[fergie]

Its not a bubble. $240k is a reasonable salary for a professional with good grades from a good university working for a highly profitable private company. In fact as long as there is such a gap between revenue per employee, and compensation per employee, there will only be upward pressure on pay and conditions.

In reality, software engineering salaries outside of established tech environments are kept artificially low because there is no "guild of software engineers", and therefore anybody can get hired no matter what level of skill they have.

I too run a software startup. The most common and serious error I see in my fellow startup founders is expecting to build better technology with worse pay and conditions. You might be able to wrangle something decent out of some poorly qualified yet smart people, but its a bit of a long shot.

[f00biebletch]

I was more looking at the differential between FB -> Alphabet -> Rest. As a member of the Rest in the Bay Area, hiring has become quantitatively more challenging in the last 12 months as FB continues to gobble up talent. Perhaps it's not so much a bubble as it is a deep, likely irreversible change to SV.

[wuunderbar]

> "guild of software engineers"

Sorry, I'm not familiar with what is meant by this. Can you elaborate?

[fergie]

I wrote about this a while ago: https://hackernoon.com/why-isnt-software-engineering-a-profe...

[conanbatt]

> tech environments are kept artificially low because there is no "guild of software engineers"

I think you would have a hard case saying Guilds and Unions are natural variations of prices.

[fergie]

Maybe, maybe not. See the link I posted elsewhere on this thread.

[tonyedgecombe]

Its not a bubble.

I'm pretty sure it is and I'm quite looking forward to seeing it burst.

[Kephael]

When I attended Facebook university day, 100% of the students I spoke with were from top schools. The majority I spoke with were from Ivy League Universities, of the non Ivy League students, one was from MIT, two from UMD, one from UCLA, and one from UT Austin. This is not a bubble, this is them hiring the best. I have been in class with students who chose to enter software engineering at major companies rather than investment banking.

[f00biebletch]

Although that notion of "the best" has been deeply challenged by slack, e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/how-s...

[Kephael]

I could never get an interview at Slack, but they are not hiring the best. Their compensation is far too low.

[ry_ry]

Schadenfreude aside, why?

Edit: that sounded confrontational, it wasn't supposed to be - I'm just curious!