Just my 2c: I know friends who work at other companies paying similar wages who immediately try to get ahold of the lists of laid off staff from these layoffs hoping to hire top talent when they're otherwise not even going to hear they're looking.
So I don't know how much this will really change comp levels? Especially with how frequently software people change jobs anyway.
> Wondering how the displaced engineers will impact the rest of the job market
That dream of making local (San Francisco) pay while living wherever you want will quickly evaporate.
I survived as a software engineer through the dot-com crash. This isn't even a crash, this is just seems like a minor correction to "normal" for most of these companies with head-counts through the roof.
But SV salaries were abnormal, and that should be taken into account. There are a lot of us, doing a lot of the same stuff, for a lot less pay out there.
Why? For all sorts of various reasons. And this is now rapidly taking into account the entire globe.
Yes, tech comp is about to come down greatly across the board.
We’ve barely seen the start of layoffs yet, and the Fed is pedal to the metal on engineering a recession. Tech falls first due to highest discount rate sensitivity
Disagree with "across the board". Tech still has a lot of difficult problems and a crazy amount of money to be made, so premium talent will continue to command premium salaries. It's just that a "staff engineer" 4 years out of college won't be able to sleep their way into $500K in salary + stock.
Comp is dictated by labor market dynamics, not by profitability of the product.
If you have 10 engineers of roughly equal skill competing for the same role, the company has more leverage to offer lower comp than if there’s just 1, or less than one.
Profitability just sets a cap on what can be paid.
That being said, I do agree that the best of the best will likely be able to maintain mid 6 figure comps. But it won’t be the norm as it has been.
There’s also theory vs practice. In practice very few companies have a high level of confidence about being able to quantify how much one engineer is worth vs another. Which is why 10x engineers can’t capture significantly higher comp than the median, even in the current (recent) market
Does this logic work for lawyers? "Biglaw" firms are similar to FAANG in that it is a handful of companies that offer very high comp (235k for first year). There is a deluge of folks that apply from all universities to biglaw but generally they primarily hire from top tier law schools and even then not all make it.
Similar for Big 3 consulting firms (BCG, Bain, McKinsey) in that there is a huge application pool for positions but they are difficult to get and provide high pay.
Interestingly revenue per employee (1.2 - 1.8 mil per employee) at biglaw companies is similar to FAANG although i'd guess biglaw margins are higher as you have less other costs (infra).
I just landed a $175k full time base gig that didn't ask about either of those, just terraform and kubernetes and AWS all day long. Also, my resume is riddled with nothing but short term stints since the start of the pandemic, but doesn't seem to have effected my prospects. Now to be fair, I do actually know both python and linux essentials, and can google and troubleshoot my way through most common infra issues. I would say I am at least mediocre enough to get most of the work done in a reasonable time frame at this point.
> tech comp is about to come down greatly across the board.
To be honest the total comps for some FAANG companies had gone into the crazy territory, there was no way for a up and coming startup to compete against comps of 500-600k (or so I had read) that decent engineers were getting.
I mean, there was a way, but in exchange those start-ups had to promise the world and then some, which was not ideal, to say the least. That's how we got lots of "fake" unicorns, which only now are beginning to get back to Earth.
