Well, there are two categories of wages for tech workers: FAANGs and everyone else.

If the tech stock bloodbath continues, that certainly will impact wages on the FAANG side. People might start leaving for places that offer more cash comp, or FAANGs might increase RSUs to compensate.

It seems like a lot of the recent wage growth is at the lower-mid tiers, which make up the bulk of the industry. So, if companies that pay in the $80-120 range start cutting back on hiring, we might see a softening of wages for normal developers. I have not seen this happening...yet.

Not necessarily. The FAANG stock prices are low right now due the overall market slump (except may be FB or NFLX). They will highly likely bounce back along with the rest of the market in a while. So getting a fat count of RSUs from a FAANG company at a bargain price (usually based on price on/around starting date) may likely have a huge payoff in a few years.

I agree, but you are still betting on a lottery ticket here. Likely, a lot of companies might not recover and just slowly grow (Netflix?) and not make too much movement.

Netflix pays cash so engineer comp is fairly insulated from market fluctuations. In the past few years, that may have seemed like a negative, but right now it’s a blessing.

Facebook and Coinbase are unique cases. Coinbase was fueled by cheap money and crypto craze. Facebook is ceding way to TikTok and due to huge investments in VR tech. Companies with profits should tighten the hatches and come out fine after 12-18 months.

All those crazy 500k+ offers going around over the last 6 months are already softer thanks to RSU value dropping. Some people are already getting 30% less then they thought they were getting (at least for now).

The big secret is those companies knew a sell off was imminent and that their stock was overvalued. The 500k offers were really 350k offers in disguise.

I really doubt this. Why do you think they knew a sell off was imminent?

Because they have financial analysts working for them.

If hedge funds can't reliably predict a market crash, why do you think a team of accountants at an Amazon office can? And if they could, why don't they exit their core business and get into trading stocks?

The accountants at Amazon have material non-public information that they can't act on for obvious reasons, but if they know beforehand - for instance - that sales aren't growing as fast as they used to, or that luxury purchases are trending downward, they can forecast that their own price might slump in the next few months.

I’d be more impressed if they could predict market conditions 3+ years from now, when the bulk of the Amazon employees’ shares are actually vesting.

Maybe they can, but I think that’s a very generous assumption.

They can still buy and sell their own company, but they have to respect the black out dates.

> They can still buy and sell their own company, but they have to respect the black out dates.

Trading on specific non-public information is insider trading and is illegal at all times - even during official trading windows.

> hedge funds can't reliably predict a market crash

Hedges can predict a recession is coming, just not the timing. They have been saying it for the last 12 months.

> a team of accountants at an Amazon

Amazon hires ex-bankers to work for them. They aren't a team of accountants. It's a cushy corproate job that many bankers take. It's good to do when you don't want to hustle long hours anymore.

> And if they could, why don't they exit their core business and get into trading stocks?

What?!

The difference is between a reliable prediction and a precise and timely prediction.

It's all about timing.

At the $1T+ scale, their CFOs are constantly road-tripping to find new institutional buyers. It stands to reason they’d perhaps know which way the wind was blowing based on those interactions.

Why would they need to go woo institutional buyers? At 1T they're already probably part of S&P 500 and other standard investment indexes. All the mutual funds, ETFs, pension plans are bought into them.

Honest question: what does a public company have to gain by convincing institutional buyers to buy its stock? I can't imagine that to have any lasting effect on the stock price.

for me personally it was rate-hike rumors/announcement by the Fed

in high-rate environment high-risk high-growth stocks are unattractive, so investors pull the money out and invest it into “safer” assets

don’t forget that many investors are leveraged too and a sale of one big investor might trigger a selloff chain reaction

it's easy to predict the past

did you short?

i don’t short, but i buy more at lower price

it’s well-known economic fact that after a crisis there’s always recovery

How’d that work out for Enron?

Or Lehman or ...

Insider trading is illegal for a reason.

Just they went public

Totally agree

I've gone through several jobs over the last year (I managed to join a company that got acquired by a company I wasn't happy with).

Smaller and medium companies are offering great salaries right now. I took an offer for over $300k just on salary. I know others who are jumping ship from the big companies to smaller ones while still getting a big bump in salary. Even with this market slump there are far more open positions than there are people to fill them, which means those people can demand quite a bit.

Can I ask what space you work in where they are offering 300K base at a smaller or medium company? Is this in Finance/Fintech ?

I've avoided fintech in my career- I currently work for a company called Aptible (currently hiring, and with great revenue so we're not dependent on investment) that manages infrastructure for companies that need HIPAA compliance.

That said I interviewed for a bunch of companies, and with the exception of a small few all of the salaries were above $250k. This is for principal level roles.

Demand is still huge for tech jobs. Even outside of tech, there are more jobs than there are people to fill them.