hey sure there is a bubble there, but last time I checked BA wasn't caput mundi yet. Plenty non inflated startups do exist, even if not specifically there.
Where the whole economy is sustained by VC money, well, there's gonna hit the hardest. But doesn't seem that the whole IT world is following that model.
Maybe not. Seems like many here are too young. I'm only in my early 30s and am already feeling deja vu. Life is strange.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution
Accordingly, there's no reason to be investing in fluff like file sharing, app-based bike delivery, or "valuable" services like Shazam when there's real work to be done. In other words, the VC correction unfolding now is exactly that, a correction (long overdue, to my mind, and an unambiguously healthy thing). It will hurt a lot of overextended people to be sure, and unprofitable companies with dubious valuations that are laying people off now are wise to get ahead of the crunch.
As the squeeze tightens, salaries will even out, the balance of power will shift to employers, traffic may improve (slightly), and rents may even stop climbing. But 20-30% declines in the overall housing market? Dream on. Prices here are a function of a massive shortage, off-the-charts desirability, and deeply-rooted peculiarities in the tax code (Prop. 13), not Florida-style speculation. All of these factors are far more impervious to temporary downturns in the employment market.
Having lived through the dot.com crash, I can certainly hear echoes, but deja vu it isn't. The world is now a very different place.
That's not the same situation. Of course you're going to see the $150-200k premium for engineers fall once startups, funding, and jobs disappear. It's already happening in the form of cutting RSUs and bonus packages.
And it has happened before. Why is it so hard to understand this?
Regardless, I was stating that your dismissal of "basic economics" was wrong. It's not basic economics, there's a lot that goes into the equation. Wages might go down. Wages might not go down by a ton. They might drop like a rock. It all depends on a number of factors, but blithely dismissing people with some nonesense about econ 101 is not being intellectually honest.
The key is that wages for /engineers/ will fall if funding and jobs disappear in the tech sector. Today's wages for engineers are high and will be unsustainable when things go bust.
How much they will fall is anyone's guess. But the reasoning behind why they will fall is very straightforward.
Your extremely talented engineers who build things at scale and understand the fundementals, who are basically a safe per of hands, are still going to be in deep demand. Profitiable companies that work at scale are still going to have real problems and are unlikely to turn around and tell their engineers that they're going to be getting significantly less money, as those engineers are already in their own market and these companies will still want to compete for them.
The startups filled with architecture astronauts who spend most of their time overdesigning, learning new tools, and basically doing anything that isn't meeting user needs, delivering the product or tackling some tough engineering problem, then you're likely going to see a drop because they're not really worth it in the first place.
However, remove the funding and force these companies to actually compete on merit and only those who are actually capable of delivering will still exist. At that point, hopefully, we'll see a rise of new leaders who actally value excellence.
The point is, we can only afford to value hipness over experience in bubbles and it looks like this one's about to burst. Of course, I'm not from the future, so I could be wrong.
You can argue that the drop in employment in startup land may see some movement outside the bay area and into boring lower paid dev jobs, but I doubt that it will be more than a small blip.
TL;DR: If you're at a start up the good times might be over. If you're not, don't expect much change (maybe less likely to see a pay rise). If you're just coming out of Uni and into the job market, you may see interesting times.
Maybe the typical age on HN is 21? :)
It will.
> Engineer salaries are not going to drop a whole lot.
Basic economics say that will follow.
None of these events are isolated. They're interconnected and cascade. Everyone will be affected, even those who are flipping burgers in the Bay Area.