Why does google (or any company for that matter) think this is a good idea? Especially with jobs in the tech industry being so abundant and people chomping at the bit to hire SWEs/SREs.
By adjusting pay to local cost of living Google is effectively saying that they will provide their employees with the same standard of living regardless of their location. In lower cost of living areas this means an accordingly lower salary, because a Bay Area salary would otherwise afford an employee a better standard of living.
As for losing talent, Google is sufficiently established that the majority of freshly minted computer science and software engineering graduates are still desperate to work for Google if they can get in. And Google doesn't need to hire all the top talent to grow or run with the same profit margins.
I suspect software engineering salaries for new hires will start declining in nominal terms within the next decade or so, as (1) automation lowers demand for engineers on the business side (2) the labor supply keeps growing (3) non engineers in tech companies demand adjustments to their own pay to match engineers or start leaving for other companies that do, leaving less money to pay engineers (4) MBAs keep moving into management and start cutting labor costs for their most expensive individual contributors to increase profits and satisfy shareholders.
When new graduates make as much as doctors, with only a fraction of the education, while every other profession, with the exception of junior investment bankers, including technical ones and non-software engineering professions, are lucky to crack $75k, I don't see how the current job market is sustainable.
It seems like people are constantly pessimistic about future salary for Software engineers. I'll present the opposite case, with the advent of software eating the world, good software engineers are infinitely more valuable than a good doctor or a good lawyer or whatever. This is only going to continue to get more extreme with software controlling more and more. Someone could stand up a web service or reduce server costs and save / make a company literally millions of $ (100's of millions at big tech). This was not possible 20 years ago when the job was much harder. Now conversely because its gotten much easier to write code, bad software engineers are basically worthless. So I predict what we'll see is an even more 2 tiered software developer salary market, where the best developers command crazy money while the bad devs get paid middling wages.
> By adjusting pay to local cost of living Google is effectively saying that they will provide their employees with the same standard of living regardless of their location. In lower cost of living areas this means an accordingly lower salary, because a Bay Area salary would otherwise afford an employee a better standard of living.
Except you are now stuck and can't transition back to a HCol area because all these years you were building less equity.
A 1M house in the Bay Area sells for 1M. A 300K house in Anywhere sells for... you guesses it, 300K.
I'd put a slightly different spin on it- sure, junior positions will be automated and commoditfied, but I don't see senior salaries going down. There's a key difference between software engineers and doctors:
No matter how good a doctor is, they can only treat so many patients and/or train so many juniors. A software engineer can scale almost infinitely in some respects. In this they are more like the investment bankers you mention, indeed in some circumstances interchangeable
I would think that relying on folks straight from school or from 4-ish years of hacking is very risky when it comes to more complex products. Unless you retain some of those expensive, grumpy, possibly-now-remote designers...
EDIT: debugging skills are earned through experience, not taught.
You’d think… I’m definitely seeing a trend towards less experienced hires at inflated positions at the tech giants. It’s something they’ve fought off for a while but seem to be losing the battle. The “senior” engineer from a company of 3 with 2 years of experience behind them post-bootcamp has finally made it into the big leagues.
The amount of production outages we’re starting to see across Azure/GCP/AWS is telling if you ask me.
They've been going that way for a long time because it was the only way to keep up headcount growth after their initial growth phase pulled in all the experienced people who were already willing to move.
Even when I was there, the number of inexperienced grads who had never known anything except Google was growing rapidly. And they unfortunately seemed much more prone to bizarre outbursts, bad behavior and extremism of various kinds. They took where they worked for granted.
As for losing talent, Google is sufficiently established that the majority of freshly minted computer science and software engineering graduates are still desperate to work for Google if they can get in. And Google doesn't need to hire all the top talent to grow or run with the same profit margins.
I suspect software engineering salaries for new hires will start declining in nominal terms within the next decade or so, as (1) automation lowers demand for engineers on the business side (2) the labor supply keeps growing (3) non engineers in tech companies demand adjustments to their own pay to match engineers or start leaving for other companies that do, leaving less money to pay engineers (4) MBAs keep moving into management and start cutting labor costs for their most expensive individual contributors to increase profits and satisfy shareholders.
When new graduates make as much as doctors, with only a fraction of the education, while every other profession, with the exception of junior investment bankers, including technical ones and non-software engineering professions, are lucky to crack $75k, I don't see how the current job market is sustainable.