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> There is going to be a broad leveling of engineering salaries in my opinion. The engineer with 8-10 years experience making north of 500k at FAANGs is largely

> There is going to be a broad leveling of engineering salaries in my opinion. The engineer with 8-10 years experience making north of 500k at FAANGs is largely going away. If those salaries go away, so will the talent. These workers will start new tech companies that either eat away at market segments or end up costing large sums to acquire. You're right that it may take time to replace the salary in the short term.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
On the whole, I disagree. My primary point is the super high compensation numbers that were possible for top individual contributor engineers was largely made possible by the explosion in stock values of the biggest tech companies. That period (basically from post Great Recession until now) was largely an anomaly of 2 things that happened simultaneously: 1. Big tech vacuuming up an ever larger amount of worldwide revenue, but many of them are now hitting the law of large numbers, and 2. ultra low interest rates, which makes the present value of a future dollar (i.e. equity) worth a lot more. Sure, some talent will leave and start new companies, but on the whole I think hardly any of them will ever be able to match top-level FAANG compensation from the 2010-2020 period. Again, there will be some outliers, but even then I think the number of outliers will be small. For example, look at AI. A lot of people freaking out the most right now are people in other areas of AI who are realizing that all of their work is being completely obviated by LLMs.