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The dot com bubble caused a salary bust because so many companies that were employing lots of people went out of business. This put a glut of programmers on th
by duderific 8y ago
The dot com bubble caused a salary bust because so many companies that were employing lots of people went out of business. This put a glut of programmers on the market with nowhere to work, which predictably pushed salary levels down.
This is nothing like the current environment, where there is a consistent demand for programming talent which outstrips the supply, and the industry as a whole is far more stable.
Of course, a global economic slowdown could put a damper on salary growth, but it will not be a salary "bust" like what happened after the dot com bubble.
- leoc 8y agoI'm certainly not claiming that the future will necessarily resemble the past. But GP was making an argument from the past, so in that context we should certainly at least try to get the past right as much as possible. (And there was (I am told http://philip.greenspun.com/research/tr1408/lessons-learned.html http://philip.greenspun.com/research/tr1408/lessons-learned.... ) the '80s, where the salary slump was driven by increased supply rather than a collapse in demand.)
- empath75 8y agoIf the current tech bubble bursts, it’s going to absolutely wreck amazon, fb and google—the three companies that actually gain most of the benefit from all these tech companies blowing their funding on ads and AWS spend. Those are the companies driving up salaries — once that rollercoast ride stops I imagine that there are going to be mass layoffs and salary readjustments for years afterwards.
- duderific 8y agoWhat is the current tech bubble, exactly? Those companies you mentioned have absolutely massive revenues and profits, and plenty of non-tech people and companies are responsible for those revenues and profits. This was not the case in the earlier bubble (lots of overvalued companies with little or no revenues). What seems more likely is that the little startups will get crushed as VC funding dries up.
- chipotle_coyote 8y agoI think that's true, but I also suspect that one of the main drivers for the incredible acceleration of big company salaries has been to keep talent at that company rather than seeing the best engineers leave to go take VC money and play the startup lottery. If VC funding really does dry up, the pressure to keep salaries this high may be considerably lower.
- empath75 8y agoamazon, google and facebook are the companies selling shovels during a gold rush, which is a great business. While the gold rush is still going on.