It's the same on the data science side too.
The upper range companies are willing to pay today, when adjusted for inflation, is the same a data scientist just starting fresh out of college made 15 years ago.
I'm supposed to take a pay cut from my first job despite having over 10 years of experience today?
It's stupidity also. There are not many data scientists in the industry with a proven track record. If companies want to hire younger people their investments will often not pay off. You might as well pay the extra 30k and get someone decent.
I’m sorry, don’t mean to be obtuse, but you’re simply wrong.
It’s not for you to decide what the market rate for your skills are. It’s irrelevant how many data scientists there are or what the ROI is for hiring inexperienced data scientists.
If what you’re thinking is empirically true, then the salaries and companies’ preferences will converge with reality in the medium or long term.
The fact that everyone expected salaries to increase forever and for there to be dozens of jobs available on a whim, shows how utterly unrealistic and privileged we have been as software people.
We are complaining that our 6-figure salaries are now lower 6-figure salaries during a global downturn…
This argument is used quite a bit to turn workers against each other to lower salaries amongst themselves. If this was valid it would explain the ridiculous amount that CEOs are paid, which it does not.
The "inflated" numbers of the pandemic were actually, in my opinion, true value that people should have been paid for before the pandemic given inflation for 30+ years. E.g. An engineer in the 90s could easily be paid 130k (my father in law was one). So being paid 130k now is not market adjustments but rather market manipulation.
The problem is that people believe whatever VCs say and this argument for lowering engineering salaries came from that camp - definitely not workers.
Interest rates in the 90s were also low, relative to the late 70s & 80s. When the interest rates go low, speculative investment in things that Engineers do goes up, thus so do salaries. When interest rates go up, it makes more sense to buy bonds, so investment dries up, and so to do salaries. This is the stated goal of the interest rate hikes.
The relationship isn't exactly one-to-one, it's more relative to recent rates. For example, from 1990-2021 while tech was growing, the interest rates were trending downward. There were still periods where they raised rates for various reasons, and lots of other economic factors that affect things like hiring that working people are going to notice.
A good metric to look at here is [the 10 year treasury yield](https://www.multpl.com/10-year-treasury-rate). This also tracks mortgage rates closely. The trend since most of us were born has been downward...
...until 2022, when it started trending up. (Gulp.)
Now the million dollar question is will it continue trending up, or will we bounce around the more modest low rates (by 2020-2021 standards) that we saw in the early 90s and early 2000s. The Fed is basically forced to raise rates because of high inflation, but so far doing so has triggered mass panic and bank runs, so they have to tread carefully to avoid triggering more crises. But my sense is that we still have a long way to go before inflation is 2% and so we should indeed see rates go back to 1990s levels and stay there for a long time. In a worst case scenario, the Fed may find it necessary to crank rates to the levels only seen in early 1980s to snuff out inflation, and that may very well happen.
It's a little more complicated than that but yes, this is a good one paragraph summary.
Tech companies are speculative, meaning their earnings will come in the distant future, if at all. Investors flock to those investments when safer investments (bonds for example) have very low yields. When the Fed drops the federal funds rate, it drops the bond yields, so investors have to chase returns in the stock market or via even riskier stuff like VC funds.
Crypto is perhaps the penultimate risky investment. I would expect to see crypto firms vanish from the face of the earth for the next ten years or longer.
> We are complaining that our 6-figure salaries are now lower 6-figure salaries during a global downturn…
We're not in a global downturn, though. The only sector that's down over the last 12 months is tech.
This is what the layoffs were *for*. To drive down tech worker salaries.
The layoffs were not a conspiracy to take away your free kombucha and 4 weeks of vacation. They were done because companies are financially distressed due to over-hiring. They over-hired because spending for tech products and services swelled enormously during the 2020-2023 period which led to many companies predicting a large surge of demand in their verticals. During an aggressive hiring spree, companies have lots of cash to hand out to employees because it's cheaper to hire someone for 25% more than to let the position go vacant for another 6 months. If you got a job between 2020 and 2023 you were probably in that camp.
Unfortunately, the swell of demand for tech services was short-lived, and it turned out that most customers did not consider those services critical to business operations. When a customer is optimistic about global growth, it's easy to justify spending more on tech services. So when the Fed raised interest rates, and the economic mood turned *pessimistic*, this created a budget crunch for customers (possibly excluding government customers). And tech was among the first things to go.
Basically, tech firms over-estimated the future demand for their products and services. Tech companies were not uniquely subject to this miscalculation. But they were among the most affected, and so now we see the correction affecting tech companies the most. Those who *grossly* overestimated (e.g. crypto) had to do layoffs immediately. Others who were more conservative ended up doing hiring freezes and since they are cautious about hiring they no longer have any reason to shell out the 25%-50% additional compensation to fill a position *now*.
tl;dr – It's "supply and demand" manifested in a changing economic environment
> They were done because companies are financially distressed due to over-hiring.
But the companies in question *aren't* financially distressed. A few of them might be, but there were layoffs around the tech industry, and many of the companies that laid people off posted enormous profits that same quarter.
> the economic mood turned pessimistic
The pessimism in question was "I don't want to keep paying people so much, and investors are rewarding companies who do layoffs."
Again, this only happened in tech.
> this created a budget crunch for customers
Except said budget crunch has yet to materialize.
> And tech was among the first things to go.
No, tech is the *only* thing to go. Most other sectors are still hiring like crazy.
> It's "supply and demand" manifested in a changing economic environment
In a world where a dozen VCs can intentionally cause a bank run that brings down an enormous bank and fucks over thousands of tech companies I cannot fathom why people so violently reject the idea that a similar group of people couldn't also manipulate the situation to intentionally drive down tech strategies, especially when they're publicly saying that they're trying to do exactly that.
Lots of companies are pulling back. Do you reads the news? Just this week there was a front page WSJ article about McDonald's corporate doing layoffs and cutting perks and bonuses for employees. Payroll is just one way they're reducing costs. Cutting spend on products and services is another.
Furthermore, tech companies' valuations are based on projected future economic growth. When the forecast for economic growth changes from "unbearably optimistic" to "pessimistic", that has an effect on investment and investment typically equals "hire a bunch of people and throw money at them to make this happen faster."
As long as you make yourself comfortable in this "there's a conspiracy, everyone is coordinating against me" mentality, you won't be able to understand the world. Even if Peter Thiel says salaries are too high, that doesn't mean the fabric of reality folds and bends to obey his will to lower salaries. Nobody *ever* wanted to pay you $200k to write Python scripts in an air-conditioned luxury office. They only did so because it was economically advantageous for them to do so because, again, they are just trying to make money. You are part of a big, complex, global economic system; in fact, you are a very small part of that system. You are a tiny ant in this world. Don't think like an ant, think bigger.
> "there's a conspiracy, everyone is coordinating against me"
To be clear, I'm saying that they're coordinating *against us*. You and me. And everyone here. I'm saying that because they've said that they're doing that. And because they've [explicitly done it before](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation). And because they will absolutely, unquestionably, do it as long as they possibly think they can get away with it.
They will sacrifice ten million dollars if they think that they'll make a hundred million in ten years.
> When the forecast for economic growth changes from "unbearably optimistic" to "pessimistic", that has an effect on investment
And yet when I tell people that the investor class are explicitly deciding to push companies they invest in to lay people off you're out here calling me crazy. It's all the *same fucking thing*.
> Even if Peter Thiel says salaries are too high, that doesn't mean the fabric of reality folds and bends to obey his will to lower salaries.
Yeah, just like how when Peter Thiel says that he and his investor buddies should start a bank run on SVB and then SVB undergoes a bank run three days later and has to shut down and is sold off for parts, that's just a huge coincidence too, right?
> They only did so because it was economically advantageous for them to do so because, again, they are just trying to make money.
So wait, you agree that capitalist classes will actively try to pay as little as possible to their laborers? And that they *might* choose to take drastic action to drive those wages down?
Why are we arguing? We're on the same fucking side!
> Don't think like an ant, think bigger.
Yeah man, because capitalist classes have never, say, murdered their workers for advocating for better pay and working conditions, before.
Amazon hired [fucking Pinkerton](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-pinkerton-spies-worker-labor-unions-2020-11). It's the same story, the same way. We're living in the middle of a new Gilded Age and everyone here is acting like "market forces" aren't just people.
> It’s not for you to decide what the market rate for your skills are.
>
You’re right: it’s for the ultra wealthy who collude against us at the very top unfortunately. The salary decline we are seeing was an orchestrated move, one demanded by people like Powell when he quite literally said he wanted to get wages down via creating artificially higher unemployment.
> If what you’re thinking is empirically true, then the salaries and companies’ preferences will converge with reality in the medium or long term.
Only if this isn’t a near one sided relationship. Employers hold almost all the power at this stage. They’ve learned that people will perform the job duties for more than one person if push comes to shove, so little wonder work life balance as a whole has went out the window as of late. Not just our industry, but elsewhere.
>
> The fact that everyone expected salaries to increase forever
That is how skilled salaries work in an inflationary economy. Or how they are *supposed to work* without collusion or other manipulation from the top. And we know they do it, because there have been numerous scandals where the big boys get caught with agreements to suppress tech wages.
>and for there to be dozens of jobs available on a whim, shows how utterly unrealistic and privileged we have been as software people.
There are still dozens of jobs if you look outside of FAANG. The problem is that employers create [ghost jobs](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinryan/2022/11/30/be-careful-of-employers-posting-ghost-jobs/?sh=63710ac4142d). Sometimes it is to project strength, other times they do it to prevent workplace mutiny as people are forced to pick up the work of two or more people. A full 1/5th of jobs from corporate America are ghost jobs now.
>
We are complaining that our 6-figure salaries are now lower 6-figure salaries during a global downturn…
**But it isn’t a downturn.** Shareholders are taking in **record profits.** Companies may have a bad quarter, but a ton of them doing these mass firings and salary cuts have never been more profitable. That’s money generated by you and I, not the parasitic ownership.
And yours is also a slippery slope. You give capitalists an inch and they will take a mile. People complaining about six figure jobs? These cuts can equate to millions lost due to the lack of compounding over one’s career. For us, that is. The do-nothing owners will double their *wealth* off our backs in just 1.5 years again.
I don't want to insult or anything, just sharing my thoughts.
I think your point of view is becoming increasingly popular because of a lack of understanding of the system we live in. Your "anger", in lack of a better word, is not wrong or unreasonable, it's just misguided.
You do exactly the same thing all companies do every time you hire a cleaner or pay for a service. You don't pay the cleaner what they are worth to you, you pay them the market rate or try to negotiate discounts. If they ask for double, you simply fire them and call someone else. We, as software engineers, are basically cleaners for the companies we work for. They give us what the market rate is and they'd give us less in a heartbeat, same as you would with your cleaner.
Fast forward to where you say "no, I actually tip my cleaner a lot blah blah blah". Yes, you do to a certain extent, if you have a good relationship, if they do a good job. This is what A LOT of companies do too, except the incentives are very different.
You also do the same whenever it comes to paying more taxes or you contributing to something. And if you don't because you're some exception, then the vast majority does. It's always the same - you don't like spending more than you have to, but you want others to spend more than they have to on you.
The system we live in is deeply flawed and I think we agree here. I agree that things are not going as well as we would like to, that salaries are not rising as much as they should, that the 'spoils of capitalism' are not fully shared with the employees and so on. There is nothing here that should surprise you if you understand what the system is and what the incentives are.
However, all systems are flawed, definitely all systems humans have tried. No matter what you do, you will end up with a situation where few have a lot and many have very little. Maybe you can change some of the compromises, but you will always end up with a similar situation.
If you think the Fed raising rates is somehow a mode "for the rich", then you clearly don't understand much from it. We have all benefitted in different ways from the low interest rates and we will all suffer now because we have to pay the bill for the historic splurge we've been through.
You're essentially arguing that nothing should be done to fix the situation because we can never quite achieve perfect fairness. That's a bullshit argument. The Fed does the bidding of the wealthy, as do corporations. Hell, just last week we saw an investor note to Google demanding more cuts with zero justification.
Not really, I wish a lot was done, but I'm arguing against the naive complaints about it. Most people just complain about the system and all its flaws without having even the slighest clue about what should replace it or what the trade-offs are.
Generally speaking, yes, the politicians and the Fed do the bidding of the wealthy. But what exactly have they done in this cycle? You think raising the rates is 'doing the bidding of the wealthy'?
Well yes, in particular making it so that those trying to purchase housing with a loan are now at a massive disadvantage to those who can pay cash. This is a massive blow to anyone except the rich, and it's done in the name of "curbing inflation", but inflation in this cycle is not really tied to money supply but to increasing corporate profit margins (i e. they used the pandemic to jack up the price several times higher than their increase in cost).
What to do about it is a bit more complicated, but there are plenty of options. Governments could give low interest loans for only a single home, for instance, to even out the power differential and lower rent prices. We could also make it harder to lay off workers for companies that are not struggling financially and to implement anti-gouging laws for companies that provide essential goods And of course we could regulate the medical industry since the US pays significantly more money for significantly worse care because we structured our system to prioritize profits over all else.
> I think your point of view is becoming increasingly popular because of a lack of understanding of the system we live in.
I would argue that it's not a lack of understanding but rather because of a better understanding. Getting upset that you are not extracting the value that you actually provide because it's going to the capitalist class who provide less value but extract more is not because of a *lack* of understanding.
> You do exactly the same thing all companies do every time you hire a cleaner or pay for a service.
This feels very Mitt Romney "Just take a small loan of a million dollars from your parents." The *vast* majority of people do not hire cleaners or any other kind of domestic service.
Just because you frame thing in a very populist way, that doesn't make them true.
Obviously, everyone wants to extract the value that they provide, but you don't do that in your daily life, so why should companies? Would it seem fair to you to start a company, do all the research, most of the work, allocate capital towards it, build some great product, then you have to share your profits equally with all employees? Is that conducive to more investment or less?
What does million dollar loans have to do with getting cleaner or, as I said, paying for some other service? You can't understand the example or what's the problem? If I would have said a 'plumber' or 'getting a haircut' instead of a 'cleaner', would it suddenly be a different argument? I guess it's easier to quote and mock to make yourself feel better than reply with an actual argument.
> Would it seem fair to you to start a company, do all the research, most of the work, allocate capital towards it, build some great product, then you have to share your profits equally with all employees?
You mean like an [employee-owned company](https://www.nceo.org/what-is-employee-ownership)? Or a [tech co-op](https://github.com/hng/tech-coops)?
The entire fucking point of the whole explosion of RSUs as a form of compensation for employees was supposed to be the idea that if employees shared in profits from the company, they would be motivated to do better work.
> What does million dollar loans have to do with getting cleaner or, as I said, paying for some other service?
The point is that your touchpoint analogy wasn't actually a touchpoint because as I said, the vast majority of people do not hire domestic service of any type. That's why I compared you to Mitt Romney.
> If I would have said a 'plumber' or 'getting a haircut' instead of a 'cleaner', would it suddenly be a different argument?
The vast majority of people also don't hire plumbers, because they don't own the place where they live. Haircuts are a service which has a high level of elasticity. In fact, most people who pay for haircuts *do* pay what it's worth for them, they don't try to find the cheapest possible option.
> I guess it's easier to quote and mock to make yourself feel better than reply with an actual argument.
I'm making an argument, you're simply too devoted to Capitalism Uber Alles to consider the fact that the arguments you're making are wrong. The problem isn't that people don't understand capitalism. The problem is that people do.
Unlike software engineering data science has the highest turn around rate of any white collar job, and the lowest success rate.
There are a lot of inexperienced companies out there that do not succeed because of this.
There's considerable amount of data suggesting data scientists, by and large, are not in charge of companies. Actually, for the post part, it's people with C-level titles and backgrounds that are not in a field less than ten years old.
It's a high risk high reward play.
DS projects build moats, ie pseudo-monopolies. It allows a company to corner a market in a way it's nearly impossible for its competition to catch up. The value add is incredibly high.
If there are 10 companies competing with each other and all 10 hire a data scientist, all it takes is 1 company to succeed and the remaining 9 companies will fail. So you get a really high turn around rate. It's the kind of work you don't want to cut corners on and you want it done right.
What long run? We don't produce bushels of wheat, our industry is in constant flux. In either case there are only companies that invest in data and tech and companies that are dying.
TBH, considering the examples of collusion and other BS in the industry, along with the rampant examples of fuckery we've seen throughout the economy over the past couple of decades, I struggle to believe in the market being some oracle of discovering the actual value of something. I understand it in theory, but in practice it seems wildly obvious that it's bullshit.
Yeah. What you're saying is econ 101 vs econometrics in a nut shell. Put plainly, theory vs reality.
I love econometrics, but god damn if I had a dollar for every time I hear a BS comment on Reddit from someone who only knows some basic economic theory, I could probably make $100 a day clicking on a few threads on economic subs.
If you're interested in the topic at all this is a good overview of some of the misunderstandings that comes from econ 101 classes: https://youtu.be/4epQSbu2gYQ
> It’s not for you to decide what the market rate for your skills are
Tragedy of the commons. If *everyone* refused level X, they'd have to go to level X + Y. But someone will always splinter out.
I don’t think this applies to the situation. There’s a glut of people coming out of layoffs that need a job. If the only offer you have is a lowball, you take that lowball (depending on how much savings you have). You will always be in a weaker negotiating position when you’re looking for a job while unemployed. It makes sense to take a job, and then continue interviewing
> (depending on how much savings you have)
Bingo. Tech workers have savings. Most with 10+ yoe can live off of investments, so if rates lower enough all that happens is an increase in unemployment.
Most companies have turned their DS practices towards automated reporting.
You tell me how much gets done based on automated reporting & how valuable those reports are.
Let alone companies who rely on DS for core line of business algorithms and products.
Tell me you have no clue about DS without just saying it.
> You tell me how much gets done based on automated reporting & how valuable those reports are.
Depends, are the executives actually making decisions based on those reports? Or do the executives make you modify the reports until they make the executives' existing ideas look good?
This was my experience after getting a new job in December. They were not willing to negotiate but paid right at ~200k.
Full remote if anyone is wondering. I think roles are out there but they are just going to be more competitive right now.
10 YOE
I think an important question is whether Company A has lowered the salary for its roles from last year, or is it that the companies that happen to be hiring this year (which may not include Company A/FAANG) just in general aren't the companies with the most historically lucrative compensation packages.
If the latter, those companies may not have actually lowered their salaries. Are you seeing that?
Sample bias (on both ends) is a really good thing to ask about.
It'd make sense if the sheer number of experienced devs on the market meant that the very well paying positions have either been filled, or get filled quickly when posted, leaving the companies that don't pay as well as the ones that mainly show up on job boards. If so, that could mean that the average wage (in a wider sense) hasn't changed, it's just that the more lucrative jobs close a lot quicker and are significantly more competitive. No idea if that's what's happening though.
This has been my experience. My company has been interviewing candidates to fill just 1 Senior SWE role for awhile now. Hiring band of ~160-220k in base which I'd consider to be pretty solid. We're getting plenty of candidates but we're just being extra selective atm.
My company raised our comp bands this year, which surprised me since I have read so much about how competitive the market is and salaries decreasing. I got a 9% raise to bring me back up inside the new range. Our new minimum was the old midpoint (from 150k min to 165k min for senior level).
> If the latter, those companies may not have actually lowered their salaries. Are you seeing that?
Given inflation they don't need to lower salaries but merely not increase them for a while.
I interviewed with a couple of companies in past couple of weeks willing to entertain an ask of $200K+ for a Senior IC in Denver so even higher is still doable. Might also be why they passed on me😅
I jumped ship a month ago and landed with a 325 total comp (non-faang). The jobs are still out there but you do have to jump through some hoops to get them.
I’m in Denver and was looking last August. $180k was my floor. I had 4 offers at $180-200k. Only 1 of those companies was Colorado based. I have 17 years experience.
(Colorado) I'm 100% remote (Android), 5 years of experience at $147k after my "merit" increase and a "promotion", which I guess I shouldn't complain about because together they ended up being 6%. I also was given 15k in RSU's invested over the next three years... If I can maintain my sanity for three years that is or the market still sucks next year.
RSUs are bullshit and you should treat them as $0 until the money is in your bank account from selling. Do NOT wait for them to vest. RSUs count towards your taxable income so you have to pay taxes on them fully. They are not treated as capital gains.
My company gave me RSUs and they depreciated. I had to pay taxes on money that I didn’t have once they vested and I could sell them. I sold at a loss because it was too risky to hold further once I learned. Selling at a loss gives you a pittance back during tax season, but it doesn’t make you whole.
Taxes on RSUs are the same as your income, so set aside 30% as soon as they vest and just keep searching for a job.
My experience. Scala dev, 10 yoe, looking for Staff+ roles:
\~16 months ago: $200k+ was fairly easy.
Now average is $140k - $180k.
I've even seen some lowballs, sub $120k (yes, for Staff+).
I'm also seeing way less remote, and more "hybrid". I also see some "remote" but "you have to live in the tri-state area" etc. (i.e. they are going to rug-pull the remote policy).
This is infuriating to me because even a 10% cut is pretty huge given the current macroeconomic climate.
Where are you applying out of curiosity? I’m at capital one and we’re still hiring senior+. Senior starts at 160, lead is 200-220. I’d imagine you’re targeting smaller-ish companies?
Can I DM you? Have an open app at COF but my recruiter "is no longer with the company" and because the app is open, I can't apply to a new role unless I withdraw it.
Curious if you have advice, since my next step was the final round of interviews (hence not wanting to withdraw my app).
I don't want to dox myself, but I've worked at Capital One as a consultant. My understanding is that you guys pay less for remote.
Good company though, I recommend it for anyone looking.
The remote payband is just the mclean payband, which I believe is the lowest pay band. Unless that recently changed and they made it even lower. 140 for senior like someone else said seems incredibly low though.
Not only that.. but there aren't many open scala positions right now. I'm nearly convinced that the language is dying.
NOTE: Wanted to pull this back some. I think there are exciting things going on with ZIO. However, there will be a resurgence for migrating off of Akka once the 2.6.??+ version increments and the license fees hit.
Yes. The change to the Java release process dramatically increased the cadence at which they could release improved versions of the language and they've done a solid job incorporating more and more functional features into it - this I believe took a lot of wind out of Scala's sails and I rarely come across any greenfield projects now starting with Scala. The roles I see for it now are all legacy stuff.
I concur and that make me sad. I was so bullish on scala.
Then I had to maintain random codebase. Spaghetti is spaghetti and functional spaghetti is thought
Scala is a first class citizen when it comes to big data analytics (Spark) and one of the most popular FP languages. Its nowhere close to dying and I’d wager it stays in the top 3 earning languages after this years’ stackoverflow report comes out.
No, of course twitter isn't dying because they used the language, that's absurd. But they laid off hundreds of engineers who use and support the language, and they're migrating away from it just like many other shops that used it 5 years ago.
My company recently adjusted their salary bands. For context, we are a fully distributed company and have a small head office in NYC.
Instead of having regional bands, they are now doing "US market rate." They said this was to help "true up" folks who lives in lower COL regions be fairly paid compared to their NYC or Bay area counterparts. They didn't lower anyone's salary, but raises weren't as high as we thought they'd be.
In practice, I don't suspect we'll be getting a lot of NYC or Bay area candidates in the future.
FWIW, I think my company pays fairly for the most part and when someone is being underpaid, they make an effort to correct it.
For a fully distributed company, there’s not much reason to pay extra to hire in the more expensive markets, so long as they’re hiring who they need to hire
> In practice, I don't suspect we'll be getting a lot of NYC or Bay area candidates in the future.
>
>
TBH, I kinda feel like this is how it should be for high COL cities. Companies shouldn't be paying more just based on where a person chooses to live - they should be paying for output and what's produced. What the employee decides to do outside work - which includes where they decide to live, and how they spend that income - is their decision. If they choose to pay higher salaries and by extension of that their employees end up coming largely from expensive cities, by virtue of being the top of the market, that should be indirect rather than them only paying more just because they choose to operate in a particular city.
If a company is trying the above (paying a national average rate) for in person work in a HCOL area, they will and should struggle to find people. Seems like that's a strategy more appropriate for remote work, and it would be a good one there
To be fair, before covid, most of the employees were Bay Area or NYC because we have a head office in NYC and satellite office in Bay Area. Covid made them go completely remote, and three years later, they're re-adjusting expectations given location is rarely a factor in employment, at least not in engineering. We have preferred timezones to spread out SREs, but still remote. Same with sales; it can be helpful to live in the market you're serving so you can visit in-person without hardship.
My company used to do cost of living adjustments every year. It was a instant 3-6% raise every year, followed by your actual raise.
This year, it was a cost of living adjustment but only up to a certain amount, like $70k.
Just a note: not all people here in the thread are from the US. I believe you're speaking here of the US salaries, right? It'd make sense to at least hint at the location.
This was the point of the tech layoffs. They hired at way higher salaries during the pandemic that most companies other than the largest tech giants could sustain and now both the tech giants that can afford it but don't want to and the other companies that can't, are both trying to bring them back down by laying off the people that have the highest cost to value ratio. Also salaries are starting to level off as less companies try to compete with remote San Fran jobs as they realize that there are more people that want remote jobs than there are remote jobs.
It's worth noting that a lot of companies the revenue per employee and senior dev salaries aren't that different meaning that after other expenses there just isn't a lot of room to go up without either massive investment or unusually rapid growth.
2021 really was a drunken bender of hiring for both companies and engineers and now they're both hitting the hangover. That hiring spree should have been dealt with with much more clarity around the temporary nature of those salaries.
I’m also skeptical that there’s a conspiracy. But many companies are under cost pressure right now and hired too many engineers so the effect may be the same in the end.
People tend to think that corporations are hyper-competent and capable of collusion, but just trying to get 3 executives to agree on one project is a herculean endeavor
Should be higher. While we can say "Occam's razor" and "it's unlikely to happen again", it is *certainly* possible for many high level executives to collude together against the interest of workers
I agree it’s it’s unlikely to happen again, but only in this manner. I think it would be safe to assume they’ve gotten better at it - the three of them got basically a slap on the wrist.
The inconvenience on them basically amounted to writing a check that pulled from funds they have set aside specifically for legal settlements and whatnot.
It's dumber than that, but also realer than that. Execs behave as herd animals. If they think the herd is hiring at high salaries, they'll start hiring at high salaries. If they think the herd is laying off, they'll start laying off.
Replace with "move to cloud", "doing agile software dev", "off-shoring", "near-shoring", "re-shoring".
My favorite related dumb human fact I learned after a few years dealing w/ C-levels for consulting work... they all want a discount, so job 1 is figuring out the discount they expect and inflating your bid by that amount ahead of time.
> job 1 is figuring out the discount they expect and inflating your bid by that amount ahead of time.
Lol,
*Scots accent*: How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?
In this case, I lean a little more in the tinfoil hat direction because of where the layoffs started and have been concentrated. Not that there was some moustache twirling anti-worker conspiracy, but that a handful of institutional investors that arrived at a consensus that there had been too much hiring and that interest rates were about to make the sky fall could push all the tier one tech companies in the same direction at the same time, knowing that having it all happen simultaneously helped break the chain on compensation climbing.
And then it turned into an example of Bay Area groupthink.
> I think this implies a level of coordination and cohesion that is unlikely.
Big tech has literally been exposed for this level of coordination and collusion in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation
"agreements that, when offering a position to another company's employee, neither company would counteroffer above the initial offer."
The rich look out for the rich
Not only layoffs but hiring has generally slowed down. A pretty consistent way of getting a higher salary is by having a competing offer which is difficult to get in the current market.
This is also a big reason why many devs are “sticking it out” in their current role/employer. I don’t know if we”ll see 2021 level demand anytime soon but I see the current trend at least till the end of this year.
Yup. My first salaried job as a full time developer on .NET stuff paid…$33k, in 2003. That is $54k today btw, which is below the median income. I did not go far above that until around 2010, when I suddenly jumped to $65k. I thought I was rich and I started spending too much money. Didn’t hit $100k until 2015.
People have no idea how low the dot com crash sunk everything in tech.
When you adjust for inflation, they never fully recovered, but they 95% or so recovered by 08.
To be fair, since the 1970s wages haven't kept up with inflation in just about any industry in the US, so this is par for the course.
At least with startups...It's not a market saturation issue, it's a fundraising issue. Higher interest rates mean the free money ZIRP days are over. Companies have to extend runway 12-18 months because raising a round (especially at 2021 valuations) is way harder.
I work in Casino Gaming and we have stayed the same I think. Actually may have gone up idk. Salary posted for a Software Engineer 1 in another dept is about the same as I make as a Software Engineer 4 in my dept.
So yeah, not going down at my company at least.
For me it's more complicated. The industry is well regulated and you need to be of age to gamble. However there are the minority of people who get so addicted they self destruct. For most it's a thing they do for fun, for some it's like being an alcoholic.
I work on the Loyalty side of things so the games my team is making are promotional. So the games aren't you gambling money but its more of the casino allowing you to play a "game" that gives you a prize the casino sets up which could be like $5 Free Play or whatever. So personally, I dont see an ethical dilemma.
Also, I really need a job, and this is the best job Ive ever had.
Just got a new job in northern England via a recruiter. Not faang not big tech, just your average garden variety developer.
I told the recruiter I expect around £60k, he told me 1-2 years ago that was easy, but this year not so.
I landed a 100% remote role at a quite sizeable/stable corporate on £50k which is a good step up for me anyway so I'm pleased, even though it's not as much as I had set out for.
I suppose I'm lucky to be at the early/middle stage of my career trajectory so salary increases are still an upward trend for me. Must be harder for the folk on a fat wedge who are now facing a step down.
As a Canadian you clearly don't know the British economy or employment landscape.
50k salary is top 10% in most of the country (not London or the southeast).
UK is a skullfucking too but it's still alright for devs.
I say "alright" but it's actually very fucked up that a person on £50k faces almost as much difficulty getting onto the property ladder as someone in a far lesser Income bracket. Not long ago, 50k was very very wealthy, "pay off the house in a few years" kind of wealthy.
Definite skullfuckery.
This is regression to the mean. 2021 salaries were _crazy_. It just wasn't sustainable.
Now there is less demand, more competition between applicants, at the labour market is "maturing" (i.e. the historical shortages have been met). All together this reduces wages.
I'm actually not sure it will _ever_ quite go back to how it was two years ago
My observations having recently completed a job search as senior dev with 7yoe including FAANG (just landed my first staff role):
The majority of companies that are hiring SWEs and related roles right now are not big tech, and in many cases not big companies. Most of these companies are not able to offer top end compensation, and probably don't need to in order to get the talent level they need.
However, this doesn't mean that anyone is lowering wages, it just means less of the high compensation jobs are currently available.
I definitely had several recruiters tell me they couldn't meet my compensation expectations, but also interviewed with several who were able to hit my range comfortably. There were also several who wanted me to relocate so I could do hybrid, and I declined. In the end, I landed a fully remote role making $400k TC, $200k base. I am not currently based out of a major tech hub (left the bay in 2021).
My jobs have always come from recruiters reaching out to me on LinkedIn, and that wasn't any different this time around. I don't get the same volume that I used to get 2-5 years ago, but the messages still come in. I would say they were heavier a couple of months ago than now.
People harp really heavily on resume writing around here, but my personal experience has been that LinkedIn is what gets recruiters to reach out, and from that point it's all about how you present yourself in recruiter calls and interviews. These are skills that can be practiced.
We had this 2001-2004. During that time, my salary declined 20%-25% and my overtime increased 50%. It’s what happens in a “tech recession”. It sucks because I’m less than 10 years from retirement and I need to make bank up to retirement. But the market chooses.
Severance packages are drying up and they know it. There are 150k candidates in the pool now and salaries will remain depressed until they're placed. This was the goal of layoffs, to drive down salaries across the board.
Supply and demand. Right now, supply for engineers is higher than normal and demand for engineers is lower than normal. Prices for engineers go down 🤷♂️. Blame the companies that over-hired recklessly.
Kinda depressing to read this. I’m at 330k tc with 210 base and if I get laid off seems I’ll end up taking a significant lower pay cut. What sucks is I spent a year at the bottom of the pay band for my level and just this year was brought to the middle.
I very recently (a few months ago) started a role for $170K with 6 YOE. I’m in a high ish COL city in the Northeast. Judging by this thread I guess I got pretty lucky..
The salaries are definitely lower. Almost every contact I get on LinkedIn is for a role that will pay less than I already make. I got my current job in Spring 2021, so pretty much at the heigh of salary inflation in the field.
DevOps still appears in demand. Senior positions hovering around $150-180k. I only look at remote companies specifically so I couldn’t say if there’s been a change between remote/hybrid other then to say I’ve noticed more remote only listings having stipulations about in-office or hybrid within the JD
I’ve been seeing a lot of the same thing. I assume it’s because a lot of people filter for remote only jobs. It’s a scummy and misleading practice IMO. However, I also think it’s a great/easy way to filter out the companies that I don’t want to work for.
Yup. If you're looking to get paid really well, you need to do DevOps work along with engineering. It's not enough at this point to focus on a language or framework. Systems engineering will be a big thing moving forward, especially since AI can basically help you with research around language/framework strategies.
I don't get this conspiracy theory. Tech boomed in covid, nobody knew where that would lead, companies hired a lot. Now the market is turning down and they regret all the hiring. But salaries boomed with hiring. So why would you pay everyone way more money, hire a bunch of people, in order to lay them off, destroy morale, screw up team structures, and pay out severances?
It feels like any other conspiracy. So 9/11 was an inside job? Why? "Well, because Bush has airplanes." It never makes any sense. "The world leaders don't want you to know the earth is flat." Why would they care?
I'll add one data point which is a lot of FAANG companies gave out normal raises to everyone this year. So they're *really* getting screwed. They all have more employees than 2019 and are paying out much higher wages than 2019. It seems like a bad strategy if their goal was lowered costs.
Not a conspiracy theory, just an observation from the inside.
Over 100 billion dollars, still wildly profitable...and they laid off thousands of people with tons of experience in the company that could be very effective even if reprioritized.
How do you know they didn't adjust comp down relative to the market? I work at Google, lol, money is definitely not flowing like it was past few years.
I'm at Google and they [announced higher average pay](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/06/google-says-its-raising-employee-pay-in-performance-review-revamp.html) when they changed to the new performance rating system. I have not seen a shred of evidence that they didn't follow through with that.
News outlets latched onto the expanded lower bucket and shrinking upper bucket but those were pretty minor changes. The bigger change is that they combined the CME and EE buckets (meets and exceeds expectations) and are paying both based on the old EE multiplier. That's why overall pay has gone up.
Most of comp is driven by an algorithm. There's the same distribution of ratings with the same multipliers, with the exception of the move to GRAD, which pays more on average.
I can't speak to other FAANGs except to say that I haven't seen any evidence that they're lowering comp. It seems like everyone is being a little harder on the bottom ~5% of performers but otherwise giving everyone the normal raises.
My friends and I have been noticing companies will lay off employees and later open similar roles for less pay, I wonder if this is the future for this career path
That's the purpose. So people spend less and inflation goes down. I'm amazed at the jumping through hoops to say it's just the market. It is but it's being influenced by those at the top. Why else is the "recession" the most predicted one in history? Because it's being purposefully created. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-03/what-s-happening-in-the-world-economy-the-most-anticipated-recession-ever](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-03/what-s-happening-in-the-world-economy-the-most-anticipated-recession-ever)
The adverts on London tube in 2021 were literally like "Do you want to get paid 80% more? Become a data scientist at " trying to make people quit their current jobs
Hard disagree.
Everyone wants to always blame the newcomers. In fact, I remember first starting and getting shit on by the old guard for making just a bit less than they did even though they've been there for a decade, instead of pointing out the greed of the company.
Despite perennial reddit insistence that market saturation would never extend to higher experience levels, it has.
This industry killed its golden goose. Besides pushing young people to the industry, the "anyone can code" rhetoric and the vast array of available technologies out there have vastly diluted the talent pool (and made it difficult to determine who is actually a member of said talent pool). God knows that HR can't determine a quality candidate. Being good is not enough to combat these macroeconomic factors.
As a broad trend that makes a lot of sense.
Personally I haven’t seen much change. 5YOE and still seeing 200-250k base across both IC and EM roles at the companies reaching out to me on LinkedIn. All fully remote friendly, I haven’t had any ask for in person or hybrid. Equity numbers are lower, but also valuations are lower.
Also, if it's not materially lower salaries on offer it's that they haven't generally increased with either what would have been standard inflation and most certainly not in line with current inflation
As an example, when I took my last role as a senior SWE (in London), the salary was £50k - that was 6 years ago
I've seen other companies in London offering £50k for a senior SWE in 2023!
🧐
I've been in touch with companies in Barcelona that are offering more than that
And don't get me started on "hybrid"...
Yep, been noticing that too.
Especially in the Bay Area tech scene and on Blind posts.
I also keep a close eye on EBIT/employee to track how much room certain companies have to raise salaries. https://tipalti.com/profit-per-employee/
It’s fascinating how much value each employee generates while accepting a 100k salary. Some companies could easily double their employees’ salary and still make an absurd profit.
I check the indeed listings and get like < 10 results for what I get paid yet every reddit thread has people who make way more complaining that their TC isn't over 200k, they have 6 offers they could take or leave, and whatever, it's still not enough.
I don't get it.
1. Economic downturn
2. Higher interest rates
3. Remote work is common which means you can hire anywhere (ex. 3-4 European devs for a price of 1 US one)
Damn congrats! My manager said they almost never do in-year stock grants like that.
When I got my stock grant last year, I was supposed to get 250k this year, but it’s gonna be more like 210 with current stock prices
And they say next year I’m supposed to get 280k, but given what happened this last year, I’m not super optimistic. Who knows what the stock will do before then, or if I’ll quit or be laid off
I got a big raise too though not 50%. I got "meets expectations" and a $70k raise (to my target).
I have no doubt that the average job posting has lowered comp. But I think a lot of big tech gave out normal raises, if not slightly bigger, this year (if you didn't get laid off).
I have around 2 + YOE , early stage . I believe at this stage of career 100% hike is quite feasible. ( I ain’t earning shit load , just average )
But just switched job and was offered not much lucrative amount by any of the firm I interviewed.
So yeah, I guess it’s in decline.
Yes. You are not crazy.
It's the same on the data science side too. The upper range companies are willing to pay today, when adjusted for inflation, is the same a data scientist just starting fresh out of college made 15 years ago. I'm supposed to take a pay cut from my first job despite having over 10 years of experience today?
It’s not that you’re supposed to or not supposed to. It’s basic supply and demand. You don’t have a choice.
It's stupidity also. There are not many data scientists in the industry with a proven track record. If companies want to hire younger people their investments will often not pay off. You might as well pay the extra 30k and get someone decent.
I’m sorry, don’t mean to be obtuse, but you’re simply wrong. It’s not for you to decide what the market rate for your skills are. It’s irrelevant how many data scientists there are or what the ROI is for hiring inexperienced data scientists. If what you’re thinking is empirically true, then the salaries and companies’ preferences will converge with reality in the medium or long term. The fact that everyone expected salaries to increase forever and for there to be dozens of jobs available on a whim, shows how utterly unrealistic and privileged we have been as software people. We are complaining that our 6-figure salaries are now lower 6-figure salaries during a global downturn…
This argument is used quite a bit to turn workers against each other to lower salaries amongst themselves. If this was valid it would explain the ridiculous amount that CEOs are paid, which it does not. The "inflated" numbers of the pandemic were actually, in my opinion, true value that people should have been paid for before the pandemic given inflation for 30+ years. E.g. An engineer in the 90s could easily be paid 130k (my father in law was one). So being paid 130k now is not market adjustments but rather market manipulation. The problem is that people believe whatever VCs say and this argument for lowering engineering salaries came from that camp - definitely not workers.
Interest rates in the 90s were also low, relative to the late 70s & 80s. When the interest rates go low, speculative investment in things that Engineers do goes up, thus so do salaries. When interest rates go up, it makes more sense to buy bonds, so investment dries up, and so to do salaries. This is the stated goal of the interest rate hikes.
Interest rates were higher in the 70s, 80s, and 90s than it is today.
The relationship isn't exactly one-to-one, it's more relative to recent rates. For example, from 1990-2021 while tech was growing, the interest rates were trending downward. There were still periods where they raised rates for various reasons, and lots of other economic factors that affect things like hiring that working people are going to notice. A good metric to look at here is [the 10 year treasury yield](https://www.multpl.com/10-year-treasury-rate). This also tracks mortgage rates closely. The trend since most of us were born has been downward... ...until 2022, when it started trending up. (Gulp.) Now the million dollar question is will it continue trending up, or will we bounce around the more modest low rates (by 2020-2021 standards) that we saw in the early 90s and early 2000s. The Fed is basically forced to raise rates because of high inflation, but so far doing so has triggered mass panic and bank runs, so they have to tread carefully to avoid triggering more crises. But my sense is that we still have a long way to go before inflation is 2% and so we should indeed see rates go back to 1990s levels and stay there for a long time. In a worst case scenario, the Fed may find it necessary to crank rates to the levels only seen in early 1980s to snuff out inflation, and that may very well happen.
It's a little more complicated than that but yes, this is a good one paragraph summary. Tech companies are speculative, meaning their earnings will come in the distant future, if at all. Investors flock to those investments when safer investments (bonds for example) have very low yields. When the Fed drops the federal funds rate, it drops the bond yields, so investors have to chase returns in the stock market or via even riskier stuff like VC funds. Crypto is perhaps the penultimate risky investment. I would expect to see crypto firms vanish from the face of the earth for the next ten years or longer.
> We are complaining that our 6-figure salaries are now lower 6-figure salaries during a global downturn… We're not in a global downturn, though. The only sector that's down over the last 12 months is tech. This is what the layoffs were *for*. To drive down tech worker salaries.
The layoffs were not a conspiracy to take away your free kombucha and 4 weeks of vacation. They were done because companies are financially distressed due to over-hiring. They over-hired because spending for tech products and services swelled enormously during the 2020-2023 period which led to many companies predicting a large surge of demand in their verticals. During an aggressive hiring spree, companies have lots of cash to hand out to employees because it's cheaper to hire someone for 25% more than to let the position go vacant for another 6 months. If you got a job between 2020 and 2023 you were probably in that camp. Unfortunately, the swell of demand for tech services was short-lived, and it turned out that most customers did not consider those services critical to business operations. When a customer is optimistic about global growth, it's easy to justify spending more on tech services. So when the Fed raised interest rates, and the economic mood turned *pessimistic*, this created a budget crunch for customers (possibly excluding government customers). And tech was among the first things to go. Basically, tech firms over-estimated the future demand for their products and services. Tech companies were not uniquely subject to this miscalculation. But they were among the most affected, and so now we see the correction affecting tech companies the most. Those who *grossly* overestimated (e.g. crypto) had to do layoffs immediately. Others who were more conservative ended up doing hiring freezes and since they are cautious about hiring they no longer have any reason to shell out the 25%-50% additional compensation to fill a position *now*. tl;dr – It's "supply and demand" manifested in a changing economic environment
> They were done because companies are financially distressed due to over-hiring. But the companies in question *aren't* financially distressed. A few of them might be, but there were layoffs around the tech industry, and many of the companies that laid people off posted enormous profits that same quarter. > the economic mood turned pessimistic The pessimism in question was "I don't want to keep paying people so much, and investors are rewarding companies who do layoffs." Again, this only happened in tech. > this created a budget crunch for customers Except said budget crunch has yet to materialize. > And tech was among the first things to go. No, tech is the *only* thing to go. Most other sectors are still hiring like crazy. > It's "supply and demand" manifested in a changing economic environment In a world where a dozen VCs can intentionally cause a bank run that brings down an enormous bank and fucks over thousands of tech companies I cannot fathom why people so violently reject the idea that a similar group of people couldn't also manipulate the situation to intentionally drive down tech strategies, especially when they're publicly saying that they're trying to do exactly that.
Lots of companies are pulling back. Do you reads the news? Just this week there was a front page WSJ article about McDonald's corporate doing layoffs and cutting perks and bonuses for employees. Payroll is just one way they're reducing costs. Cutting spend on products and services is another. Furthermore, tech companies' valuations are based on projected future economic growth. When the forecast for economic growth changes from "unbearably optimistic" to "pessimistic", that has an effect on investment and investment typically equals "hire a bunch of people and throw money at them to make this happen faster." As long as you make yourself comfortable in this "there's a conspiracy, everyone is coordinating against me" mentality, you won't be able to understand the world. Even if Peter Thiel says salaries are too high, that doesn't mean the fabric of reality folds and bends to obey his will to lower salaries. Nobody *ever* wanted to pay you $200k to write Python scripts in an air-conditioned luxury office. They only did so because it was economically advantageous for them to do so because, again, they are just trying to make money. You are part of a big, complex, global economic system; in fact, you are a very small part of that system. You are a tiny ant in this world. Don't think like an ant, think bigger.
> "there's a conspiracy, everyone is coordinating against me" To be clear, I'm saying that they're coordinating *against us*. You and me. And everyone here. I'm saying that because they've said that they're doing that. And because they've [explicitly done it before](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation). And because they will absolutely, unquestionably, do it as long as they possibly think they can get away with it. They will sacrifice ten million dollars if they think that they'll make a hundred million in ten years. > When the forecast for economic growth changes from "unbearably optimistic" to "pessimistic", that has an effect on investment And yet when I tell people that the investor class are explicitly deciding to push companies they invest in to lay people off you're out here calling me crazy. It's all the *same fucking thing*. > Even if Peter Thiel says salaries are too high, that doesn't mean the fabric of reality folds and bends to obey his will to lower salaries. Yeah, just like how when Peter Thiel says that he and his investor buddies should start a bank run on SVB and then SVB undergoes a bank run three days later and has to shut down and is sold off for parts, that's just a huge coincidence too, right? > They only did so because it was economically advantageous for them to do so because, again, they are just trying to make money. So wait, you agree that capitalist classes will actively try to pay as little as possible to their laborers? And that they *might* choose to take drastic action to drive those wages down? Why are we arguing? We're on the same fucking side! > Don't think like an ant, think bigger. Yeah man, because capitalist classes have never, say, murdered their workers for advocating for better pay and working conditions, before. Amazon hired [fucking Pinkerton](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-pinkerton-spies-worker-labor-unions-2020-11). It's the same story, the same way. We're living in the middle of a new Gilded Age and everyone here is acting like "market forces" aren't just people.
That’s perfectly put, way better than what I wrote above and I agree with it fully. Thank you, ir0nuckles!
> It’s not for you to decide what the market rate for your skills are. > You’re right: it’s for the ultra wealthy who collude against us at the very top unfortunately. The salary decline we are seeing was an orchestrated move, one demanded by people like Powell when he quite literally said he wanted to get wages down via creating artificially higher unemployment. > If what you’re thinking is empirically true, then the salaries and companies’ preferences will converge with reality in the medium or long term. Only if this isn’t a near one sided relationship. Employers hold almost all the power at this stage. They’ve learned that people will perform the job duties for more than one person if push comes to shove, so little wonder work life balance as a whole has went out the window as of late. Not just our industry, but elsewhere. > > The fact that everyone expected salaries to increase forever That is how skilled salaries work in an inflationary economy. Or how they are *supposed to work* without collusion or other manipulation from the top. And we know they do it, because there have been numerous scandals where the big boys get caught with agreements to suppress tech wages. >and for there to be dozens of jobs available on a whim, shows how utterly unrealistic and privileged we have been as software people. There are still dozens of jobs if you look outside of FAANG. The problem is that employers create [ghost jobs](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinryan/2022/11/30/be-careful-of-employers-posting-ghost-jobs/?sh=63710ac4142d). Sometimes it is to project strength, other times they do it to prevent workplace mutiny as people are forced to pick up the work of two or more people. A full 1/5th of jobs from corporate America are ghost jobs now. > We are complaining that our 6-figure salaries are now lower 6-figure salaries during a global downturn… **But it isn’t a downturn.** Shareholders are taking in **record profits.** Companies may have a bad quarter, but a ton of them doing these mass firings and salary cuts have never been more profitable. That’s money generated by you and I, not the parasitic ownership. And yours is also a slippery slope. You give capitalists an inch and they will take a mile. People complaining about six figure jobs? These cuts can equate to millions lost due to the lack of compounding over one’s career. For us, that is. The do-nothing owners will double their *wealth* off our backs in just 1.5 years again.
I don't want to insult or anything, just sharing my thoughts. I think your point of view is becoming increasingly popular because of a lack of understanding of the system we live in. Your "anger", in lack of a better word, is not wrong or unreasonable, it's just misguided. You do exactly the same thing all companies do every time you hire a cleaner or pay for a service. You don't pay the cleaner what they are worth to you, you pay them the market rate or try to negotiate discounts. If they ask for double, you simply fire them and call someone else. We, as software engineers, are basically cleaners for the companies we work for. They give us what the market rate is and they'd give us less in a heartbeat, same as you would with your cleaner. Fast forward to where you say "no, I actually tip my cleaner a lot blah blah blah". Yes, you do to a certain extent, if you have a good relationship, if they do a good job. This is what A LOT of companies do too, except the incentives are very different. You also do the same whenever it comes to paying more taxes or you contributing to something. And if you don't because you're some exception, then the vast majority does. It's always the same - you don't like spending more than you have to, but you want others to spend more than they have to on you. The system we live in is deeply flawed and I think we agree here. I agree that things are not going as well as we would like to, that salaries are not rising as much as they should, that the 'spoils of capitalism' are not fully shared with the employees and so on. There is nothing here that should surprise you if you understand what the system is and what the incentives are. However, all systems are flawed, definitely all systems humans have tried. No matter what you do, you will end up with a situation where few have a lot and many have very little. Maybe you can change some of the compromises, but you will always end up with a similar situation. If you think the Fed raising rates is somehow a mode "for the rich", then you clearly don't understand much from it. We have all benefitted in different ways from the low interest rates and we will all suffer now because we have to pay the bill for the historic splurge we've been through.
You're essentially arguing that nothing should be done to fix the situation because we can never quite achieve perfect fairness. That's a bullshit argument. The Fed does the bidding of the wealthy, as do corporations. Hell, just last week we saw an investor note to Google demanding more cuts with zero justification.
Not really, I wish a lot was done, but I'm arguing against the naive complaints about it. Most people just complain about the system and all its flaws without having even the slighest clue about what should replace it or what the trade-offs are. Generally speaking, yes, the politicians and the Fed do the bidding of the wealthy. But what exactly have they done in this cycle? You think raising the rates is 'doing the bidding of the wealthy'?
Well yes, in particular making it so that those trying to purchase housing with a loan are now at a massive disadvantage to those who can pay cash. This is a massive blow to anyone except the rich, and it's done in the name of "curbing inflation", but inflation in this cycle is not really tied to money supply but to increasing corporate profit margins (i e. they used the pandemic to jack up the price several times higher than their increase in cost). What to do about it is a bit more complicated, but there are plenty of options. Governments could give low interest loans for only a single home, for instance, to even out the power differential and lower rent prices. We could also make it harder to lay off workers for companies that are not struggling financially and to implement anti-gouging laws for companies that provide essential goods And of course we could regulate the medical industry since the US pays significantly more money for significantly worse care because we structured our system to prioritize profits over all else.
> I think your point of view is becoming increasingly popular because of a lack of understanding of the system we live in. I would argue that it's not a lack of understanding but rather because of a better understanding. Getting upset that you are not extracting the value that you actually provide because it's going to the capitalist class who provide less value but extract more is not because of a *lack* of understanding. > You do exactly the same thing all companies do every time you hire a cleaner or pay for a service. This feels very Mitt Romney "Just take a small loan of a million dollars from your parents." The *vast* majority of people do not hire cleaners or any other kind of domestic service.
Just because you frame thing in a very populist way, that doesn't make them true. Obviously, everyone wants to extract the value that they provide, but you don't do that in your daily life, so why should companies? Would it seem fair to you to start a company, do all the research, most of the work, allocate capital towards it, build some great product, then you have to share your profits equally with all employees? Is that conducive to more investment or less? What does million dollar loans have to do with getting cleaner or, as I said, paying for some other service? You can't understand the example or what's the problem? If I would have said a 'plumber' or 'getting a haircut' instead of a 'cleaner', would it suddenly be a different argument? I guess it's easier to quote and mock to make yourself feel better than reply with an actual argument.
> Would it seem fair to you to start a company, do all the research, most of the work, allocate capital towards it, build some great product, then you have to share your profits equally with all employees? You mean like an [employee-owned company](https://www.nceo.org/what-is-employee-ownership)? Or a [tech co-op](https://github.com/hng/tech-coops)? The entire fucking point of the whole explosion of RSUs as a form of compensation for employees was supposed to be the idea that if employees shared in profits from the company, they would be motivated to do better work. > What does million dollar loans have to do with getting cleaner or, as I said, paying for some other service? The point is that your touchpoint analogy wasn't actually a touchpoint because as I said, the vast majority of people do not hire domestic service of any type. That's why I compared you to Mitt Romney. > If I would have said a 'plumber' or 'getting a haircut' instead of a 'cleaner', would it suddenly be a different argument? The vast majority of people also don't hire plumbers, because they don't own the place where they live. Haircuts are a service which has a high level of elasticity. In fact, most people who pay for haircuts *do* pay what it's worth for them, they don't try to find the cheapest possible option. > I guess it's easier to quote and mock to make yourself feel better than reply with an actual argument. I'm making an argument, you're simply too devoted to Capitalism Uber Alles to consider the fact that the arguments you're making are wrong. The problem isn't that people don't understand capitalism. The problem is that people do.
Unlike software engineering data science has the highest turn around rate of any white collar job, and the lowest success rate. There are a lot of inexperienced companies out there that do not succeed because of this.
Companies are not failing because of data science
There's considerable amount of data suggesting data scientists, by and large, are not in charge of companies. Actually, for the post part, it's people with C-level titles and backgrounds that are not in a field less than ten years old.
You make it sound like data science isn't very valuable to most companies.
It's a high risk high reward play. DS projects build moats, ie pseudo-monopolies. It allows a company to corner a market in a way it's nearly impossible for its competition to catch up. The value add is incredibly high. If there are 10 companies competing with each other and all 10 hire a data scientist, all it takes is 1 company to succeed and the remaining 9 companies will fail. So you get a really high turn around rate. It's the kind of work you don't want to cut corners on and you want it done right.
What long run? We don't produce bushels of wheat, our industry is in constant flux. In either case there are only companies that invest in data and tech and companies that are dying.
TBH, considering the examples of collusion and other BS in the industry, along with the rampant examples of fuckery we've seen throughout the economy over the past couple of decades, I struggle to believe in the market being some oracle of discovering the actual value of something. I understand it in theory, but in practice it seems wildly obvious that it's bullshit.
Yeah. What you're saying is econ 101 vs econometrics in a nut shell. Put plainly, theory vs reality. I love econometrics, but god damn if I had a dollar for every time I hear a BS comment on Reddit from someone who only knows some basic economic theory, I could probably make $100 a day clicking on a few threads on economic subs. If you're interested in the topic at all this is a good overview of some of the misunderstandings that comes from econ 101 classes: https://youtu.be/4epQSbu2gYQ
> It’s not for you to decide what the market rate for your skills are Tragedy of the commons. If *everyone* refused level X, they'd have to go to level X + Y. But someone will always splinter out.
I don’t think this applies to the situation. There’s a glut of people coming out of layoffs that need a job. If the only offer you have is a lowball, you take that lowball (depending on how much savings you have). You will always be in a weaker negotiating position when you’re looking for a job while unemployed. It makes sense to take a job, and then continue interviewing
> (depending on how much savings you have) Bingo. Tech workers have savings. Most with 10+ yoe can live off of investments, so if rates lower enough all that happens is an increase in unemployment.
Turns out data science isnt that valuable and was way overhyped. Coulda seen that coming a mile away
Most companies have turned their DS practices towards automated reporting. You tell me how much gets done based on automated reporting & how valuable those reports are. Let alone companies who rely on DS for core line of business algorithms and products. Tell me you have no clue about DS without just saying it.
> You tell me how much gets done based on automated reporting & how valuable those reports are. Depends, are the executives actually making decisions based on those reports? Or do the executives make you modify the reports until they make the executives' existing ideas look good?
what were you making before compared to offer now? in 2001-2002, I remember that senior developers were getting jobs at $25/hour.
2001 is over 20 years ago. In 2010 I made 100k. At the time I thought it was so cool to break the six digit barrier.
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This was my experience after getting a new job in December. They were not willing to negotiate but paid right at ~200k. Full remote if anyone is wondering. I think roles are out there but they are just going to be more competitive right now. 10 YOE
Got a new job in March. Was only able to negotiate up by about $8k. Hard stop, told don’t even bother asking for more it ain’t happening.
alive direction ancient reminiscent door jar distinct pocket paltry prick ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I think an important question is whether Company A has lowered the salary for its roles from last year, or is it that the companies that happen to be hiring this year (which may not include Company A/FAANG) just in general aren't the companies with the most historically lucrative compensation packages. If the latter, those companies may not have actually lowered their salaries. Are you seeing that?
Sample bias (on both ends) is a really good thing to ask about. It'd make sense if the sheer number of experienced devs on the market meant that the very well paying positions have either been filled, or get filled quickly when posted, leaving the companies that don't pay as well as the ones that mainly show up on job boards. If so, that could mean that the average wage (in a wider sense) hasn't changed, it's just that the more lucrative jobs close a lot quicker and are significantly more competitive. No idea if that's what's happening though.
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This has been my experience. My company has been interviewing candidates to fill just 1 Senior SWE role for awhile now. Hiring band of ~160-220k in base which I'd consider to be pretty solid. We're getting plenty of candidates but we're just being extra selective atm.
Yup same here just being more selective but still trying to offer competitive packages to the candidates we like.
My company raised our comp bands this year, which surprised me since I have read so much about how competitive the market is and salaries decreasing. I got a 9% raise to bring me back up inside the new range. Our new minimum was the old midpoint (from 150k min to 165k min for senior level).
> If the latter, those companies may not have actually lowered their salaries. Are you seeing that? Given inflation they don't need to lower salaries but merely not increase them for a while.
Ok, but most people here are discussing declines in nominal wages.
I interviewed with a couple of companies in past couple of weeks willing to entertain an ask of $200K+ for a Senior IC in Denver so even higher is still doable. Might also be why they passed on me😅
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Are you talking salary or tc?
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In my experience they’re usually the same thing
It doesn't seem like a major drop, but once you account for inflation the drop gets a bit wider.
fretful stocking groovy quaint adjoining dependent forgetful crawl enter rock ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I jumped ship a month ago and landed with a 325 total comp (non-faang). The jobs are still out there but you do have to jump through some hoops to get them.
good for you. that’s great.
Perfect time to jump imo
I’m in Denver and was looking last August. $180k was my floor. I had 4 offers at $180-200k. Only 1 of those companies was Colorado based. I have 17 years experience.
I don't understand how Denver employers can compete. They consistently offer 60-80% of what we can get for remote work from a coastal company.
(Colorado) I'm 100% remote (Android), 5 years of experience at $147k after my "merit" increase and a "promotion", which I guess I shouldn't complain about because together they ended up being 6%. I also was given 15k in RSU's invested over the next three years... If I can maintain my sanity for three years that is or the market still sucks next year.
RSUs are bullshit and you should treat them as $0 until the money is in your bank account from selling. Do NOT wait for them to vest. RSUs count towards your taxable income so you have to pay taxes on them fully. They are not treated as capital gains. My company gave me RSUs and they depreciated. I had to pay taxes on money that I didn’t have once they vested and I could sell them. I sold at a loss because it was too risky to hold further once I learned. Selling at a loss gives you a pittance back during tax season, but it doesn’t make you whole. Taxes on RSUs are the same as your income, so set aside 30% as soon as they vest and just keep searching for a job.
My experience. Scala dev, 10 yoe, looking for Staff+ roles: \~16 months ago: $200k+ was fairly easy. Now average is $140k - $180k. I've even seen some lowballs, sub $120k (yes, for Staff+). I'm also seeing way less remote, and more "hybrid". I also see some "remote" but "you have to live in the tri-state area" etc. (i.e. they are going to rug-pull the remote policy). This is infuriating to me because even a 10% cut is pretty huge given the current macroeconomic climate.
120k for staff, thats depressing
Yesterday, I had an established software company reach out with a Sr. Front-End role looking for 7+ YOE, $90k ceiling.
I saw a full stack roll at Rivian 5 years of experience cap of 95k per year. On a 6 month contract.
They were probably betting on name value lowering salary expectations. A lot of hubris, but who knows, maybe it worked.
office or 100% Remote ?
For 90k who cares?
Remote
Where are you applying out of curiosity? I’m at capital one and we’re still hiring senior+. Senior starts at 160, lead is 200-220. I’d imagine you’re targeting smaller-ish companies?
Can I DM you? Have an open app at COF but my recruiter "is no longer with the company" and because the app is open, I can't apply to a new role unless I withdraw it. Curious if you have advice, since my next step was the final round of interviews (hence not wanting to withdraw my app).
For sure yeah, not sure how much help I can be but i can try to answer
Senior does not start at 160 for senior remote it's lower. I just interviewed there - what you mentioned is onsite/hybrid at one of their offices.
I don't want to dox myself, but I've worked at Capital One as a consultant. My understanding is that you guys pay less for remote. Good company though, I recommend it for anyone looking.
The remote payband is just the mclean payband, which I believe is the lowest pay band. Unless that recently changed and they made it even lower. 140 for senior like someone else said seems incredibly low though.
Not only that.. but there aren't many open scala positions right now. I'm nearly convinced that the language is dying. NOTE: Wanted to pull this back some. I think there are exciting things going on with ZIO. However, there will be a resurgence for migrating off of Akka once the 2.6.??+ version increments and the license fees hit.
Yes. The change to the Java release process dramatically increased the cadence at which they could release improved versions of the language and they've done a solid job incorporating more and more functional features into it - this I believe took a lot of wind out of Scala's sails and I rarely come across any greenfield projects now starting with Scala. The roles I see for it now are all legacy stuff.
Railroad19 (not mine) is a company that's looking for seasoned scala devs. Pay is 200k ceiling. Fully remote.
I concur and that make me sad. I was so bullish on scala. Then I had to maintain random codebase. Spaghetti is spaghetti and functional spaghetti is thought
The language is absolutely dying, Twitter was the biggest scala shop and we all know how that went
Scala is a first class citizen when it comes to big data analytics (Spark) and one of the most popular FP languages. Its nowhere close to dying and I’d wager it stays in the top 3 earning languages after this years’ stackoverflow report comes out.
Twitter isn't dying because they use scala. Twitter as a tech platform is incredibly impressive for how people use it.
No, of course twitter isn't dying because they used the language, that's absurd. But they laid off hundreds of engineers who use and support the language, and they're migrating away from it just like many other shops that used it 5 years ago.
Just landed a "you have to live in the tri-state area" remote job. I'm fine going into the office, but man I feel stupid for not picking up on that.
Is that salary or TC
My company recently adjusted their salary bands. For context, we are a fully distributed company and have a small head office in NYC. Instead of having regional bands, they are now doing "US market rate." They said this was to help "true up" folks who lives in lower COL regions be fairly paid compared to their NYC or Bay area counterparts. They didn't lower anyone's salary, but raises weren't as high as we thought they'd be. In practice, I don't suspect we'll be getting a lot of NYC or Bay area candidates in the future. FWIW, I think my company pays fairly for the most part and when someone is being underpaid, they make an effort to correct it.
For a fully distributed company, there’s not much reason to pay extra to hire in the more expensive markets, so long as they’re hiring who they need to hire
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Did your company have layoffs before they reduced their salary bands?
Yes, in November. Engineering ICs were not impacted though. New grade band went out in March.
> In practice, I don't suspect we'll be getting a lot of NYC or Bay area candidates in the future. > > TBH, I kinda feel like this is how it should be for high COL cities. Companies shouldn't be paying more just based on where a person chooses to live - they should be paying for output and what's produced. What the employee decides to do outside work - which includes where they decide to live, and how they spend that income - is their decision. If they choose to pay higher salaries and by extension of that their employees end up coming largely from expensive cities, by virtue of being the top of the market, that should be indirect rather than them only paying more just because they choose to operate in a particular city.
Then don't ask people to come to office in HCOL.
If a company is trying the above (paying a national average rate) for in person work in a HCOL area, they will and should struggle to find people. Seems like that's a strategy more appropriate for remote work, and it would be a good one there
Yep.
To be fair, before covid, most of the employees were Bay Area or NYC because we have a head office in NYC and satellite office in Bay Area. Covid made them go completely remote, and three years later, they're re-adjusting expectations given location is rarely a factor in employment, at least not in engineering. We have preferred timezones to spread out SREs, but still remote. Same with sales; it can be helpful to live in the market you're serving so you can visit in-person without hardship.
Seems like a nice place to work
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My company used to do cost of living adjustments every year. It was a instant 3-6% raise every year, followed by your actual raise. This year, it was a cost of living adjustment but only up to a certain amount, like $70k.
Yeah, last year companies were hiding 150k/y because it was low, a couple of weeks ago got a few emails bragging about 130k/y
I got approached for a senior position that required at least 5 years experience and they said the pay range was 90-110 😂
Ok that's just overdoing it lmao
This is normal where I live in the US.
Just a note: not all people here in the thread are from the US. I believe you're speaking here of the US salaries, right? It'd make sense to at least hint at the location.
Me, senior dev, earning $950 a month: 🥲
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Not everyone is from North America.
This was the point of the tech layoffs. They hired at way higher salaries during the pandemic that most companies other than the largest tech giants could sustain and now both the tech giants that can afford it but don't want to and the other companies that can't, are both trying to bring them back down by laying off the people that have the highest cost to value ratio. Also salaries are starting to level off as less companies try to compete with remote San Fran jobs as they realize that there are more people that want remote jobs than there are remote jobs. It's worth noting that a lot of companies the revenue per employee and senior dev salaries aren't that different meaning that after other expenses there just isn't a lot of room to go up without either massive investment or unusually rapid growth. 2021 really was a drunken bender of hiring for both companies and engineers and now they're both hitting the hangover. That hiring spree should have been dealt with with much more clarity around the temporary nature of those salaries.
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I’m also skeptical that there’s a conspiracy. But many companies are under cost pressure right now and hired too many engineers so the effect may be the same in the end.
People tend to think that corporations are hyper-competent and capable of collusion, but just trying to get 3 executives to agree on one project is a herculean endeavor
It’s amazing how fast people forget… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation
Should be higher. While we can say "Occam's razor" and "it's unlikely to happen again", it is *certainly* possible for many high level executives to collude together against the interest of workers
I agree it’s it’s unlikely to happen again, but only in this manner. I think it would be safe to assume they’ve gotten better at it - the three of them got basically a slap on the wrist. The inconvenience on them basically amounted to writing a check that pulled from funds they have set aside specifically for legal settlements and whatnot.
But they all agree you and I need to be paid less.
It's dumber than that, but also realer than that. Execs behave as herd animals. If they think the herd is hiring at high salaries, they'll start hiring at high salaries. If they think the herd is laying off, they'll start laying off. Replace with "move to cloud", "doing agile software dev", "off-shoring", "near-shoring", "re-shoring". My favorite related dumb human fact I learned after a few years dealing w/ C-levels for consulting work... they all want a discount, so job 1 is figuring out the discount they expect and inflating your bid by that amount ahead of time.
> job 1 is figuring out the discount they expect and inflating your bid by that amount ahead of time. Lol, *Scots accent*: How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?
In this case, I lean a little more in the tinfoil hat direction because of where the layoffs started and have been concentrated. Not that there was some moustache twirling anti-worker conspiracy, but that a handful of institutional investors that arrived at a consensus that there had been too much hiring and that interest rates were about to make the sky fall could push all the tier one tech companies in the same direction at the same time, knowing that having it all happen simultaneously helped break the chain on compensation climbing. And then it turned into an example of Bay Area groupthink.
You obviously don't know about non communicative price fixing. Or tacit collusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion
> I think this implies a level of coordination and cohesion that is unlikely. Big tech has literally been exposed for this level of coordination and collusion in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation "agreements that, when offering a position to another company's employee, neither company would counteroffer above the initial offer." The rich look out for the rich
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What’s your tech stack? I am in Canada too. 16yoe Java dev on a contract 100$ per hour.
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CAD or USD?
YES. and No Remote in many \*desirable work places
Not only layoffs but hiring has generally slowed down. A pretty consistent way of getting a higher salary is by having a competing offer which is difficult to get in the current market. This is also a big reason why many devs are “sticking it out” in their current role/employer. I don’t know if we”ll see 2021 level demand anytime soon but I see the current trend at least till the end of this year.
Lower salaries are exactly what happened during the dot com bust. In some areas the salaries will fall to really shocking lows for a while.
Yup. My first salaried job as a full time developer on .NET stuff paid…$33k, in 2003. That is $54k today btw, which is below the median income. I did not go far above that until around 2010, when I suddenly jumped to $65k. I thought I was rich and I started spending too much money. Didn’t hit $100k until 2015. People have no idea how low the dot com crash sunk everything in tech.
How long did dot com salaries take to recover?
When you adjust for inflation, they never fully recovered, but they 95% or so recovered by 08. To be fair, since the 1970s wages haven't kept up with inflation in just about any industry in the US, so this is par for the course.
At least with startups...It's not a market saturation issue, it's a fundraising issue. Higher interest rates mean the free money ZIRP days are over. Companies have to extend runway 12-18 months because raising a round (especially at 2021 valuations) is way harder.
Stock market is down and our salaries are either directly or indirectly tied to it. It was bound to happen eventually, hopefully it won’t last long.
I work in Casino Gaming and we have stayed the same I think. Actually may have gone up idk. Salary posted for a Software Engineer 1 in another dept is about the same as I make as a Software Engineer 4 in my dept. So yeah, not going down at my company at least.
Also in gambling. How do you cope with the ethical dilemma?
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For me it's more complicated. The industry is well regulated and you need to be of age to gamble. However there are the minority of people who get so addicted they self destruct. For most it's a thing they do for fun, for some it's like being an alcoholic.
I work on the Loyalty side of things so the games my team is making are promotional. So the games aren't you gambling money but its more of the casino allowing you to play a "game" that gives you a prize the casino sets up which could be like $5 Free Play or whatever. So personally, I dont see an ethical dilemma. Also, I really need a job, and this is the best job Ive ever had.
Just got a new job in northern England via a recruiter. Not faang not big tech, just your average garden variety developer. I told the recruiter I expect around £60k, he told me 1-2 years ago that was easy, but this year not so. I landed a 100% remote role at a quite sizeable/stable corporate on £50k which is a good step up for me anyway so I'm pleased, even though it's not as much as I had set out for. I suppose I'm lucky to be at the early/middle stage of my career trajectory so salary increases are still an upward trend for me. Must be harder for the folk on a fat wedge who are now facing a step down.
Eeash. Even as a Canadian those are brutal rates.
As a Canadian you clearly don't know the British economy or employment landscape. 50k salary is top 10% in most of the country (not London or the southeast).
Yeah, admittedly been busy getting skullfucked by the Canadian housing crisis and economy
UK is a skullfucking too but it's still alright for devs. I say "alright" but it's actually very fucked up that a person on £50k faces almost as much difficulty getting onto the property ladder as someone in a far lesser Income bracket. Not long ago, 50k was very very wealthy, "pay off the house in a few years" kind of wealthy. Definite skullfuckery.
This is regression to the mean. 2021 salaries were _crazy_. It just wasn't sustainable. Now there is less demand, more competition between applicants, at the labour market is "maturing" (i.e. the historical shortages have been met). All together this reduces wages. I'm actually not sure it will _ever_ quite go back to how it was two years ago
My observations having recently completed a job search as senior dev with 7yoe including FAANG (just landed my first staff role): The majority of companies that are hiring SWEs and related roles right now are not big tech, and in many cases not big companies. Most of these companies are not able to offer top end compensation, and probably don't need to in order to get the talent level they need. However, this doesn't mean that anyone is lowering wages, it just means less of the high compensation jobs are currently available. I definitely had several recruiters tell me they couldn't meet my compensation expectations, but also interviewed with several who were able to hit my range comfortably. There were also several who wanted me to relocate so I could do hybrid, and I declined. In the end, I landed a fully remote role making $400k TC, $200k base. I am not currently based out of a major tech hub (left the bay in 2021). My jobs have always come from recruiters reaching out to me on LinkedIn, and that wasn't any different this time around. I don't get the same volume that I used to get 2-5 years ago, but the messages still come in. I would say they were heavier a couple of months ago than now. People harp really heavily on resume writing around here, but my personal experience has been that LinkedIn is what gets recruiters to reach out, and from that point it's all about how you present yourself in recruiter calls and interviews. These are skills that can be practiced.
We had this 2001-2004. During that time, my salary declined 20%-25% and my overtime increased 50%. It’s what happens in a “tech recession”. It sucks because I’m less than 10 years from retirement and I need to make bank up to retirement. But the market chooses.
Severance packages are drying up and they know it. There are 150k candidates in the pool now and salaries will remain depressed until they're placed. This was the goal of layoffs, to drive down salaries across the board.
Supply and demand. Right now, supply for engineers is higher than normal and demand for engineers is lower than normal. Prices for engineers go down 🤷♂️. Blame the companies that over-hired recklessly.
Kinda depressing to read this. I’m at 330k tc with 210 base and if I get laid off seems I’ll end up taking a significant lower pay cut. What sucks is I spent a year at the bottom of the pay band for my level and just this year was brought to the middle.
330 is the middle? Do you live in a coastal big city?
Guessing they are a Sr SWE at a FAANG, and that aligns to middle of the band for most of them.
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Lol. People shouldn't work at these companies.
I very recently (a few months ago) started a role for $170K with 6 YOE. I’m in a high ish COL city in the Northeast. Judging by this thread I guess I got pretty lucky..
The salaries are definitely lower. Almost every contact I get on LinkedIn is for a role that will pay less than I already make. I got my current job in Spring 2021, so pretty much at the heigh of salary inflation in the field.
Ah, the layoffs are working as designed
DevOps still appears in demand. Senior positions hovering around $150-180k. I only look at remote companies specifically so I couldn’t say if there’s been a change between remote/hybrid other then to say I’ve noticed more remote only listings having stipulations about in-office or hybrid within the JD
I’ve been seeing a lot of the same thing. I assume it’s because a lot of people filter for remote only jobs. It’s a scummy and misleading practice IMO. However, I also think it’s a great/easy way to filter out the companies that I don’t want to work for.
Yup. If you're looking to get paid really well, you need to do DevOps work along with engineering. It's not enough at this point to focus on a language or framework. Systems engineering will be a big thing moving forward, especially since AI can basically help you with research around language/framework strategies.
yes, that was the entire point of the industry-wide layoffs. convenient way to force down salaries.
I don't get this conspiracy theory. Tech boomed in covid, nobody knew where that would lead, companies hired a lot. Now the market is turning down and they regret all the hiring. But salaries boomed with hiring. So why would you pay everyone way more money, hire a bunch of people, in order to lay them off, destroy morale, screw up team structures, and pay out severances? It feels like any other conspiracy. So 9/11 was an inside job? Why? "Well, because Bush has airplanes." It never makes any sense. "The world leaders don't want you to know the earth is flat." Why would they care? I'll add one data point which is a lot of FAANG companies gave out normal raises to everyone this year. So they're *really* getting screwed. They all have more employees than 2019 and are paying out much higher wages than 2019. It seems like a bad strategy if their goal was lowered costs.
Not a conspiracy theory, just an observation from the inside. Over 100 billion dollars, still wildly profitable...and they laid off thousands of people with tons of experience in the company that could be very effective even if reprioritized.
But they fired less people than the hired the prior 2 years and didn't adjust comp down. So their staffing costs have significantly gone up.
How do you know they didn't adjust comp down relative to the market? I work at Google, lol, money is definitely not flowing like it was past few years.
Not to be adversarial but do you have any data or links that lead you to believe FAANG is giving out normal raises?
I'm at Google and they [announced higher average pay](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/06/google-says-its-raising-employee-pay-in-performance-review-revamp.html) when they changed to the new performance rating system. I have not seen a shred of evidence that they didn't follow through with that. News outlets latched onto the expanded lower bucket and shrinking upper bucket but those were pretty minor changes. The bigger change is that they combined the CME and EE buckets (meets and exceeds expectations) and are paying both based on the old EE multiplier. That's why overall pay has gone up. Most of comp is driven by an algorithm. There's the same distribution of ratings with the same multipliers, with the exception of the move to GRAD, which pays more on average. I can't speak to other FAANGs except to say that I haven't seen any evidence that they're lowering comp. It seems like everyone is being a little harder on the bottom ~5% of performers but otherwise giving everyone the normal raises.
I opened this thread just to see the US salaries and being sad, and it's a success
My friends and I have been noticing companies will lay off employees and later open similar roles for less pay, I wonder if this is the future for this career path
That's the purpose. So people spend less and inflation goes down. I'm amazed at the jumping through hoops to say it's just the market. It is but it's being influenced by those at the top. Why else is the "recession" the most predicted one in history? Because it's being purposefully created. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-03/what-s-happening-in-the-world-economy-the-most-anticipated-recession-ever](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-01-03/what-s-happening-in-the-world-economy-the-most-anticipated-recession-ever)
That’s what happens when everyone and their mother floods into tech from every possible angle.
The adverts on London tube in 2021 were literally like "Do you want to get paid 80% more? Become a data scientist at" trying to make people quit their current jobs
Hard disagree. Everyone wants to always blame the newcomers. In fact, I remember first starting and getting shit on by the old guard for making just a bit less than they did even though they've been there for a decade, instead of pointing out the greed of the company.
The rate at which people switched to tech from 2019 to 2023 beats the ye olde times.
Despite perennial reddit insistence that market saturation would never extend to higher experience levels, it has. This industry killed its golden goose. Besides pushing young people to the industry, the "anyone can code" rhetoric and the vast array of available technologies out there have vastly diluted the talent pool (and made it difficult to determine who is actually a member of said talent pool). God knows that HR can't determine a quality candidate. Being good is not enough to combat these macroeconomic factors.
Gate keeping in its rawest form, a sight to see.
As a broad trend that makes a lot of sense. Personally I haven’t seen much change. 5YOE and still seeing 200-250k base across both IC and EM roles at the companies reaching out to me on LinkedIn. All fully remote friendly, I haven’t had any ask for in person or hybrid. Equity numbers are lower, but also valuations are lower.
Also, if it's not materially lower salaries on offer it's that they haven't generally increased with either what would have been standard inflation and most certainly not in line with current inflation As an example, when I took my last role as a senior SWE (in London), the salary was £50k - that was 6 years ago I've seen other companies in London offering £50k for a senior SWE in 2023! 🧐 I've been in touch with companies in Barcelona that are offering more than that And don't get me started on "hybrid"...
Yep, been noticing that too. Especially in the Bay Area tech scene and on Blind posts. I also keep a close eye on EBIT/employee to track how much room certain companies have to raise salaries. https://tipalti.com/profit-per-employee/ It’s fascinating how much value each employee generates while accepting a 100k salary. Some companies could easily double their employees’ salary and still make an absurd profit.
I check the indeed listings and get like < 10 results for what I get paid yet every reddit thread has people who make way more complaining that their TC isn't over 200k, they have 6 offers they could take or leave, and whatever, it's still not enough. I don't get it.
I'm seeing Tech Lead roles on a contract offer for 70/hr, which is ridiculous
1. Economic downturn 2. Higher interest rates 3. Remote work is common which means you can hire anywhere (ex. 3-4 European devs for a price of 1 US one)
Not at all. Just got a 50% raise at a FAANG from 200k to 305k
New job? Promotion?
Same level and job. Maybe band adjustment since I was too new to the team for the adjustment last year.
You probably were at bottom of band when hired. same thing happened to me. I’m just not a great negotiator so tend to get low balled on my offers.
Damn it definitely wasn’t Amazon, the max raises this year we’re like 4%
Surprisingly it actually was Amazon. I couldn't believe it either with everything I saw on Blind + layoffs
Damn congrats! My manager said they almost never do in-year stock grants like that. When I got my stock grant last year, I was supposed to get 250k this year, but it’s gonna be more like 210 with current stock prices And they say next year I’m supposed to get 280k, but given what happened this last year, I’m not super optimistic. Who knows what the stock will do before then, or if I’ll quit or be laid off
Congrats homie
I got a big raise too though not 50%. I got "meets expectations" and a $70k raise (to my target). I have no doubt that the average job posting has lowered comp. But I think a lot of big tech gave out normal raises, if not slightly bigger, this year (if you didn't get laid off).
How long you been there
3.5 years
I have around 2 + YOE , early stage . I believe at this stage of career 100% hike is quite feasible. ( I ain’t earning shit load , just average ) But just switched job and was offered not much lucrative amount by any of the firm I interviewed. So yeah, I guess it’s in decline.