That would be true if there was a salary bubble. There isn't. On the contrary, salaries for engineers are still low relative to the scarcity, and tech startups are only a small portion of the IT job market. And most startup jobs are actually underpaid compared to "boring" IT.
There may be a bit of an impact in SV, but not much beyond. Same as last time.
> And most startup jobs are actually underpaid compared to "boring" IT.
Most tech workers don't realize this. I can work an exciting, below market startup job (infrastructure/devops), and then hop back into enterprise IT (it manager/vp engineering/senior linux admin) when the going gets tough and get paid more (ie market rate) until the next startup wave comes through.
With the kind of capital Snapchat can raise today, cost savings on salaries is a trivial part of their competitive advantage.
1,000 people * $100,000 average total employment cost = $100m per year (intentionally rough math). Now shave 20% off of that. It simply isn't meaningful to what they're doing; they raised $685 million in the last six months, saving $20 or $30 million per year doesn't matter.
For Snapchat, for which money is no issue relatively speaking, it's better to have this super rich funding environment. They can out-raise, and out-spend their competition when it comes to talent (and for those they can't do that to, like Google, it's moot anyway).
Interesting to see Google included in this comment, since they are currently the only company profiting off of the snapchat user base. Snapchat is built on the google cloud, presumably one of its biggest clients, Google gets a piece of every bit of funding that goes to snapchat. More users -> more growth -> higher cloud costs. Profitable or not, snapchat pays google.