| Consider: Upward pressure on our salaries is in large part driven by the compensation packages given at Google and Facebook, etc. Those compensation packages can be that high because they've tapped into (and in large part monopolized) absolute firehoses of revenue in the form of online advertising. Those companies do "other" things than advertising, but advertising makes up the vast majority of their revenue. Without it, they could not compensate so highly. The problem comes from the fact that these companies eagerly hoover up all the engineers they can get. And rarely to actually work on the core advertising and ad-tech portions of their business, but literally almost anything. There's very little that Google doesn't do. And they're always starting to do new things. So upward pressure is applied on compensation across the whole job market. And Google at least seems to always be hiring. Also, Google will happily pay $400k for a SWE if it means that SWE is not creating new revenue sources for potential / future competitors. The cost to them is minimal compared to the revenue they make. I leave it as an exercise for the reader what this does to the health of the industry as a whole. |