Seems like a lot of people want the market to crash. Or, everyone is trying to time the pop.
Fundamentals for Tech is still pretty solid. Yes all the crypto/NFT can crash and burn but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash.
IMO the fact is simply that policymakers have become really good at ensuring that crashes like 2008 don’t happen again.
Don’t believe the BS VCs are trying to sell. Yeah, startups won’t be able to raise money, its ok, there’s a ton of demand elsewhere for Tech jobs.
As someone on HN had previously mentioned - the crash and burn is more for “cathartic” purposes.
Big Tech is the equivalent of 2008 derivatives and the greed , the brashness of I am smarter,the IPOs and VC exits,the parties, the insane wealth to gobble up competition and create monopolies.
The nerdy tech worker was replaced by the modern day chiseled , slick , stock options loaded tech worker who would have gone to banking in 2006. They pop adderall and leetcode and crack coding interviews like the bankers did brutal Goldman interviews. They go to burning man as a sign of lifestyle instead of counter culture.
Big Tech has upended the middle class and data privacy and gamed our emotions and attention so much that I am tired .
I will gladly see my stock values halved if I can get back my simpler times of 1998. I wish I could escape the monopolies and their hold on my everyday life . But maybe I am an old fart so ignore me .
This part resonated with me
> monopolies. The nerdy tech worker was replaced by the modern day chiseled , slick , stock options loaded tech worker who would have gone to banking in 2006. They pop adderall and leetcode and crack coding interviews like the bankers did brutal Goldman interviews. They go to burning man as a sign of lifestyle instead of counter culture
I think you are right. The money is moving towards tech and now the MBA crowd is looking to signal that they can code well enough to build products. I went to burning man about 5 years ago, it was already about money and status signaling more than counter culture. many of the people I met there were fairly successful tech people, they’re the ones who can afford it after all.
On average yes, but I tend to agree that the 'jock' tech worker is an archetype that didn't exist 20 years ago. Tech is no longer counterculture and has become a more high status profession in the eyes of the public. This is probably good for short term productivity but bad for long term innovation. I'm a big believer in the idea that the biggest innovations generally begin as low status or 'unsexy' endeavors.
> I'm a big believer in the idea that the biggest innovations generally begin as low status or 'unsexy' endeavors.
This is generally because low status or "unsexy" confers sufficient time to tinker, make recoverable mistakes and polish until the innovation gains traction. High status or "sexy" attracts all the wrong kinds of attention that brings all the wrong kinds of pressure that steals away that time.
I think it's more because prominent strains of Hollywood/American pop-culture valorizes the low status underdog who succeeds and shits on people who are already high status. We can pretend we are insulated from American cultural norms but we are not.
I don't think there is any real backing to the idea that low-status people are more likely to succeed.
> I don't think there is any real backing to the idea that low-status people are more likely to succeed.
Point. They definitely aren't more likely to succeed. I do contend they are however, afforded a small opportunity to work on their idea in obscurity until it reaches that stage it can gain traction. And in the meantime, position their chess pieces for the inevitable entry of the avaricious, high-status people looking for a kill at the low-status people's expense.
That is, low-status can be deployed as camouflage to deflect attention away from the gathering of resources and information to choose the time, place and terms to start the fight for maintaining control over anything that gains traction.
Same experience, I never met another tech person that fits the bro stereotype? most of my colleagues are like people on h1b. My idea of a bro is like those frat guys with the popped collars years ago.
Some of this other stuff just sounds like over excited college kids, like adderal and stuff?
I disagree. If nerds remain nerds and the focus is on learning and trying out cool stuff then Leetcode would not exist . There would be way more companies coming out to compete or springing up with cool stuff . Apart from TikTok upending Facebook , none of the other big tech firms have any competition and I do not see them having a viable threat in the next 5-6 years . They will buy up any competitors.
Anecdotally- I know of two people who quit tenured professor positions in physics and neuroscience to join big tech . The one in neuroscience had recently made a big find and Google Deepmind came and offered an insane amount of money she would never make even if she won the Nobel prize.
Leetcode is a counter response to an interview type that existed well before the current tech boom, and the interview type existed as long as google was an ascendant company, since they were the ones that popularized it. Before algorithmic interviews, there were microsoft's lateral thinking interviews that were the bullshit interview type du-jour that everyone complained about.
The money is the relatively recent thing that made people practice for leetcode more that wouldn't necessarily go into software otherwise, but the algorithmic interview was there before tech started paying a lot and became the only growth engine of the american economy that is left.
Oh please. The questions asked in modern day interviews are ridiculous. If you don't receive a specific quality and caliber of education, then you will be completely hopeless without Leetcode practice and CTCI. Do you seriously expect people to intuitively discover the Blum-Floyd-Pratt-Rivest-Tarjan algorithm in the space of a 30 min whiteboard interview?
Despite the FAANG acronym, Netflix was always a nothing burger in terms of BigTech. Even befits the crash they were like #50 in terms of market cap. BigTech should have always been FAAMG. With Microsoft instead of Netflix. Those five ads worth more than a trillion
FAANG was never about big tech it was about companies that experienced tremendous stock growth 100-300% in a short time.
Then people co opted the term to mean companies that paid well (wow the company with high stock growth pays more).
In regards to this Netflix was absolutely innovative in regards to engineering. They literally wrote the book on chaos practices. They also pay extremely high base salary ($400-600k).
Microsoft never paid well in regards to its peers.
I feel Netflix used to look like a tech companies couscous they where the first that use the new medium, and expand to the world market whit easy.
But in the long run they aren't, you (regular joe,jhon,juan, karen, maria,Raphaël) don't care whats the tech stack of Netflix and not as much for the ux, you care about content, and now you have all the platform who produce content (hbo, cbs, disney), they want to maximize they profits, and they know how to creates long term fans, sustain numbers of rating, Netflix don't.
They focus on license media, and short dopamine hits who work for 5 years, but now nobody care anymore.
> Apart from TikTok upending Facebook , none of the other big tech firms have any competition and I do not see them having a viable threat in the next 5-6 years . They will buy up any competitors
What does that have to do with nerds remaining nerds?
Theres definitely positions which the “slick MBA type” can fill in a tech company (PM, TPM, VP etc). But building, operating and reasoning about complex software systems is just hard and so demanding. It’s not possible to do this without having some level of “nerdiness” or love of technical things.
Keep telling yourself that. What we do is soooo hard and special and we're soooo smart. There are plenty of smart people, and guess what - they used to go into harder and more demanding jobs in search of high pay.
Plenty of would-be bankers end up in tech, and plenty of would-be-could-be doctors end up in tech. Plenty of people who care more about success and money than twos complement are ending up in tech.
Investment Banking? Way worse hours, way worse culture. Medicine? Way longer hours, way more difficult road to a career.
Tech? Easy path (BS in CS is easy), than LC for a few weeks, and boom, you'll land a job - unlike medicine which takes a decade and 2 degrees. Most people can stop work after a 9-5, except maybe for on-call which IB and Medicine both deal with in their own way. Tech isn't nearly as dependent on networking and socializing as IB, which means way more smart people who want good pay can do it, even if they aren't born into a great professional network.
> It’s not possible to do this without having some level of “nerdiness” or love of technical things.
Plenty of people aren't nerdy but are smart are filling up Silicon Valley and those open-offices across the country. Google's Operating System research teams? Probably nerdy. ACME Co's Random CRUD App team? Chill guy making a lot of money without knowing or caring about how compilers work, but very happy he can afford to visit Tahoe every weekend.
At my last FAANG job one of my coworkers didn't know what UDP or TCP were, and didn't care and wouldn't learn. Didn't want to learn about anything unless it was needed next sprint. He wasn't the best at his job, but he could do it just fine. Missed some opportunities to be more efficient by leaning on prior art and existing libs he never learned about, but got his work done and supported business goals. Parents told him to get a good job so he did.
> Keep telling yourself that. What we do is soooo hard and special and we're soooo smart.
I flip-flop every 6 months between thinking that everybody can do this and being absolutely floored that I myself can keep up with this.
One day we're writing HTML and CSS, and a few years later we're learning about the shadow DOM and why we may want to use React Native Web to run React Native on the web.
One day we're writing a LAMP CRUD app, and a few years later we're deploying a service mesh for resilience, visibility, and configurable networking - concepts that didn't even exist when we were writing CRUD apps.
I'm not a doctor/surgeon, but I don't think that the kind of work they do changes year to year at this pace?
I guess you could say that none of these concepts are really that difficult conceptually, but...what is...? Algebraic Topology? Chaos Theory?
It's a bit of both. Most of the work in our space is a lot lamer than we like to make it out to be. Almost anyone, with a modicum of training can do this. The hard problems, and by "the hard problems" I'm not talking about crazy algorithms but rather what does one do when the poop hits the fan, that's harder. Most people could still do it, but it takes a lot more training and experience.
One is development. The other is system ops. Some people like to handle both, and others don't.
I spent the last year migrating our backend off of heroku onto bare metal Proxmox servers with unlimited VMs. It blew my mind that 0, literally 0, of my developers took up my offer to give them free VMs (including KDE/Gnome with NoMachine/NX!!).
It turns out that my devs just want to be devs, and not use their free time to play on sys ops and k8s and ceph clusters.
When I saw this happen, I started hiring staff for sysops separately than expecting my devs to do so, and see much more clarity in output.
In summary, if you're writing the LAMP CRUD app, maybe someone else oughta be the one to deploy the service mesh.
> flip-flop every 6 months between thinking that everybody can do this and being absolutely floored that I myself can keep up with this.
I agree that it takes a certain way of thinking to be able to reason about strict logic and symbolic relationships. Just ask someone what (X or Y) equals when X and Y are both true. I knew people in my CS classes right up until the end that couldn't tell you correctly (because people in regular English think of "or" as "exclusive or" and its hard for some people to change their understanding).
I disagree with the concept about the rapidly changing tech jargon. I think in SF tech startup scene it may be that crazy, but once I start a job, I use their stack, and it stays that way for years. Different companies different stacks though. Big-Tech is even easier since they have their own custom stacks that are pretty stable.
> I'm not a doctor/surgeon, but I don't think that the kind of work they do changes year to year at this pace?
On the contrary. It changes all the time. They always have to be learning about new medication, new surgical techniques, new diseases. Ask a doctor in 2019 to diagnose the Sars-Cov-2019 Novel Coronavirus. Then ask them about ivermectin.
> I guess you could say that none of these concepts are really that difficult conceptually, but...what is...? Algebraic Topology? Chaos Theory?
I would say that real theory is actually pretty hard in CS. Math is famously unapproachable to people who don't "get it" and I think CS theory shares similar logical rigor - honestly similar to law and how it is a "different" logic than most people are ready for.
I know rocket scientists, and their classes were actually-intense math - but conceptually/logically easy IFF you could do the math. The basic biology of how a viral infection works is pretty straightforward (and taught to 13yo's), but again, thats not the hard part of the job of a doctor.
But most CRUD apps are not. And most people write CRUD apps. At my BigTech jobs, the company always had custom-in-house build tools that were great at doing deterministic reproducible builds and they were always based on strong theory and rigor and had white papers. But how many people actually have to do that at those companies?
A lot of the difficulty to modern web development and so forth don’t even feel like engineering, so much as navigating bureaucracy. The scale of complexity in modern codebases has turned us into software bureaucrats.
I just disagree that the work done by doctors & IB are at all comparable to what is done by tech workers.
Tech is poaching from academia and quantitative finance people -- not the normal professional careers because the type of thinking that is needed is very different from IB & law & medicine. It's not about hours.
I know plenty of doctors and lawyers and consultants and IB. The only people I know in other careers who I think could make it as well as the top tech workers have are people who are in physics and other STEM academia (my major) or quants who work for major market making firms (ie. Jane St, Citadel).
> I just disagree that the work done by doctors & IB are at all comparable to what is done by tech workers.
You're over thinking this. I'm talking about high school and college students picking majors. I'm talking about what parents telling their kids to do. Immigrants moving to America picking a career to support their family.
No one quits Goldman Sachs's deal floor to work at Facebook. They skip the finance class and go to data structures freshman year. The alum they met at google are rich and happy and the alum from wall street are bitter and tired and overworked.
> the type of thinking that is needed is very different
Eh, its different but its not that crazy. Most of tech is not that hard. The harder part of being at a top firm anywhere is being generally successful enough to achieve the goal. The top few % of people that go to top school and go to top wall street banks or consulting firms or get into med school can do that.
> "ACME co" et al aren't paying $300k+.
You can replace acme with any tech company. You can work at apple making 300k and making a crud app. Tons of Silicon Valley companies are paying 300k+ for engineers and many of those engineers aren't solving problems that are particularly hard.
> It’s not possible to do this without having some level of “nerdiness” or love of technical things.
If you pay enough you will get a lot of focused, attentive, highly intelligent people. Accounting and law have never lacked for employees because they pay. Any industry that pays well enough will get good entry level people and if it continues to do well one day they’ll be that kind of person with 30 years of experience.
I agree but people hear nerd and they picture the John Hughes caricature. This is no more accurate than Hollywood’s “Wall Street bro”. There’s some seriously douchey needs around.
Been hanging out on a lot of personal finance related communities. For people outside the tech bubble, this has been brutal. Rents have increased 20-50% in many cases and wages haven't kept pace. People making otherwise decent income are being forced to shack up with roommates in their 30s just to pay rent.
Worst of all, it has debased work. Idiots threw random dollar amounts on crypto memecoins and came out with hundreds of thousands. Degens gambled on memestocks and made millions. Anyone who did the "stable" thing of saving and investing wisely got left behind.
The worker shortage isn't just because people suddenly became lazier. They've absolutely debased money. And in the process, debased work. Why work hard when gambling and speculation and straight up lying ("hustling") are rewarded way, way more?
Anyone who thinks this is sustainable is delusional. And insensitive.
Maybe in some cases. Not on average [0]. Here is SF [1]
> Anyone who did the "stable" thing of saving and investing wisely got left behind.
Gambling has always been a thing. Lots of people lost big on crypto.
> Why work hard when gambling and speculation and straight up lying ("hustling") are rewarded way, way more?
If you actually think that, go ahead and make your millions. Efficient markets are not that easy. If you knew you could make more ahead of time, it would already be priced in.
I suggest spending less time hanging in communities and hearing people spitball and more time looking at the facts.
Are we in a housing crisis? Yes, of course. But the problem is not Californians or crypto bros.
Did not realize these claims were over the last decade... rents are up 37% on average, which is 15% more than we would expect with a standard 2% inflation.
And of course we return to the old HN bogeyman of shadow inflation. there are a number of independent academic researchers who track prices showing changes roughly in line with FRED cpi, but I'm sure those researchers are also part of the conspiracy.
> The nerdy tech worker was replaced by the modern day chiseled , slick , stock options loaded tech worker who would have gone to banking in 2006.
This reads to me as someone who has been in tech since the 80s as a new way to put down the nerds now that they are actually not socially despised any more.
“nerds now that they are actually not socially despised any more.”
- go to any working class area in San Francisco and tell them you work in big tech . See if you are not socially despised . Go tell anyone working blue collar jobs that you work in big tech in the Bay Area or Seattle and see if their reaction is not one of despisal.
That did not exist before unless I was living in a bubble.
> go to any working class area in San Francisco and tell them you work in big tech . See if you are not socially despised . Go tell anyone working blue collar jobs that you work in big tech in the Bay Area or Seattle and see if their reaction is not one of despisal.
This doesn’t have anything to do with being a ‘nerd’ or even “big tech”. It’s about housing costs and the result of NIMBYism from long term residents longing for the past.
People are going to move to the Bay, you can’t stop change. If you make it harder only the people with more money will be here which is what’s happening.
Nietzsche wrote extensively about this phenomenon in his genealogy of morals.
> Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you eternally wicked cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will be eternally wretched, cursed and damned. (OGM 1:7)
Of course they’re despised. Strange people with alien interests doing incomprehensible jobs making tons of money. Animus is normal and actual behavior is ~irrelevant.
I will tell you how we know. There is a correlation between Ivy League graduates flooding Wall Street and an inevitable market crash. Why? Because they can't help themselves but come up with exotic trading (read: gambling) instruments that no one understands and then torching a whole sector for profit. See: the 2008 housing crisis. I just rewatched the Big Short. It's absurd.
Well, now we have Web 3.0. It's the same type of people, creating new devices of gambling, cleaning out the laymen. Tired - NFTs, wired - Soulbound tokens.
> Well, now we have Web 3.0. It's the same type of people, creating new devices of gambling, cleaning out the laymen.
So what are the tech and "BigTech" equivalents of broad market index funds like VTSAX held for the long-term starting in one's teens and dollar cost averaging out into bonds in latter decades?
There aren't. I am not comparing the web to the market, I am pointing out that in the past the tech sector did not attract such a large number of frauds and conmen. It was just this thing the nerds did.
I'm 100% sure that countercultures still exist in general, and I think most people who say otherwise are from a specific counterculture that's gone mainstream.
Think about things that are outright criminal, that breach the TOS on most websites, or that are wildly offensive or ridiculous. Being repulsive doesn't mean something isn't a counterculture; in fact, it can be sign that it is.
Fire up IG and you can find people vandalizing property illegally. Really search anything graffiti related. That didn’t exist 15 years ago, maybe hosted on some niche forums, other content was underground magazines and shops. Flickr was the first place you really started seeing this start, IG changed eveything.
Illegal shows? Well dead city punx just had an illegal show in the LA river! Cops couldn’t even break it up. Streamed live on IG, lots of good advertising content.
All counterculture is mainstream, all of it is profitable with advertising. Burn a house down, riot about capitalism, at the end of the day you’re making a capitalist or mega corp money if someone can get the content from a device.
Want to truly be rebellious? Be boring and stop using social media.
Don't strap a tracking device to your wrist.
Don't experience the moment filtered through a slab of magic glass.
Don't broadcast your thoughts and actions to the world.
This is today's counter-culture. Something like the final scene in 'Fahrenheit 451'.
So well put, captures precisely why capitalism has been so successful and still persists. everything, even anti-capitalist rhetoric, gets folded into the money machine and keeps it moving.
I would cite heroin users, thinspo anorexics, (real) Neo-Nazis, some varieties of paedophile, and credit card skimmers as examples of communities with their own unique cultures (disclaimer: often awful ones) that are counter to the mainstream. The first two you can maybe make an argument for being integrated into the mainstream, but the last three are totally against the current culture.
People were saying "Counter culture stopped existing a decade ago" when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s. I'd bet good money they said it before that too.
This reeks of bitterness. "Simpler times" of 1998 when a whole generation of boomers benefited from Alpha squeezed through multiple wars, fossil fuel addiction, polluting the planet, severely destabilizing the real estate markets, unethical banks.
Sure people that thrived then are not thriving as much now, but it's a much more sustainably prosperous few decades since then.
I agree. there is not going to be major crash as all the overrated pundits are predicting, who keep being wrong over and over.
Yes all the crypto/NFT can crash and burn but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash.
Crypto is just a very expensive hobby/fad. It has no bearing on the overall economy. It could all go to zero and the affect on the rest of the economy and stock market would be small or minimal. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 have recovered far faster than bitcoin. Crypto generates no profits, big tech generates hundreds of billions of dollars of profit annually. Facebook alone makes $40 billion/year profit, about 3x that of Walmart.
Regardless of the value of crypto itself, it does impact the job market, especially in the security space. A collapse would reduce demand for security professionals.
Journalists especially seem eager to have tech put back in its place.
These days it feels like they are straight up antagonistic towards the whole industry. A quick scan of The Verge homepage, I see mostly sarcastically negative stories (Netflix is finally taking a page from the rest of Hollywood) and neutral PR placements (Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered is coming to PC in August). As far as I can tell the only positive headlines are affiliate listicles (Here are the best tablet deals right now)...
To be fair, anyone sitting on the sidelines watching tech companies spend 15-20 years without making a profit - or ever making a profit - is going to start thinking "what the hell is going on"
More than watching tech go down, I think there's just a general anxiety that all basic business fundamentals have been turned upside down, and much of it is led by tech.
The markets are rallying right now because macro data is poor (which means Fed rate hikes might slow down). It's a bizarro economy and anyone who thinks long-term is understandably queasy.
> To be fair, anyone sitting on the sidelines watching tech companies spend 15-20 years without making a profit - or ever making a profit - is going to start thinking "what the hell is going on"
Big tech companies have been absolute money making machines. What are you talking about?
The ones at the very top -- Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon -- are profitable. There's been a good number of big hyped names and decade+ "startups" that might have a lot of revenue but don't have much if anything left over in the net column. (Uber most famously.)
> Journalists especially seem eager to have tech put back in its place.
Journalists first turned on Craigslist when they stole classified revenue, then they turned on Facebook when they stole advertising revenue. They started turning on tech as a whole as collateral damage.
The whole time they shat on wall-street for stealing everyone else's money and being rich. When tech got rich, they turned on them. First in the dot-com era when SF started to get corporate-ified and not counter cultural, and then everywhere when Tech became the new upper-middle class and linked (by journalists) with society's problems.
Tech is never not going to be among the best paying profession until governments regulate the industry into less profitability. If Google can make $millions per-employee by having a global reach, then there is no way to stop the salary creep compared to companies that only have local-reach.
Its the job of journalists to bring a cynical/critical eye to important things in society. I'm glad that these folks exist and its their fulltime job to call out bullshit. Of course they will misfire at times.
People in tech also seem to forget that a lot of attention to tech is brought to them by the media. The first adopters are generally computer nerds and teenagers; people in media write about it, glamorize and make it mainstream (how many Tech CEOs have been on the cover of TIME magazine?). In fact, my personal perspective is that they haven’t been critical enough; when instagram and WhatsApp were gobbled up by Facebook the prevailing media sentiment was that of the unlimited possibilities in tech for wealth generation rather than concern about the anti competitiveness of the market that it caused.
Wasn't this started because before journalists started losing their jobs, they were telling blue collar unemployed workers to learn to code? So people turn that against them.
> but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash.
Not sure about the US but over here in Europe there are billions of euros (probably tens of billions) that are poured right now into the market thanks to the latest EU Next Generation funds (basically post-Covid support money, in fact a typical keynesian move, with all its pluses and minuses).
There's a huge digitalisation push that comes from top to down, with actual money set up to pay for (almost) all of it. Add to it the the typical keynes-ian "accumulator" logic and things should be ok for at least the next couple of years for many computer programmers and IT people based in Europe, especially those that will get into contracting and will be able to land some part of the pie (a very big pie, as I've mentioned).
Systems fail in many different ways. Its not that the market can never fail, that would be an absurd claim. They are less likely to fail along the lines that they failed before.
What we’re seeing instead is people fearing a repetition of the same mistakes and the same failures.
Yeah it won't literally be a repeat of 2001 or 2008.
I mentioned CMBS which along with crypto are the fairly safe bets on what will meltdown this time, and they weren't involved (or didn't exist) last time.
The script also tends to vary. I was quiet surprised that the markets had a fit over the 1% fed funds rate and was caught a bit off guard.
They're announcing very directly though that they're going to invert the yield curve. They are quite concerned about wage inflation. They are more than willing to tank the economy to get it under control and are invoking the name of Paul Volker. There is no way we get out of this with a "soft landing" and things are going to detonate.
Then the fun really begins because the political climate is going to be much worse than 2008/2009. The Tea Party Republicans ostensibly claim to be against any kind of bailout and they'll be willing to play chicken with the entire economy in order to harm the Biden administration.
It is pretty obvious that it is going to be somewhat different this time.
The idea that policymakers will magically navigate us through these waters though harkens back to the Clinton/Greenspan era of policy. But we don't even have anyone like "The Maestro" running the show this time.
Wages are out of control and they're going to crash the economy to get them back under control. That's what they do. They haven't figured out anything magical to avoid the pain, and they always underestimate what kind of chaos it will cause.
Mega corp comp doesn’t work like that. It takes years to adjust their bandings. As a hiring manager it always frustrates you because you’re hopelessly out of touch with the pervading market for comp. If they want to reduce costs they’ll slow hiring before reduce comp.
Isn't this mostly just due to the shift away from equity-based compensation? Nobody wants your stock if it's tanking.
That said, as small-medium companies start crashing and burning, the megacorps that quickly ramp up hiring incentives will be in a pretty awesome spot in 5 years, as they'll have snatched up more great talent than their slower-moving competitors.
Successfully negotiating for more equity usually depends on other offers. Now that mega corps are clearly outperforming the Uber and DoorDashes and Squares of the world they have no competition other than other megacorps and don’t have to counter with more equity simply because someone has an offer from Uber.
Didn’t mean pay would drop below a band but you’re likely going to be able to get away with the lower end instead of the higher end of a band if you’re perceived as “safe” in this market
If you already have a job then they’re explicitly competing against your existing employer even without other offers. You’re right though if you can’t shop other jobs it might depress your upside, and if you’re coming in off a layout you should expect parity unless you have competitive offers. Ultimately though comp models won’t change.
Stock valuations had a pretty large pullback though so RSU compensation for existing employees is a lot lower than it was at the height of the red hot market.
there are plenty of ways a company can pay you less without having to change their entire comp model and wasn’t suggesting that was what was happening
the point is a flight to safety gives Megacorps leverage they didn’t have 1-3 years ago. they can pay you at the lower end of a pay band or interview you for a lower level than you asked for. and if people are desperate enough because they are in a tanking company or laid off they might take it.
And when everyone is thinking the same thing they can be pickier and get better quality talent for the same money regardless
They won’t. I’ve spent 30 years in fairly senior positions at mega corps. It’ll take a few years and only if the other mega corps reduce pay. Their response to a lot of available talent isn’t to pay less it’s to reduce their conversion rates and be more selective. They aren’t competing for talent against startups or even places like Coinbase and Uber for the most part. It’s against each other.
The “big money” only comes from “equity comp” if the stock market is going up - which it isn’t doing now.
Both companies are increasing their base pay precisely because employees like the assurance that their pay isn’t based on stock price.
For me personally, it would have taken a lot less work dealing with real estate if I could just have handed the bank my W2s with all cash compensation than having to deal with a 2 year prorated signing bonus and a 4 year vesting schedule.
Don’t you think that Netflix’s employees are kind of happy that their compensation is all cash right now?
Except for the few who foolishly chose to take their pay in cash + future RSUs instead of cash.
Both MS and Amazon announced they were increasing total compensation. Amazon specifically is slowly starting to weight cash comp over stock.
Got an email last week from Apple “People team” - aka HR. They said they’ve increased the salary pool for this year, so I guess we’ll see how that pans out.
There are pay bands. If you have multiple offers you can usually counter for more equity. In this market if you’re a megacorp you have the upper hand when the competition is Uber and their stock is down 70% eg you don’t need to counter so aggressively and offer so much more money whereas you might’ve a year ago
> Seems like a lot of people want the market to crash. Or, everyone is trying to time the pop.
This same sort of article has been posted here a couple times in the past two weeks. Some news outlets seem incredibly eager to report this story
I feel like there's a certain sort of resentment from the news media towards the tech industry in general, and it's gotten worse in recent years. I think some of it is political, and some of it is out of fear because different outputs of the tech industry have radically changed other industries (e.g. cable TV's former monopoly on entertainment) and their success is dependent on their ability to maintain an online presence
Financial crashes are often precipitated by short term factors eg inability to come up with enough capital, cascading failures as financial firms fail and spook all investors. The Fed has essentially acted more proactively to assure the market that it won’t let this happen.
If the fundamentals of the system are broken, there isn’t much even the fed could do. That doesn’t seem to be the case (modulo things the Feds cant control eg Foreign Wars).
Yeah, I wouldn’t say we successfully prevented a 2008 crash until we’re through the next crash - as arguably the 2008 crash was a prevention of a 2001 crash.
You can’t stop a market bubble from popping with policy. You can only keep the cycle going until the bubble is bigger then the policy maker… which, since the bubble grows exponentially, is soon no matter how big that policy maker is.
In theory, yeah. I don't know if this has been done in the past 30ish years, though... it seems that, mysteriously, the people in charge of making those decisions are always the same people who have a lot invested in seeing the bubble continue to inflate.
Fundamentals for Tech is still pretty solid. Yes all the crypto/NFT can crash and burn but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash.
IMO the fact is simply that policymakers have become really good at ensuring that crashes like 2008 don’t happen again.
Don’t believe the BS VCs are trying to sell. Yeah, startups won’t be able to raise money, its ok, there’s a ton of demand elsewhere for Tech jobs.