* Today's big tech companies are still relatively young, so the workforce is young.
* The companies have grown exponentially in recent years, and they've hired many new grads to meet hiring targets. This would also shift the average employee age lower.
* The people who joined these companies 15-20 years ago would likely be very well-off financially by now, so they don't need to keep working. They've retired early, created start ups, left the Bay Area, etc.
I think there's likely some truth to these claims. But Silicon Valley also has a reputation for ageism, so who knows.
https://i1.wp.com/danwang.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/bach...
CS enrollments reached a max around 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble. But when the bubble burst in 2000-2001, enrollments plummeted in 2002, 2003 and 2004, leading to the local minimum in graduates in 2009.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity/images/BS...
Facebook and Google do ads, and most online advertisers look for immediate, real value. These success stories are as real as e-commerce.
That brings us to Amazon. It's e-commerce is real, but margins are low. AWS looks more like the dot-com bubble in that some of that money is coming from VCs. If funding dries up, AWS gets hit. That said, there's a larger migration to the cloud, and that's also real.
Apple makes high-margin phones that people all over the world buy. Full stop.
Netflix is the least like the others. It's smaller, and while it revolutionized how we consume content, it's current model is heavily funded by debt, and it's facing stiff competition. No one's talking about how Netflix will take over long-form video, they're griping at having to pay for six streaming services.
The alternate story for tech salaries is that PCs and the internet weren't ready for prime time in 2000. After the bubble burst, there were too few CS grads for when the internet was finally ready. The internet wasn't ready until 2006-2010 when most people had broadband at home, smartphones matures, and LTE was ready.
These salaries come with a big gamble on SV real estate and the market performance of these companies. The first one is a big difference between young and middle aged people. In my 20s I averaged a new home every year as my financial situation changed and I wanted to live in different parts of a city. Now in my 30s with a wife and kid I don't expect to move for 10+ years. The only way to achieve that is buying a house. Which, in SV, means plunking down 3-4 million. That's doable given the salaries, but it's a huge bet that the real estate bubble won't burst.
Same thing with the market performance. Sure, the FAANGs + MS (and minus Netflix) make a ridiculous amount of money and that likely won't change. But what about companies like Snap, Pinterest, Lyft, et.al. that lose money? There's a huge risk that these companies (1) go bankrupt or (2) decide to focus on profitability and slash their engineering workforce.
If you're a 20 something renter you ride the gravy train as long as it keeps coming. If you're a 30 something with small kids and a mortgage you want stability.
I think you're pretty deep in the bubble or you have really extreme tastes. I have tons of friends in their 30s with kids in SV and NYC. Almost all of them are renters. The actual financial calculation for renting vs. buying in these markets is brutal. You need to stay for 10-20 years for buying to start to make sense.
Also, you don't need $3-4mm in either of these markets to buy a place suitable for two adults and a child. There are plenty of 2 bedrooms for a third of that.
If you want to afford a nice house in a good neighborhood with good schools in the Bay Area, you’ve got to go into management.
What you might be trying to say is there are more available positions at VP than DE, so your chances of making it are better? Or that being promoted to VP is easier than to DE? I think having seen how the sausage is made, would agree with both of those.
Sure, it exists. How many DEs do you know of, vs. VPs?
How do you get a DE job? Usually you are the most well known person in your field.
How you do you get a VP job? You have to be a pretty good manager.
At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many.
That's the BS. It's like saying "there is totally a path to getting really rich as an actor!". Sure, there is a path, but not a lot of people make it. And even the ones that do usually get there by also doing the management path (producer) at the same time.
The lie is in the claim it's just as easy to climb the DE ladder as it is the VP ladder.
It's not. Not even close.
Fwiw, the number is significantly higher than 10, though still fewer than there are VPs.
That said, things get tricky: there are DEs who have reports, and there are VPs with no (or trivial, like 3) reports. But either way, if your metric is DE/VP or if it's manager of a large org vs IC/TLM, the number of IC-track people is higher than you suggest.
But re-read the description of "Software Engineer (II)" closely:
> Typically 2-5+ years of experience. [...] At many companies, this is considered a 'career-level', as in you can spend the rest of your career operating at this level without being pushed out for not being promoted.
So, it doesn't suggest it caps out at 5 years, and this could be where people who do "good, but not outstanding" work end up. Also the next level says "Role shifts more towards design rather than implementation depending on size and expectations at company.", so maybe the big break isn't "seniority and how good you are at your job" but rather "can you, and do you want to, work at the next level of design abstraction?"
WHAT?
I don't know a profession with high knowledge requirements where after 2 years you can and are expected as a job req to manage a team.
This speaks to me two things: a. a lot of staff is young and unexperienced b. rotation in segment <5 is big
Ageism is real, but so is the growth of the engineering profession, and so is early retirement (which is definitely possible at the salaries senior people make, especially if you consider they bought houses in Silicon Valley for a lot less than they sell for now).
Jackpot!
All it takes for this to happen is that the number of software engineers in the world grows by 10--20% every year. (Because this means it doubles every 5 years, which means half the workforce has less than or equal to five years of experience.
I recall reading somewhere that the actual growth of the workforce is even greater than that -- somewhere around 25%!
Around minute 13
So the proportion for a large majority of startups is not similar to what this document shows, which is centered to bigger (1000+ engineers) companies.
They might get tired of the politics at their company, or they just want to try something new, or founding/joining a smaller company might be the easiest way for them to continue to get promoted
According to this, the Senior, Staff, or Principal titles are generally for people with 5+ year experience? Those roles make up 30%, 10%, and 3% of companies respectively. That leaves 57% of engineers in positions listed are usually for people with 0-5 years experience. Does that mean over half of engineers are relatively new to the industry? Are there large numbers of engineers that go their entire career without getting a Senior title? Are there large numbers that end up changing industries? I know some people transition from hands on engineering to management, but there can't possibly be that many management jobs to make up that difference, right?