IMO this is 100% right and not just for new grads. The compensation for software engineers is on such a broad spectrum. Even if I think leetcode style questions are completely inane and reveal horrendous values, I'll put up with it for the prospect of double the compensation (or more).
I wouldn’t go that far. I did say college grads. I know a number of people who are 40+ (including myself) who would never want to give up their lives in the burbs with the 2.1 kids in the good school system to relocate and work for BigTech.
My story is that in 2020, I was 46 years old living in the 3200 square foot house I had built in 2016 making $150K (and getting offers locally for $170k) my wife was also working part time making around $25K in the school system.
We had more than “enough”. We went on two or three trips a year, had “date nights”, saving “enough” for retirement. I ignored every message from recruiters at BigTech. I actively didn’t want to work at any large company as a software developer nor did I want to move.
The only reason that the recruiter from Amazon Retail even piqued my interest was that when she suggested I do a slight pivot to “enterprise application modernization” cloud consulting.
The extra money is nice. But it really just ended up going into my bank account and didn’t make an appreciable difference in our lives besides “retiring my wife”.
I would have no problem going back to my (inflation adjusted) prior compensation.
Your case is a strong argument for remote work. Tech companies are kind of weird in that they all focus on the same cities, SF or Seattle, then NYC, Austin, Boston and then maybe they branch out from there. As if great engineers don't live in Kansas City. There is a lot of talent being left on the table imo when companies aren't willing to hire remote, or create more small satellite offices if they can't accept remote. There's a lot of great engineers working at say Lockheed Martin because that is the highest paying job around them, that would be a strong asset to any tech company.
I hinted at it but I didn’t make it clear. The software development job was “remote until Covid cleared” in mid 2020. The role in Professional Services assigned me to a “virtual office” permanently with travel when “things got back to normal”.
You're phrasing this as disagreeing with me but I don't see your anecdote as contradicting me at all. A lot of people would strongly prefer to make $400k rather than $150k, and not just college grads. Not everyone, and maybe not you, but many people. Are we actually disagreeing here?
I know plenty of developers 40+ who would never give up their lives in the burbs of Atlanta (where I lived until this year) to move to the west coast.
Even now, I’m almost sure that the new college grads who I work with (and one that I mentored as an intern) that came in after I did at an L4 will be promoted to an L6 long before I will (if I ever get promoted). I actually told my manager and my skip manager that I don’t want to be an L6 or the responsibilities it entails. I’m already saving/investing every penny of my RSUs. My base salary is about the same as it was before I left “enterprise development”. My fixed expenses are actually lower
Well, the longer version of the story is that when we got married in 2012, we had both been laid off from the same company. Her job increasingly became “I need you to work for the benefits while I change jobs 5 times between contract and perm building my resume and getting my career back on track”.
By 2020 she was working for the school system part time on the school schedule.
I used the two year prorated signing bonus to pay off all of our debts, increase savings and reduce our expenses.
We also moved from the big house in the burbs of Atlanta to a smaller condo in Florida and we don’t pay state income taxes.
So yeah over the past three years I both increased my compensation and reduced our fixed expenses.
Big tech includes more people, and pays more, now than it did in 2019. 2020 and 2021 hiring and offers were unprecedented. Things have slowed down, but this is no where near a dead, or even cold, industry.
Yea, I was just told by an AWS employee that they're desperately trying to hire as many people as they can still. Those companies are massive. The layoffs and divisions with hiring freezes don't seem to even make up a tenth of their capacity to hire.
People who work for BigTech are still making those “absurd “ total comp levels. I see no indication that the offers are much lower or that when reviews come, they aren’t attempting to offer more stock to keep them at somewhat decent levels.
The amount that Big Tech can afford to pay is correlated to their revenue.
The amount that Big Tech is willing to pay is correlated to the market supply of employees.
But I'm unconvinced that a very profitable company will decide to pay less than it can afford, in order to acquire the best engineering talent it can, when their revenue is directly linked to their engineering products.
The only thing that would make FAANG pay nosedive is if they made an organizational decision that they didn't want to prioritize software development.
So basically, if one of them decided to hire an Eddie Lampert type.
I agree that they could indeed be paying their engineers far more and still make a profit, but that’s just supply versus demand. They found the pay bands that provide the sweet spot:
Relative maximums for profit and talent willing to accept those salaries.
