expensive people stay more in the office.
It's because there's a story that a lot of laborers (and capital owners) want to believe, that capitalism is a great meritocracy, and the rewards of it are based on one's moral fiber, instead of purely a function of every individual's leverage effect on the returns on capital/labor.
The replies are hilariously illustrative of your point. Why do you guys keep working for theese evil capitlists taking away the bilions of value you generate and leaving you with pitiful hundreds of thousands (+free snacks)? You should start a cooperative or something.
Can I offer a different perspective of providing drinks and food at the office?
Add to that coffee places and more on the company campus.
In some cases, maybe not yours, that is also a way to keep employees in the campus/at the office together. Nice things for the company happens there: you go with your team, have lunch and also have a meeting/discussion about the project you are working on.
I think when the company can afford it it is mostly a win-win situation that maybe it is presented only with the benefit side for the employee.
There's definitely a silver lining in that being a software engineer at a normal-ish company feels more satisfying now. Being more focused and KPI-driven has some upsides.
Working at larger companies during zirp seemed high risk because the odds of getting stuck on a company side project were high. I was always wondering "is my team actually doing enough to not get fired?"
That seems to be happening less now. It's easier to know where you stand.
Yeah, worrying about getting fired isn't very helpful.
But selling out isn't either.
Programmers should be left enough space to do their thing well, that's the only way to build great software. Which was the entire point of Agile before it was corrupted into Scrum.
Well, not OP, but there's definite degradation in software quality and attention to detail.
Some is due to Scrum. It's actually not the fault of the methodology but that it's been half implemented by companies that did waterfall before. You are expected to finish a feature in a sprint, but you have no connection to speak to the stakeholders/customers.
The other things are these KPIs, and unsurprisingly, the bean counters behind them don't care about refactoring or addressing tech debt.
In a sense, yes, we need to focus on delivering value but it's much more chaotic now, so it's very difficult to deliver performant features that deliver also what was expected.
There's no appreciation of skills anymore, of quality; it's all about generating features as effectively as possible. No room for creativity/trial and error.
It's like working at a factory, pushing a button as fast as humanly possible.
And coders are treated like button pushers as a consequence.
Hmm, is the argument that it's a generational problem?
Maybe it is, but I find it strange that nobody seems to care that visiting a page downloads 100s of MBs of packages that clogs the browser. Or, that latencies in backend replies can go into multiple 10s of seconds, etc.
Back in the day, we had to make sure the software ran on less performant computers and we painstakingly analyzed memory allocations and checking the run times of requests, etc. We also had to make sure that the software baked onto CDs worked, there was no multi GB downloads after install possible.
I, for one, would still like that to be the case for the software I use and would still prefer to have the time to do this for the projects I work on.
Some pressure to ship and to work on the things your customers actually need keeps you honest. It's satisfying to work on things which make a short term difference to the bottom line because you know at least someone cares. In contrast to working on a speculative side project which may never see the light of day.
I've come to believe this is just a legitimate personality difference. I really struggle to find joy when I'm working on something that I question the usefulness of. But I've worked with many people who find the work itself joyful and don't mind that at all.
That's not my problem at all. I can't work on something I don't see as useful, that's the whole reason I started programming in the first place. But building useful things is not what most software companies are up to these days, far from it.
You're making it sound like plumbers are a lesser thing. You sound like you're one of those people who compare what AI does to what human junior engineers do or should be treated like (which is surprisingly a lot of people here on HN)
True I understand that. Digital plumbing is not a lesser thing. It's part of the job. Software engineering is done better when being "pampered" regardless if it's plumbing or rocket science. If companies want to stop pampering then sit back and watch. Bad software will be noticed
And while some of the "pampering" is excessive, an awful lot of it is just "giving your valuable employees, the ones who actually do all the work that makes you money, a good place to work that's conducive to creative work and solid work-life balance."
Like...being bought the best equipment for the job they're doing? Making high-quality foods available on-site? Even something as simple as having great desk chairs, I can say from frustrating personal experience, can make a huge difference.
Plumbers are paid quite well and they deal with actual, literal shit. It is not glamorous work, but I would have to guess there is likely less disillusionment and burnout in plumbing overall compared to software.
I have family that work in trades and this is just not true at all.
They are literally focused on retirement, pension and next time off once past the apprentice stage.
Why? Because the work is terrible. Really demanding physical work in terrible conditions. Unimaginable really for anyone who works remote.
Then it just gets worse as you get older and your body breaks down. Then your really just holding on to get to retirement and that pension so you can finally relax and enjoy life without doing this awful job before you die.
No thanks. I am so glad I didn't go down that path. The romanticization of the trades on here is completely delusional. I think it is just the level of being disconnected from physical labor most are on here. Physical labor is not fun when your young and just gets harder and harder with age.
aye this one. got a lot of fam in welding and carpentry.
good money. uncle who is a welder has travelled all over working different gigs. got certified to do underwater welding, too, which is terrifying for a lot of reasons. but it's hell on the eyes, joints, and the UV can even cause skin cancer.
other fam in carpentry make good money. north of 6 figures, and that was in 2010. but it's demanding: show up at 6am, haul things and hammer all day, crawl around in weird angles, and do it all in -5C or +35C.
both eventually tapped out after ~25-30 years. one ran the business in the office and the other just got a job in home depot. meanwhile I'll probably program until I can't sit upright -- could be coding in the retirement home, as long as me brain works.
I haven't but I believe that if it makes them better at their job they would be treated so. most plumbers are independent freelancers and for them that's a rock star way to live
In many places in the US you might find it hard to get a plumber to even return your calls or come out to your house for a smaller job, since the good ones have as much work as they could ever want. Not a perfect comparison since plumbers tend not to work for giant companies that can lavish them with perks, but there are parallels in in-demand skilled labor getting to set some of their own rules.
I have compared AI to junior engineers a few times. Not in terms of treatment, but in terms of output quality. Is there a better analogy I should prefer? Or if my thinking is horribly wrong, I'd love a different perspective to think on.
I'm an engineer at a large tech company. I am by all means considered a successful engineer. I am actively looking for a way to exit the field, and am assuming that in a few years my career options will be vastly diminished. I am worried about ageism, and can already feel it in my early 30s. Its certainly become more up or out
A friend of mine, with a STEM PhD, and 8+ years of experience between Amazon and Google was laid off, is struggling to find a job paying over 200k, they were making 500k previously. Obviously 150-200k is still decent money, but it really doesnt go far in major metro areas, and for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come
It's always a struggle to land leadership or niche top-seniority gigs. It doesn't matter how awesome you are. They're not commodified swap-in staff roles, and there are not a lot of them, and your friend is probably looking for a quality organization too (or leaders in shabby ones won't touch this resume).
Your friend is just encountering the reality that there will be a search phase after the end of any high-seniority professional job, plan for it.
No from the 2010-2022 period, this wasnt the case. You could find a ton of very high paying roles, or atleast get interviews for them. There is a serious vibe shift. Also, 500k isnt that senior
You've defined the market as four companies (FAANG - 1) and roles representing <1% of their highest performers. Yes, they have roles and maybe even openings, but no reason to think there would be an immediate match for anyone but a superstar.
Honestly , I think people will misjudge me when I say this , but these reasons are the reason why I am frugal.
My economic condition can change drastically , it just depends on the market , how is your "friend" entitled to 150-200K ? Because of our "expectations" (Amazon , google are the best companies so "best" + phd , phd means you are in academia so more "smarter")
But our "expectations" are now changing , mine certainly changed , but instead of panicking (because lets be honest? whats the point of panicking?)
We can try to be frugal. We can try to live in a way where my salary doesn't really matter that much , I can live off of any salary but the only difference b/w big salary and low salary might be the fact that your savings increase which you invest in things like index funds (boglehead investing) and the only difference it makes is on what age you can retire (thus , being a point on ageism)
I might also think that after a age , person can get a little less ambitious and more rigid , so more flexibility early on (in mid 30's) can be absolutely great but for that you need good saving habits / being frugal in your 20's.
I also believe that frugality is sometimes seen as not being ambitious or I live life only once and for that I have to say that I agree , I am frugal mostly because I have seen / just feel this tingle for spending money where my mind .
Of course , you don't have to be frugal over like a $ , but just changing your mindset & hobbies from being materialistic to non materialistic and being satisfied .
What I personally can't be is a frugal who constantly switches / worries about light bulbs / appliances just to save 2 cents or people who don't eat outdoor to save money (unless its in literally 5 star and I also believe that going to dine in full time also sucks , I just like to eat burgers , pizzas , chips etc. but some people can be really that level of frugal .
I just want to have a decent life reading good books with emergency funds and funds invested. I would try to maximize my income , but I wouldn't chase it as my ultimate goal , the ultimate number.
I might earn less but if I am working on one of my passion ideas on some company , I am down.
I understand that going to 200k after your whole standard of living has been built around 500k is pretty difficult, but objectively speaking: half of America is living in metro areas right? Most of them are managing without making nearly three times the median income.
Also: is America just vastly more expensive than Europe? Here in the Netherlands (one of the wealthiest nations in the world) even just 100k is aspirational for most higher paid jobs.
> Also: is America just vastly more expensive than Europe?
Yes.
In my family I am under employed and my wife is an elementary teacher. Health insurance for us costs $800 every month. A car is required and so is the gas to drive it. We have two 7 year old Toyotas and insurance on them is $100 a month.
It’s a lot more overhead and risk mitigation compared to the better nations like yours that care for their people.
People in the major cities practically live in their own society in America.
$200k is a huge amount of money in most of America based on geography.
In the major cities though it is not just the cost of living but the feeling of being wealthy is all relative to those around you. In the major cities there are people with huge amounts of wealth so $200k year is not going to feel wealthy at all. Of course, no one is actually just scraping by on white bread and ramen noodles making $200k unless they are terrible with money. More like you can only eat out X number of times a week instead of having a personal chef. The person making $200k also probably not much different in ability than the person with the personal chef and private jet so not only do you not feel wealthy but might even feel like you are getting shorted. Of course, if you did have the personal chef and private jet you would face the same problem but at a higher level.
This isnt really accurate. If you want to live in an upper middle class neighborhood, and save money, with kids, 200k is peanuts. Sorry, it is. Upper middle class needs both parents working at 200k, which itself is really a middle class existence.
What do you consider an “upper middle class lifestyle”. In 2020, I was living in the burbs of Atlanta in the good school system with a 3200 square foot house that I had built in 2016, one teenager in the house, three cars making less than $200K combined and we weren’t eating hot pockets everyday
> Obviously 150-200k is still decent money, but it really doesnt go far in major metro areas, and for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come
The problem here is that the dollar has devalued so far to the point where it is close to worthless, especially with rising house prices across the country.
This is why $200k - $500k seems to be "not enough" in the US due to its cost of living and at the same time it isn't sustainable for Amazon or Google to pay at that rate.
Really, this the hallmarks of a crash that is waiting to happen and it was never going to last.
Yeah I think the dollar has been completely decimated. There is nowhere to hide, assets are no longer ripping, but cost of living is higher than ever. For a family that wants to be upper middle class, 500k really is not that much, if you want to save and live comfortably/go on vacations, drive a nice car.
>For a family that wants to be upper middle class, 500k really is not that much, if you want to save and live comfortably/go on vacations, drive a nice car.
That might be true for Bay Area. What about other states, Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska, Montana etc. ?
I am not from US, but I don't get why tech companies can only have offices in Bay Area.
> A friend of mine, with a STEM PhD, and 8+ years of experience between Amazon and Google was laid off, is struggling to find a job paying over 200k, they were making 500k previously.
My negative opinion based on experience working with the stereotype that fits your friend is they are only valuable in a massive company. 8/10 phd holders I have worked with couldn’t actually do hands on work. So where do people who just want to think, talk and write about work without being able to actually ship provide value on the order of $250/hr?
Tragic! Meanwhile those of us who do this because they "like tech" (read: it's the only thing I can or will do for a living) will continue to be happy scraping by on the insulting pay of.... (checks notes) $200k/year. You can't even afford to have your balls shaved and sucked every morning with that kind of pay! Even worse, how can you impress your wealthy parents, friends, friends' parents and romantic partners without a job that pays enough for the morning balls treatment? What's the point of getting a PhD when you have ball stubble? Dear lord, you might have to go find work in another field (adios vampire, you won't be missed here).
It makes sense that there was a flood of folks coming in as they saw that it look like the place to be if you wanted to be in the good times... then you layer in interest rates. Good Times Never Last Forever
I have read somewhere that FAANG hired just to talent-starve the other four, even if they don't have much to do day to day.
In their playbook, the cost of keeping a good talent in house is less costly than the damage done by 3-4 of these talents if they were in one of the other four companies.
This allowed "free" side projects and cool stuff, too.
But as always, it's time to face the music. Every sine wave has its descend and we're past the maxima.
I'd say the good times have just moved around a bit, there's always demand for smart/experienced STEM folk. What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area). But there's other sectors, and other markets that are still growing just fine.
A lesson to be adaptable, and always be learning/hungry.
Classic stuff that impacts all of us (feel free to add/remove to the list),
AI (bringing intelligence to the real world), green tech (solar/evs/power electronics etc), defense, aerospace (sat constellations etc), industrial automation, smart agriculture, government etc.
Look into profitable companies not focusing on software: Walmarts and homebuilders, Toyotas and medical device makers, miners and electric utilities and so on. All of them need software to run their businesses.
> What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area).
Did they? Because Google and Facebook revenues are still growing and at ATH. What happened is that they decided to divert more of that juice to their investors rather than their developers.
Leadership think developers no longer matter and they'll be able to replace them with AI in a couple years. So they are firing them all and spending all their money on AI. If you think they can't be that stupid and irresponsible, remember who took all the hiring decisions during COVID.
to some degree, yes. everyone is holding their breath for AI.
but WFH is also here to stay, and COVID proved it worked alright. not great, but alright, and alright is usually enough. been seeing an awful lot of job ads in Croatia, for example.
if AI won't eat it, send it to Mexico City or India or Eastern Europe on the cheap. you don't need a rockstar QA team you just need them to be mostly competent, and they cost 50% less than Big US City talent.
They control their markets, exhibit broad capture of regulatory and standards bodies, and have established authoritarian control of the American state.
Sure, it's a conspiracist's "they," but society and freedom have become as awful as the most obnoxious, strident, and hysterical /. poster's predictions during the DoubleClick acquisition a quarter of a century ago.
Cui bono? Is it the finance ghouls whose ideological and economic lineage continues unbroken through Nazi-advocacy, the Business Plot, and American chattel slavery? Would we face a brighter future if the late 20th century tech industry had collectively rejected the vision of a future based on a panopticon used to generate authoritarian algorithmic control of humanity?
How many acai bowls and fancy cars was the future worth? Are we all complicit, or merely automatons whose lack of agency absolves us of the moral implications of the sum of our collective purpose?
Today's media environment is an atrocious indictment of the world built upon networked computing's awesome power to transform humanity. We have the power to uplift all life in harmony with the bounteous and breathtaking miracle of our beautiful planet. We have built a world of nightmares.
My hot take is that we're in a forced reset period for employers to "re-assert" their control over the labor market. The macroeconomic factors frequently mentioned plus COVID-era policies of remote work/etc are over and the execs, corporations and broader financial markets are letting us know.
This stuff runs in cycles. Nearly everything does. Your guess is as good as mine when we've reached any top or bottom of the bear market. We'll see good times again in the future. Just stick with it.
Cling to yesteryear all you want. Just remember the ship has a new captain.
Notice how all the coasters at big tech companies are now being called in and with RTO policies? This is what we have here.
The "good times" where the era of coasting and doing zero work for a month with a >$300k+ a year SWE web developer job is over.
Now (unsurprisingly) your startup HAS to be profitable and cannot afford to lose money for years with the over-reliance on cheap VC money. For big tech it is not a playground or a day care.
These AI companies are the last reminants of the hype in 2021 and if one of those overvalued companies closes down, then it will cause a 2000 level crash.
There is still room for the tech industry to go down and it requires the AI hype to deflate.
The presumption that RTO is driving the wave of 'we need to be profitable' is myopic. The article rightly attributes it to financial liquidity. RTO is more expensive for most companies than remote which is often overlooked.
Now that that liquidity is lower, companies are incentivized to cut back excess they created. In many cases they aren't capable of actually determining value by employee, so most of these layoffs are impacting hard working and often critical employees (aka not coasters) that then struggle to find new jobs because both the market conditions and idiotic assumptions about these layoffs actually being performance related.
The performance narrative is literally to reduce the cost of regular layoffs which they now do almost yearly to attempt to inflate stock prices at key times, while not admitting that a fairly significant portion end up being hired back over the next 12 months (boomerangs lmao) to fill the critical holes they created.
The hype in the industry and the shit outcomes aren't the fault of employees but bad leadership and executives caring more about short term profit through deceptive marketing than creating value. And that's why as an employee creating value for a company is no longer enough to justify job security. If you care about value and not profit or margins than you are a coaster these days.
There will be more busts, but the narrative that coasters or entitled employees have anything to do with it is bunk.
This matches my experiences. I see a lot of side projects being dropped. I’ve been hired (as an external consultant / developer) to maintain some of these side projects while their core developers are either fired, let go, left or are put on their main projects.
It resulted in a surprising boom of jobs for us hah
Just give it 3-4 years. Many of these "side-projects" are powering quite a portion of the web and elsewhere. Software requires maintenance, bug fixing, updates, etc...
The tech industry is based on copying the cool kids. Once Google and Meta started laying off, startups started laying off random people because it was cool. When Apple created the worst keyboard on earth (the arrow buttons squished together in a square) all other brands followed. Apple stopped squishing the arrow keys together but the rest still didn't notice. If someone "cool" thinks AI will replace engineers, all companies will follow blindly.
I find it weird how Elon's firing 50% of twitter is rarely brought up. Even the linked article's reference only mentions the layoffs starting jan 2023...
Can I offer a contrarian point of view? Tech is still a great place to work.
Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.
We have exciting and innovative new technology with AI which still offer all sorts of opportunities for disruption.
The tooling we have now is amazing, a lot of the drudgery of writing boilerplate code can be delegated to LLMs.
The hardware platforms we're coding for continue to improve at an amazing pace.
I also recognise that being laid off really sucks and that recent job losses are definitely not a good time. I'm not arguing otherwise. I just think that being a software engineer with a job is still pretty good.
It's heavily company/team/manager specific, but you are absolutely correct. I've seen a lot of disillusioned peers leave the industry pretty much since COVID, and they came back after a small break because it's the best of all alternatives.
I think a lot of my peers didn't really understand what working was, and really bought into a lot of the BS. The last few years have been a reality check for us all.
My current employer (big tech) is the best I've ever had. The internal tooling is amazing and works well, access to powerful development hardware is straightforward and everything just works, expensing things required for my job is not a hassle. Yes, there may be a lot of annoying process and it can take a long time to get the 20 approvals you need to deploy a code change, but in all, I've never had it so good. I've seen what it's like in startups and medium sized companies, and it would take a lot of convincing to go back.
Then I see coworkers who have only ever been in this environment. This was their first job out of undergrad, and they've never seen the shit you have to deal with at other companies. They get frustrated at the trivial little things here and decide, "I'm going to quit and go to a small or medium sized company" where there's less bureaucracy or where they can have a bigger "impact" or whatever. Then they get to their new company and HR tosses them a half-working workstation and a dirty used mouse as "onboarding". And they realize they don't have the massive build infrastructure they took for granted or a dedicated build/release team. They don't have robust performance and crash metrics dashboards, and they don't have automatic code bisecting tools to find the change that caused the error. They don't even have a QA team! They don't have continuous builds or maybe they don't even have functional source control or a reliable internet connection. No free food, no massage chairs, no flexible work hours, they have to fill out a time sheet now and maybe even have to clock in and out for bathroom breaks (yes, I've worked at a shitty software company where they made engineers clock in and out).
A lot of these guys realize what they had and boomerang right back after a year or so of this. And now that we are in a bear market and hiring is getting tough, I wouldn't count on the ability to just waltz back in anymore...
A lot of people I know in SV are quitting as 60 hours is being normalized and they’re getting treated like they should be grateful. I know, I know, 60 hours is just what it takes to “focus” as that’s what the working world is like, or some other nonsense coming from the cult of overwork, which seems to be the tone being set.
> Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.
Agreed. Amazingly good, in fact. Sometimes I wonder how we can sustain such level of amazing income
> The tooling we have now is amazing,
Yes, although it's not necessarily a blessing but a curse. Being amazing means maturity. Being mature meaning stalled marginal return. Stalled marginal returns means no growth. No growth means no meaningful projects. I missed the 2000s, when there were so many low-hanging fruits. We had multiple competing KV stores in development, multiple stream processing frameworks, multiple ML frameworks, multiple query engines. Heck, even multiple programming languages for data analytics.
> Agreed. Amazingly good, in fact. Sometimes I wonder how we can sustain such level of amazing income
Other jobs are getting fucked much more severely. Most industries have bled their labor dry, to the bones. There’s nothing left, they’ve solve the optimization problem of moving as much money as possibly away from them.
Tech is still working on that optimization problem.
1. For front end people, its code and design both...i.e. two jobs combining.
2. For backend, its again combining two jobs dev and server engineer...
In short words look to what two jobs will combine that you can leverage with tools that allow you to combine those two jobs in the first place. For example, front end frameworks generally allow us to combine front end dev with designer.
I think the good times are still on for anyone who continues to focus on the customer and their experience.
From the perspective of the typical software engineer's salary, there are largely two sources of money in a technology startup - the investors (i.e., ZIRP) and the customers. Perhaps it is time to start leveraging the 2nd category of cash cow.
I realize the customer is far more demanding, but in my experience they are also significantly more rewarding to work with.
Not trying to throw shade on the article because I think its worth reading, but also important to note that the "good times" he's describing in tech never really existed to begin with for most people working in the tech industry or doing software development generally.
I'm not going to ascribe it to "FAANG" as the freedoms he's describing existed beyond that literal set of companies, but they didn't really extend that much wider relative to the entire tech industry.
Working for a company that would be happy paying you to do things that don't pretty directly lead to expected profit was always a very privileged situation.
Yeah, I worked for relatively normal companies as a dev from 2013 to now most of the benefits were normal across the company apart from choice of machine and I guess going to a conference but my current employer doesn't offer that.
> Providing value to the company gets you rewarded
This is the part that is no longer true. The focus on individual contributors remains with your direct manager but don’t go much further. Execs always try to zoom out and save more money in different ways. So here come the offshoring and layoffs.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadI jokingly said out loud, "what did we do to deserve this?". A coworkers overheard and replied, "speak for yourself".
The entitlement was and probably still is crazy.
Google pays SWEs around $300k average total comp and gets $1.5 MILLION per employee (SWE or not) per year in revenue. With a profit margin of over 20%.
A single project can increase revenue by $100m/year so not sure if "I made the company $500m over the last five years" is entitlement. Tech companies should be paying more and not less.
Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers". It isn't due to the "brilliance" of their engineers.
Google is like a reverse Robin Hood. It steals data from the users. The customers are the ones buying that data.
You may not like their business model but they are objectively very good at what they do.
Google has great research going on, but their products seem to be mostly coasting along. There's still some growth, but is that more than inertia and network effect?
Where the large innovation in their product that keeps them ahead?
> Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do?
So your bar for success is having a perceptual monopoly on the whole world? Or just the digital world?
You're jumping to mental gymnastic to not acknowledge that Google has consistently grown while being highly profitable. It's a massive success as a company.
Again: inertia and network-effect.
> It's a massive success as a company.
Undoubtedly. And they appear to be great at not failing. Like any bureaucracy, that works until it doesn't. What new markets have they created or taken over in the past 10 years?
-Upton Sinclair
Would Google's bottom line drop by ($500m - $devSalary) if that developer were to quit this year?
Of course not! In most cases Google's bottom line wouldn't even notice if Google failed to replace them, but if their job was really important and they did have to replace them, they still wouldn't notice that it was someone else and not that one dev.
This suggests that the dev isn't actually what's making Google $500m/employee, it's the systems that make up Google that are making Google $500m/employee. Any one employee doesn't actually contribute nearly that much to the functioning of the system, otherwise every company would make $500m per developer.
So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
The exact numbers don't matter, the point is the same: with only a few exceptions, no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company. If they did, you could pick up your laptop and go to any other company and start earning them $N/year for whatever value of N you prefer.
As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't. The general solution is to go into management (more visibility and no cap on comp), or to create (or join) your own startup (which doesn't have a rigid interview process and you can use "references"). Which many do given how many startups exist in the Bay Area. Companies also may give out large bonuses in RSUs to keep those employees.
Correct. But with very few exceptions I don't believe that any one person contributes $500m in value over 5 years.
> Second of all, having been in tech individual employees do drive projects that wouldn't have happened without them for a decent amount of time. In aggregate that moves the bottom line a ton
In aggregate, yes. But it's the systems that aggregate the contributions of the employees and turn them into profits.
> As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't.
I'm assuming you mean omniscient, and no, I'm not assuming omniscience because I'm not actually talking about a company's ability to attribute value creation, I'm talking about the employee's ability to attribute it. Any random Google employee who thinks that they contributed $500m over 5 years can't just pick up their laptop and go work for a startup and expect that startup to make $500m over the next 5 years. It's not happening. The only way that their project made $500m was as a project embedded in the enormous money-making system that is Google, and absent that system they don't make that much money for the company.
> no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company
> Sub in $1.5m/year
Are you standing by that or is your new assertion now that no employee contributes $500m but that many do contribute $1.5m/year?
The back and forth is getting a bit confusing so trying to make sure we're on the same page.
edit: You do realize that a non-trivial number of employees including ICs are paid more than $1.5m/year. So even Google disagree with your assertion.
edit: There's also a material difference between no one, a few, many and the majority. You made a specific claim that no employee provides more then $1.5m of value. I disproved that with Google's own comp. Not my problem you're butt hurt about being called out for being wrong with quotes you said yourself.
Firing an employee most likely won't reduce the bottom line.
But every employee is a chance to increase it by creating a new project/product etc.
So firing would reduce the probability of a new idea generating an increase to the bottom line.
I see where you're coming from but I think you're missing the fact that large projects have lots of bullshit work that requires high skill but is technically lower value. There is a lower bound to what people will accept, as people with marginally better skills get lucky enough to get highly-visible and much more highly compensated roles. The pay stratification you wish for is already built in, and the average just reflects the fact that these companies DO make enough money to have competitive pay rates.
Your compensation is dominated by the function of supply of and demand for labor, not how much the company makes from your labor.
Demand being a function of how much investment money is available is going to be closer to reality, although that is not the whole story either.
The point is that many tech companies in the Bay Area were not profitable, never going to be profitable, but they treated software developers like kings because of the distorted market supported by low interest rate environment.
Let me give you a hint - if the existence of snacks made people work a mere 20 minutes more a week it would’ve already paid for itself. The calculus is a bit more complicated for full service lunch, but you get the idea.
I worked at place before that didn't have coffee so people would walk to the coffee place in groups that took 15-30 minutes. Sometimes twice a day. It became a routine part of the day, everyday.
Like literally throwing the cost of an invisible bag of Starbucks beans in the garbage everyday to save the visible cost of brewing a few cups.
For example I work in a company where the salary is pretty good, but they're also super stingy in general. No snacks, no socials, shitty laptop, etc. It betrays a lack of interest in making employees happy.
The absence of things like snacks is also an indication of how much the bean counters are in charge, because as you say it's probably good value for money in terms of morale, but as soon as the bean counters come in they see you spending £1k/month on snacks or coffee or whatever and that's an easy thing to cut.
1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
…in fact, when some folks suggested engineers organize, the types who complained about worker entitlement remarked: “we make enough, why would we organize?”
This perspective of worker entitlement is really harmful to labor, I assure you that the execs rarely talk about entitlement as they issue bonuses to themselves now while simultaneously embracing rolling layoffs.
Now engineers are working to obsolete themselves with AI and reduce their bargaining power permanently for the promise of a post-scarcity AGI facilitated future that is all but guaranteed. But they’re just entitled, that’s the problem.
That’s why a laborer gets paid a few dollars for a backbreaking day of work and Matt Damon makes a million dollars for holding a can of Pepsi and smiling for the camera for 15 minutes.
The sentiment of the OP resonates with me; it’s closer aligned with reality, and building a product that actually produces value, that needs to satisfy customers, is both a rewarding and a humbling experience.
Lucky! Here in Colombia I went for the `get investor` phase, and despite get 'great' interest and even win some competition where I go to a thousands event to get it, I get at then end US1500 (today money) that was restricted in what I can spend on (nothing in what I need that was get more developers!).
(The rest of the money, that was for the startups consultants)
The market TC is crazy high, do you add a minor bump in $$$ to attract some candidates that will go to Sweetgreen? Or you add flashy food while taking advantage of economies of scale? Bonus, the very expensive people stay more in the office.
I'd rather have better compensation and sensible vacation / work-life balance policies, be treated as a professional, and make my own sandwich..
In some cases, maybe not yours, that is also a way to keep employees in the campus/at the office together. Nice things for the company happens there: you go with your team, have lunch and also have a meeting/discussion about the project you are working on.
I think when the company can afford it it is mostly a win-win situation that maybe it is presented only with the benefit side for the employee.
Because from what I can see it's been quite a downhill ride since Y2k. To the extent that many who used to love the work just can't do it anymore.
That seems to be happening less now. It's easier to know where you stand.
But selling out isn't either.
Programmers should be left enough space to do their thing well, that's the only way to build great software. Which was the entire point of Agile before it was corrupted into Scrum.
Some is due to Scrum. It's actually not the fault of the methodology but that it's been half implemented by companies that did waterfall before. You are expected to finish a feature in a sprint, but you have no connection to speak to the stakeholders/customers.
The other things are these KPIs, and unsurprisingly, the bean counters behind them don't care about refactoring or addressing tech debt.
In a sense, yes, we need to focus on delivering value but it's much more chaotic now, so it's very difficult to deliver performant features that deliver also what was expected.
There's no appreciation of skills anymore, of quality; it's all about generating features as effectively as possible. No room for creativity/trial and error.
It's like working at a factory, pushing a button as fast as humanly possible.
And coders are treated like button pushers as a consequence.
Maybe it is, but I find it strange that nobody seems to care that visiting a page downloads 100s of MBs of packages that clogs the browser. Or, that latencies in backend replies can go into multiple 10s of seconds, etc.
Back in the day, we had to make sure the software ran on less performant computers and we painstakingly analyzed memory allocations and checking the run times of requests, etc. We also had to make sure that the software baked onto CDs worked, there was no multi GB downloads after install possible.
I, for one, would still like that to be the case for the software I use and would still prefer to have the time to do this for the projects I work on.
Older, more experienced people tend to have more integrity. We're not as easily bullied into fulfilling whatever business goals at whatever cost.
I started working at my first startup in 1998.
Like...being bought the best equipment for the job they're doing? Making high-quality foods available on-site? Even something as simple as having great desk chairs, I can say from frustrating personal experience, can make a huge difference.
And maybe I even implied that software engineers are the lesser thing here, because LLMs can't do hard plumbing yet.
They are literally focused on retirement, pension and next time off once past the apprentice stage.
Why? Because the work is terrible. Really demanding physical work in terrible conditions. Unimaginable really for anyone who works remote.
Then it just gets worse as you get older and your body breaks down. Then your really just holding on to get to retirement and that pension so you can finally relax and enjoy life without doing this awful job before you die.
No thanks. I am so glad I didn't go down that path. The romanticization of the trades on here is completely delusional. I think it is just the level of being disconnected from physical labor most are on here. Physical labor is not fun when your young and just gets harder and harder with age.
good money. uncle who is a welder has travelled all over working different gigs. got certified to do underwater welding, too, which is terrifying for a lot of reasons. but it's hell on the eyes, joints, and the UV can even cause skin cancer.
other fam in carpentry make good money. north of 6 figures, and that was in 2010. but it's demanding: show up at 6am, haul things and hammer all day, crawl around in weird angles, and do it all in -5C or +35C.
both eventually tapped out after ~25-30 years. one ran the business in the office and the other just got a job in home depot. meanwhile I'll probably program until I can't sit upright -- could be coding in the retirement home, as long as me brain works.
There will always be a need for many people to do plumbing work. Can we say that about software engineering?
Many people worked on vanity/side projects of some corporations. And those jobs are gone, since there's not so much free money anymore.
A friend of mine, with a STEM PhD, and 8+ years of experience between Amazon and Google was laid off, is struggling to find a job paying over 200k, they were making 500k previously. Obviously 150-200k is still decent money, but it really doesnt go far in major metro areas, and for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come
It's always a struggle to land leadership or niche top-seniority gigs. It doesn't matter how awesome you are. They're not commodified swap-in staff roles, and there are not a lot of them, and your friend is probably looking for a quality organization too (or leaders in shabby ones won't touch this resume).
Your friend is just encountering the reality that there will be a search phase after the end of any high-seniority professional job, plan for it.
My economic condition can change drastically , it just depends on the market , how is your "friend" entitled to 150-200K ? Because of our "expectations" (Amazon , google are the best companies so "best" + phd , phd means you are in academia so more "smarter")
But our "expectations" are now changing , mine certainly changed , but instead of panicking (because lets be honest? whats the point of panicking?) We can try to be frugal. We can try to live in a way where my salary doesn't really matter that much , I can live off of any salary but the only difference b/w big salary and low salary might be the fact that your savings increase which you invest in things like index funds (boglehead investing) and the only difference it makes is on what age you can retire (thus , being a point on ageism)
I might also think that after a age , person can get a little less ambitious and more rigid , so more flexibility early on (in mid 30's) can be absolutely great but for that you need good saving habits / being frugal in your 20's.
I also believe that frugality is sometimes seen as not being ambitious or I live life only once and for that I have to say that I agree , I am frugal mostly because I have seen / just feel this tingle for spending money where my mind .
Of course , you don't have to be frugal over like a $ , but just changing your mindset & hobbies from being materialistic to non materialistic and being satisfied .
What I personally can't be is a frugal who constantly switches / worries about light bulbs / appliances just to save 2 cents or people who don't eat outdoor to save money (unless its in literally 5 star and I also believe that going to dine in full time also sucks , I just like to eat burgers , pizzas , chips etc. but some people can be really that level of frugal .
I just want to have a decent life reading good books with emergency funds and funds invested. I would try to maximize my income , but I wouldn't chase it as my ultimate goal , the ultimate number. I might earn less but if I am working on one of my passion ideas on some company , I am down.
Also: is America just vastly more expensive than Europe? Here in the Netherlands (one of the wealthiest nations in the world) even just 100k is aspirational for most higher paid jobs.
Yes.
In my family I am under employed and my wife is an elementary teacher. Health insurance for us costs $800 every month. A car is required and so is the gas to drive it. We have two 7 year old Toyotas and insurance on them is $100 a month.
It’s a lot more overhead and risk mitigation compared to the better nations like yours that care for their people.
$200k is a huge amount of money in most of America based on geography.
In the major cities though it is not just the cost of living but the feeling of being wealthy is all relative to those around you. In the major cities there are people with huge amounts of wealth so $200k year is not going to feel wealthy at all. Of course, no one is actually just scraping by on white bread and ramen noodles making $200k unless they are terrible with money. More like you can only eat out X number of times a week instead of having a personal chef. The person making $200k also probably not much different in ability than the person with the personal chef and private jet so not only do you not feel wealthy but might even feel like you are getting shorted. Of course, if you did have the personal chef and private jet you would face the same problem but at a higher level.
The problem here is that the dollar has devalued so far to the point where it is close to worthless, especially with rising house prices across the country.
This is why $200k - $500k seems to be "not enough" in the US due to its cost of living and at the same time it isn't sustainable for Amazon or Google to pay at that rate.
Really, this the hallmarks of a crash that is waiting to happen and it was never going to last.
That might be true for Bay Area. What about other states, Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska, Montana etc. ?
I am not from US, but I don't get why tech companies can only have offices in Bay Area.
The median household income is $80K. Those people aren’t homeless and starving
That is true in US. In Europe having a PhD and working for Google and Amazon never meant being payed huge sums.
I make way above market rates for my area currently, but I don't have to be worried about getting laid off.
And as my salary went up i made sure my life style didn't.
In their playbook, the cost of keeping a good talent in house is less costly than the damage done by 3-4 of these talents if they were in one of the other four companies.
This allowed "free" side projects and cool stuff, too.
But as always, it's time to face the music. Every sine wave has its descend and we're past the maxima.
Is there an actual reputable source that says this? For me I've only seen it asserted without evidence in comment sections.
Go to any tech company job site and youll see many of the engineering jobs are non US.
A lesson to be adaptable, and always be learning/hungry.
Like what (except AI of course)? I am not working in ad tech, but it doesn't feel good either.
AI (bringing intelligence to the real world), green tech (solar/evs/power electronics etc), defense, aerospace (sat constellations etc), industrial automation, smart agriculture, government etc.
Did they? Because Google and Facebook revenues are still growing and at ATH. What happened is that they decided to divert more of that juice to their investors rather than their developers.
but WFH is also here to stay, and COVID proved it worked alright. not great, but alright, and alright is usually enough. been seeing an awful lot of job ads in Croatia, for example.
if AI won't eat it, send it to Mexico City or India or Eastern Europe on the cheap. you don't need a rockstar QA team you just need them to be mostly competent, and they cost 50% less than Big US City talent.
Sure, it's a conspiracist's "they," but society and freedom have become as awful as the most obnoxious, strident, and hysterical /. poster's predictions during the DoubleClick acquisition a quarter of a century ago.
Cui bono? Is it the finance ghouls whose ideological and economic lineage continues unbroken through Nazi-advocacy, the Business Plot, and American chattel slavery? Would we face a brighter future if the late 20th century tech industry had collectively rejected the vision of a future based on a panopticon used to generate authoritarian algorithmic control of humanity?
How many acai bowls and fancy cars was the future worth? Are we all complicit, or merely automatons whose lack of agency absolves us of the moral implications of the sum of our collective purpose?
Today's media environment is an atrocious indictment of the world built upon networked computing's awesome power to transform humanity. We have the power to uplift all life in harmony with the bounteous and breathtaking miracle of our beautiful planet. We have built a world of nightmares.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
My hot take is that we're in a forced reset period for employers to "re-assert" their control over the labor market. The macroeconomic factors frequently mentioned plus COVID-era policies of remote work/etc are over and the execs, corporations and broader financial markets are letting us know.
This stuff runs in cycles. Nearly everything does. Your guess is as good as mine when we've reached any top or bottom of the bear market. We'll see good times again in the future. Just stick with it.
Cling to yesteryear all you want. Just remember the ship has a new captain.
The "good times" where the era of coasting and doing zero work for a month with a >$300k+ a year SWE web developer job is over.
Now (unsurprisingly) your startup HAS to be profitable and cannot afford to lose money for years with the over-reliance on cheap VC money. For big tech it is not a playground or a day care.
These AI companies are the last reminants of the hype in 2021 and if one of those overvalued companies closes down, then it will cause a 2000 level crash.
There is still room for the tech industry to go down and it requires the AI hype to deflate.
Now that that liquidity is lower, companies are incentivized to cut back excess they created. In many cases they aren't capable of actually determining value by employee, so most of these layoffs are impacting hard working and often critical employees (aka not coasters) that then struggle to find new jobs because both the market conditions and idiotic assumptions about these layoffs actually being performance related.
The performance narrative is literally to reduce the cost of regular layoffs which they now do almost yearly to attempt to inflate stock prices at key times, while not admitting that a fairly significant portion end up being hired back over the next 12 months (boomerangs lmao) to fill the critical holes they created.
The hype in the industry and the shit outcomes aren't the fault of employees but bad leadership and executives caring more about short term profit through deceptive marketing than creating value. And that's why as an employee creating value for a company is no longer enough to justify job security. If you care about value and not profit or margins than you are a coaster these days.
There will be more busts, but the narrative that coasters or entitled employees have anything to do with it is bunk.
It resulted in a surprising boom of jobs for us hah
Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.
We have exciting and innovative new technology with AI which still offer all sorts of opportunities for disruption.
The tooling we have now is amazing, a lot of the drudgery of writing boilerplate code can be delegated to LLMs.
The hardware platforms we're coding for continue to improve at an amazing pace.
I also recognise that being laid off really sucks and that recent job losses are definitely not a good time. I'm not arguing otherwise. I just think that being a software engineer with a job is still pretty good.
I think a lot of my peers didn't really understand what working was, and really bought into a lot of the BS. The last few years have been a reality check for us all.
Then I see coworkers who have only ever been in this environment. This was their first job out of undergrad, and they've never seen the shit you have to deal with at other companies. They get frustrated at the trivial little things here and decide, "I'm going to quit and go to a small or medium sized company" where there's less bureaucracy or where they can have a bigger "impact" or whatever. Then they get to their new company and HR tosses them a half-working workstation and a dirty used mouse as "onboarding". And they realize they don't have the massive build infrastructure they took for granted or a dedicated build/release team. They don't have robust performance and crash metrics dashboards, and they don't have automatic code bisecting tools to find the change that caused the error. They don't even have a QA team! They don't have continuous builds or maybe they don't even have functional source control or a reliable internet connection. No free food, no massage chairs, no flexible work hours, they have to fill out a time sheet now and maybe even have to clock in and out for bathroom breaks (yes, I've worked at a shitty software company where they made engineers clock in and out).
A lot of these guys realize what they had and boomerang right back after a year or so of this. And now that we are in a bear market and hiring is getting tough, I wouldn't count on the ability to just waltz back in anymore...
Agreed. Amazingly good, in fact. Sometimes I wonder how we can sustain such level of amazing income
> The tooling we have now is amazing,
Yes, although it's not necessarily a blessing but a curse. Being amazing means maturity. Being mature meaning stalled marginal return. Stalled marginal returns means no growth. No growth means no meaningful projects. I missed the 2000s, when there were so many low-hanging fruits. We had multiple competing KV stores in development, multiple stream processing frameworks, multiple ML frameworks, multiple query engines. Heck, even multiple programming languages for data analytics.
Other jobs are getting fucked much more severely. Most industries have bled their labor dry, to the bones. There’s nothing left, they’ve solve the optimization problem of moving as much money as possibly away from them.
Tech is still working on that optimization problem.
... such as destroying what's left of the entry to junior-level job market. And perhaps in the near future, mid-level too.
1. For front end people, its code and design both...i.e. two jobs combining.
2. For backend, its again combining two jobs dev and server engineer...
In short words look to what two jobs will combine that you can leverage with tools that allow you to combine those two jobs in the first place. For example, front end frameworks generally allow us to combine front end dev with designer.
From the perspective of the typical software engineer's salary, there are largely two sources of money in a technology startup - the investors (i.e., ZIRP) and the customers. Perhaps it is time to start leveraging the 2nd category of cash cow.
I realize the customer is far more demanding, but in my experience they are also significantly more rewarding to work with.
The good times will continue as soon as money does the same.
I'm not going to ascribe it to "FAANG" as the freedoms he's describing existed beyond that literal set of companies, but they didn't really extend that much wider relative to the entire tech industry.
Working for a company that would be happy paying you to do things that don't pretty directly lead to expected profit was always a very privileged situation.
This is the part that is no longer true. The focus on individual contributors remains with your direct manager but don’t go much further. Execs always try to zoom out and save more money in different ways. So here come the offshoring and layoffs.