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> Does this signal that its harder to find those young hungry geniuses? Or that other stages of life are now predominating? It’s much, much easier to get a hig

> Does this signal that its harder to find those young hungry geniuses? Or that other stages of life are now predominating? It’s much, much easier to get a high paying tech job now than it was back then. Assuming you’re ambitious and willing to relocate, you can now go to Silicon Valley, make all of the right moves, and amass millions of dollars in a decade of working for the right companies. Making that kind of money with that kind of point-and-shoot career process (not easy, but doable for kinds of ambitious engineers considering startup life) wasn’t nearly as easy a couple decades ago. If you wanted to really accomplish something and make it big, it felt like a startup was the right kind of gamble. Products were also easier to ship back then. 37Signals (now Basecamp) built a highly profitable empire on top of software that was basically a bunch of web forms. A couple founders eating ramen could very easily launch a new web product back then. Now it’s tough to get recognized without polished UX, flawless features, and a significant customer acquisition budget. It’s easy to forget just how much technology and the industry have changed in recent years.

legostormtroopr 5y ago
> A couple founders eating ramen could very easily launch a new web product back then. Now it’s tough to get recognized The competition was signficantly lower back then as well. Not only is all of the low hanging fruit gone, but those start ups who made it are now the current behemoth incumbents and are trying to clean up the whole orchard (so to speak).
fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
The overall value of a software engineer is higher now than in the past. I think companies recognize this and are paying for it. An engineer that builds a system that controls 1000 machines in some distributed system, that serves content to 100 million people has massive leverage, and is worth paying an extra few hundred grand.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > An engineer that builds a system that controls 1000 machines in some distributed system, that serves content to 100 million people has massive leverage The idea of individual engineers shipping services on their own is long gone, though. Big companies have an almost unthinkably large army of engineers working on everything these days. It’s never just one person doing the magic that makes a service go. OTOH, decades ago it wasn’t too uncommon to find just a couple key engineers at the helm of key services. I think the real driver is the amount of money pouring into the tech space. Companies have to pay more to compete with each other for talent because there are so many tech companies trying to do tech things now. It’s as simple as that.
  - fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
    Right, but the market caps have gone up so much. If you run some basic metric like market cap/number of engineers, places like facebook have an insane incentive to pay huge money for talent. The relative scope may have gone down (many people on one project/api), but the wide ranging impact on PnL/Profitability/Money generated by those individual engineers changes have gone up
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
> Assuming you’re ambitious and willing to relocate, you can now go to Silicon Valley, make all of the right moves, and amass millions of dollars in a decade of working for the right companies It's quite easy to do it in 4 years or less now. At current pay rates and stock growth rates, you have to be VERY optimistic to turn down a FAANG job.
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  That's very much true, even though I had an exit, if I could turn back the wheels of time, I would have spent a few years in a FAANG job. Way less stressful and you (can) have exposure to startup culture anyway there.
- hemloc_io 5y ago
  Yep and you also can learn to deliver products at scale. For me the main reason I took a FAANG job was to get enough money that I can chill for a couple years and build a failed startup ;). (And hopefully meet many smart people work with on it.)
- sarma912 5y ago
  Millions in 4 years? Damn, can you give me a rough calculation on how this happens?
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    Senior offers from Facebook in Seattle are nearing $500k/y total comp.
    - madars 5y ago
      But that doesn't get you to millions (plural, post-tax) in 4 years...
      - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
        Depending on your spending and your return on investments, it easily could have in the last 4 years... House prices (on 5:1 leverage) are up >100% THIS YEAR. The S&P is up ~30%. You need a ~20% return saving ~$300k per year to get >$2M in 4 years. This wasn't terribly difficult to get in the last 4 years. Who knows what the future will bring.
majani 5y ago
Yup, nowadays I see most MVPs and at first glance I am amazed at the quality. Back in the day, a well put together MVP was probably enough to make your product go viral
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  That depends heavily on the product, but yeah it's true. Also what I see is teams are getting better at focusing on their core value and stripping away unnecessary things at the beginning.
spamizbad 5y ago
Yeah, looking back to the mid-aughts you could probably "launch" a "product" in a few weeks. You could stretch that 5K into a few months of runway as your expenses are rent, food, internet, and maybe $150/month tops in SaaS stuff. Like you said, it was also easier to find people who wanted to work on that stuff. Tech jobs were less kushy and highly paid. Working at that kind of startup was a dream compared to slogging through crufty code at some company where software was viewed as a cost - rather than profit - center. But I think back then market rate for a mid-level dev was something like 70K.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Now companies seem to be in stealth for years.
  - ricardobayes 5y ago
    True, partially I think because there's more founders nowadays with exits behind them and can bankroll an operation for years.

legostormtroopr 5y ago

> A couple founders eating ramen could very easily launch a new web product back then. Now it’s tough to get recognized The competition was signficantly lower back then as well. Not only is all of the low hanging fruit gone, but those start ups who made it are now the current behemoth incumbents and are trying to clean up the whole orchard (so to speak).

fdgsdfogijq 5y ago

The overall value of a software engineer is higher now than in the past. I think companies recognize this and are paying for it. An engineer that builds a system that controls 1000 machines in some distributed system, that serves content to 100 million people has massive leverage, and is worth paying an extra few hundred grand.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> An engineer that builds a system that controls 1000 machines in some distributed system, that serves content to 100 million people has massive leverage The idea of individual engineers shipping services on their own is long gone, though. Big companies have an almost unthinkably large army of engineers working on everything these days. It’s never just one person doing the magic that makes a service go. OTOH, decades ago it wasn’t too uncommon to find just a couple key engineers at the helm of key services. I think the real driver is the amount of money pouring into the tech space. Companies have to pay more to compete with each other for talent because there are so many tech companies trying to do tech things now. It’s as simple as that.
- fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
  Right, but the market caps have gone up so much. If you run some basic metric like market cap/number of engineers, places like facebook have an insane incentive to pay huge money for talent. The relative scope may have gone down (many people on one project/api), but the wide ranging impact on PnL/Profitability/Money generated by those individual engineers changes have gone up

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

> Assuming you’re ambitious and willing to relocate, you can now go to Silicon Valley, make all of the right moves, and amass millions of dollars in a decade of working for the right companies It's quite easy to do it in 4 years or less now. At current pay rates and stock growth rates, you have to be VERY optimistic to turn down a FAANG job.

ricardobayes 5y ago
That's very much true, even though I had an exit, if I could turn back the wheels of time, I would have spent a few years in a FAANG job. Way less stressful and you (can) have exposure to startup culture anyway there.
hemloc_io 5y ago
Yep and you also can learn to deliver products at scale. For me the main reason I took a FAANG job was to get enough money that I can chill for a couple years and build a failed startup ;). (And hopefully meet many smart people work with on it.)
sarma912 5y ago
Millions in 4 years? Damn, can you give me a rough calculation on how this happens?
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Senior offers from Facebook in Seattle are nearing $500k/y total comp.
  - madars 5y ago
    But that doesn't get you to millions (plural, post-tax) in 4 years...
    - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      Depending on your spending and your return on investments, it easily could have in the last 4 years... House prices (on 5:1 leverage) are up >100% THIS YEAR. The S&P is up ~30%. You need a ~20% return saving ~$300k per year to get >$2M in 4 years. This wasn't terribly difficult to get in the last 4 years. Who knows what the future will bring.

majani 5y ago

Yup, nowadays I see most MVPs and at first glance I am amazed at the quality. Back in the day, a well put together MVP was probably enough to make your product go viral

ricardobayes 5y ago
That depends heavily on the product, but yeah it's true. Also what I see is teams are getting better at focusing on their core value and stripping away unnecessary things at the beginning.

spamizbad 5y ago

Yeah, looking back to the mid-aughts you could probably "launch" a "product" in a few weeks. You could stretch that 5K into a few months of runway as your expenses are rent, food, internet, and maybe $150/month tops in SaaS stuff. Like you said, it was also easier to find people who wanted to work on that stuff. Tech jobs were less kushy and highly paid. Working at that kind of startup was a dream compared to slogging through crufty code at some company where software was viewed as a cost - rather than profit - center. But I think back then market rate for a mid-level dev was something like 70K.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Now companies seem to be in stealth for years.
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  True, partially I think because there's more founders nowadays with exits behind them and can bankroll an operation for years.