My buddy is a nurse in Bay Area with a CRNA, it’s pretty much understood you make 225k plus any overtime so there’s not much more to discuss.
https://www.thestar.com/business/personal_finance/2020/09/21...
In no world are SWEs "relatively speaking" little people compared to lawyers.
However, in our field you end up with people who have sat around in their same SWE job at DuPont/Lockheed or some other boomer company for 10 years and are making $80k while new grads are hitting $150k+ TC going into Google and 7 years experienced engineers can hit $450k TC at the big tech companies.
A tech company with a good moat can easily extract millions in value out of the work of SWEs building more crap for them. That's why they are willing to compete for competent engineers. If they didn't bring in that kind of cash, the companies just wouldn't pay for it, period.
Employees talking money with each other has zero bearing on what a company is willing to offer. I worked at a hotel in high school and everyone knew the hourly pay of every position in the hotel. It didn't get us raises.
The skyrocketing wages for engineers are because until recently, tech companies were illegally conspiring to not compete for competent engineers.
It's true that some market forces and potential value of what is created are factors else nobody would pay for the premium, but he generally scarcity rules here.
For a contrived example, why is caviar astronomically more expensive than bread? It's not the cost of production. It's not the fact that people like it more than bread.
It's just scarce.
Like...I had foie gras for the first time a few years ago, and while I thought it was pretty good, it definitely wasn't mindblowly good, and definitely wasn't worth the price.
(Later, I looked up what foie gras actually was and decided I'd never eat it again)
Yes, but it's an acquired taste.
If caviar was scarce, and the only people interested in buying it had no money, then it would simply be unavailable. Or maybe whatever little supply there is would sell for as much as the buyers could afford.
> It's true that some market forces and potential value of what is created are factors else nobody would pay for the premium
Although, amazingly demand can be manufactured to some extent (where potential demand has to exist of course). De Beers managed it with 'A Diamond Is Forever' where they managed to become the de facto engagement ring stone. Scarcity + good marketing does seem to be a magnet for the wealthy.
The government requires that companies publicly report salary data for H1Bs. You can google for that data. Here's one site https://h1bsalary.online/
In my opinion a huge role in the raise of tech salaries is simply constrained real-estate in the bay area. Just looking at rents and homeprices, I wonder if cost-of-living adjusted salaries have actually gone up much in the bay area.
However...it does set the bar for the country overall, which is good for everyone.
Secondly, i'm not sure about brag but I think tech companies have realized that skin-in-the-game has resulted in shared success. This is also great for everyone -- companies, and workers.
For better or for worse, this lead to discussions about salary, negotiating practices, and to people looking elsewhere.
I sometimes speak with people that work in other fields and many of them have zero clue about these topics, whereas in most IT-related discussion boards (whether it's HN, reddit or whatever) there's a related thread in an almost periodic cadence. We in IT are kinda obsessed with these topics (we're discussing this on a VC-owned discussion board after all).
On a different topic: is there any data for salaries in other fields for the same companies (FAANG and similar) ? It'd be interesting to see how much earns, for example, a lawyer in such companies.