| Yes, no, maybe. For people who are just doing glue code with no real understanding, yes. That market is going south. For the high end it’s more complicated: Comp (not salaries) took a huge upward swing because of an influx of VC money as well as a bull market. People at FAANG type companies could leverage their unvested stock to get higher comp at new companies. Let me explain. Bob joins Amazon in 2016. His initial comp was targeting 250k but by year 3 he was going to make 350k due to stock appreciation on his 4 year stock grant. Bob has a smashing interview at Google and they know he won't take less than 350k. So they offer 370k PER YEAR (with an initial stock grant) even though Bob wasn't going to always make that much at Amazon. Bob works at Google for a bit, his stock goes up even MORE, bob is bored and interviews at Uber/Databricks/Snowflake who has billions in VC money and they offer him 450k (sure some is less liquid, but maybe he knows there's a secondary market). Without a bull market and without the VC market, comp is going to be a LOT less for the top of band offers. However, it's probably not going to be a lot lower than the bottom of band offers, because Jim who cracked google but didn't have a boatload of unvested stock and competing offers wasn't getting near as much as Bob anyway. Finally, Software Engineer fuck ups are still very expensive for companies. So any profitable company that can afford it is going to to to pay close to top of market because paying 2x as much for an engineer who is even 20% better is WORTH IT for them. It's just likely top of market is down a bit. |