[thatsenough]

I started working at FANG recently, after spending 15 years in a different field. The very first thing I noticed was how young the average employee is. It was a little startling. I've heard different theories:

* Today's big tech companies are still relatively young, so the workforce is young.

* The companies have grown exponentially in recent years, and they've hired many new grads to meet hiring targets. This would also shift the average employee age lower.

* The people who joined these companies 15-20 years ago would likely be very well-off financially by now, so they don't need to keep working. They've retired early, created start ups, left the Bay Area, etc.

I think there's likely some truth to these claims. But Silicon Valley also has a reputation for ageism, so who knows.

[dehrmann]

Looking at this (hopefully someone can find longer-term data), the number of CS graduates was in decline until 2009.

https://i1.wp.com/danwang.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/bach...

[thatsenough]

There was a peak in the mid-80s, and another around 2005.

CS enrollments reached a max around 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble. But when the bubble burst in 2000-2001, enrollments plummeted in 2002, 2003 and 2004, leading to the local minimum in graduates in 2009.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity/images/BS...

[kokey]

I'm getting a bit of a dot-com feeling around these compensation figures, especially seeing the sign up bonuses and how tangible stocks are considered as normal compensation now. The FAANGs remind me a bit of Microsoft, Cisco and Intel before their y2k peaks.

[dehrmann]

I do get some of that feeling. The differences is that the FAANGs are all public, have been for a while, and have real revenue. The dot-com bubble was mostly fueled by VC, IPOs, and a virtuous cycle (though I guess Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel had been public for a while, and they did survive the bubble burst).

Facebook and Google do ads, and most online advertisers look for immediate, real value. These success stories are as real as e-commerce.

That brings us to Amazon. It's e-commerce is real, but margins are low. AWS looks more like the dot-com bubble in that some of that money is coming from VCs. If funding dries up, AWS gets hit. That said, there's a larger migration to the cloud, and that's also real.

Apple makes high-margin phones that people all over the world buy. Full stop.

Netflix is the least like the others. It's smaller, and while it revolutionized how we consume content, it's current model is heavily funded by debt, and it's facing stiff competition. No one's talking about how Netflix will take over long-form video, they're griping at having to pay for six streaming services.

The alternate story for tech salaries is that PCs and the internet weren't ready for prime time in 2000. After the bubble burst, there were too few CS grads for when the internet was finally ready. The internet wasn't ready until 2006-2010 when most people had broadband at home, smartphones matures, and LTE was ready.

[vonseel]

I'm surprised it started growing even that early. When I attended school (2007-11), we thought CS jobs would be outsourced to India/China/etc. (we were wrong).

[mywittyname]

I started a few years before you and remember people saying I was crazy to go into development since the jobs were all being outsourced. They might have been wrong in the long run, but I did spend the first few years of my career managing offshore development more than doing actual development.

[treis]

>The very first thing I noticed was how young the average employee is. It was a little startling. I've heard different theories

These salaries come with a big gamble on SV real estate and the market performance of these companies. The first one is a big difference between young and middle aged people. In my 20s I averaged a new home every year as my financial situation changed and I wanted to live in different parts of a city. Now in my 30s with a wife and kid I don't expect to move for 10+ years. The only way to achieve that is buying a house. Which, in SV, means plunking down 3-4 million. That's doable given the salaries, but it's a huge bet that the real estate bubble won't burst.

Same thing with the market performance. Sure, the FAANGs + MS (and minus Netflix) make a ridiculous amount of money and that likely won't change. But what about companies like Snap, Pinterest, Lyft, et.al. that lose money? There's a huge risk that these companies (1) go bankrupt or (2) decide to focus on profitability and slash their engineering workforce.

If you're a 20 something renter you ride the gravy train as long as it keeps coming. If you're a 30 something with small kids and a mortgage you want stability.

[senordevnyc]

Now in my 30s with a wife and kid I don't expect to move for 10+ years. The only way to achieve that is buying a house. Which, in SV, means plunking down 3-4 million.

I think you're pretty deep in the bubble or you have really extreme tastes. I have tons of friends in their 30s with kids in SV and NYC. Almost all of them are renters. The actual financial calculation for renting vs. buying in these markets is brutal. You need to stay for 10-20 years for buying to start to make sense.

Also, you don't need $3-4mm in either of these markets to buy a place suitable for two adults and a child. There are plenty of 2 bedrooms for a third of that.