The reality is there are a large number of engineers that have enjoyed sky-high comp without having particularly good or difficult to acquire skills. The numbe

The reality is there are a large number of engineers that have enjoyed sky-high comp without having particularly good or difficult to acquire skills. The number of engineers that know how to write a basic java or ruby/node/go web service, some frontend, and basics of using a RDBMS getting half a mil TC is quite high in the bay. However, they lack the background to really advance a company's technical direction, reduce major inefficiencies, or handle problems of scale in a rigorous manner. It's a trend I see having interacted with engineers of all levels at a large number of silicon valley companies. With the era of kubernetes and virtually unlimited cloud hardware on-demand, any college grad can stand up dozens of microservices quickly and satisfy almost any consumer or enterprise product's requirements by throwing money at the problem. To some degree, it's worse at FANGs given how the tooling has essentially narrowed most engineer's focuses to just writing application logic and abstracting everything else away. For these companies, it's effectively cheaper to run thousands of extremely inefficient microservices than try to consolidate the architecture into something leaner and more efficient. Sadly, smaller companies try to emulate this pattern and end up burning piles of VC cash to build something that really requires a fraction of the compute or engineering resources. What this ultimately means is most "engineers" truly are replaceable, lack depth in understanding, and are nothing more than code monkeys. It's about time we see a market correction.