If they're willing to move to anywhere in the US and/or take a 50+% pay cut then they'll have no problem getting a job. If they all want to stay where they are and get paid within 20% of their current salary then lots of people will end up without a job.

If you somehow forced someone to sit and practice drawing a hand for eight hours a day, they would get surprisingly far as an artist.

Being a founder isn’t too dissimilar. Determination tends to be decisive.

If you spent eight hours a day trying to make a small group of users love you, you’d get surprisingly far.

I think that’s what they mean about potential founders at Stripe. There’s a lot of potential energy that a layoff might release.

Starting a company is a risk vs reward calculation. If they were getting high salaries it wouldn't be unreasonable to want to minimize your risk by working on a project on the side while getting a bigger saving bank until a certain point. If you get fired the calculation is now whether you want to invest in job search or take the plunge and start the company

I don’t know that there are any stats on this so in the end it is juts your and my opposing instincts :-)

I'll bet a lot of those "low performers" just had a hard time jumping through hoops at the circus, but will do just fine out on the savannah

> It’s helpful to remember that we’re collectively doing about 1% of what we theoretically could be accomplishing.

Is this supposed to mean anything at all?

There's certainly less demand for Facebook's style of social media, for sure.

I don't think a recession with low demand and high interest rates is a good time to start a company at all.

It depends on how you define "startup." They don't necessarily have to keep staring at screens for their living.

It was mass layoffs of real estate and banking workers in 2008 that kick started the food truck industry.

EDIT: I mistakenly first wrote "each day" instead of "in each direction".

When I roll on to a new project and it is more/less work than my previous one, I don't think of it as a pay increase or decrease.

No, a FAANG employee probably isn’t suffering (although consider the pay outside of the prestige jobs) but everyone just got a multi-year reminder of those indirect costs.

Why would they perform better in another industry where presumably they do not have qualifications either (nor ability)?

You shouldn't take these governmental reports at face value. In my country, we see a lot of these reports too, and for all kinds of professions. Most of the time it just means that the corporate want more people willing to work for less.

Meta was hiring aggressively at the beginning of the year, as were many other companies.

If i put out a job ad: Need a software develioer with skills in COBOL, latest react and assembly, to lead a team of 10 for $30k

And I cant hire anyone

It will still end up in government statistics for shortage.

This is lile if we all put out ads on Gumtree/craiglist 'will buy a Toyota, brand new, for $1000", and someone counts thise ad and concludes there is a shortage of Toyotas.

Not all organizations get lots of value from developers.

It also means they're not losing a lot by not having a developer, so they're perfectly ok with having the position open until someone takes it.

If I want to hire a top proffeshional for minimum wage, its not a job offer, its just wishfull thinking.

Demand elasticity makes any report on the volume of demand irrelevant unless it also covers the pricing of that demand.

Compare that to a new grad at Google Germany making 130k€. Somebody with ten years of experience there would be making closer to 300k€.

If prosperity distribution had kept track during the last 50 years (wealth has increased dramatically due to tech), the average salary would be 6 figures, so it’s actually better for wealth distribution to have tech folks making higher 6 figures to put pressure on the 8+ figure class.

1. the US is somewhat of an outlier, while Germany is grouped together with other wealthy countries

2. the US' Gini has been steadily growing last few decades - implying inequality is getting worse

3. Germany's Gini is very slightly declining in the last few decades - implying it's staying roughly stable

I don't think higher-than-average is particularly good at all - you're in the neighbourhood of places like Qatar, Iran, DRC and Argentina. In fact the only way you'd use Gini to suggest the US has a ok level of wealth inequality is if you presented two countries Gini coefficients side-by-side to someone who doesn't normally think about Gini, presented them without any other context and said "look, they're kinda close"

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:G...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33530819

Also this obscures the fact that it is far better to be poor or working class in the US than somewhere with a similar Gini coefficient.

I think you might want to lookup what Gini tries to measure. You used Gini as a way to suggest the USA isn't so bad, and now you're having to backpedal and say that actually Gini kinda sucks but the USA isn't so bad.

No, I'm pointing out that at lot was being made of a small difference in a ratio that's really sensitive to marginal differences. I'm noting a marginal difference that makes the US look more different than other OCED nations than it is in fact and more like autocratic developing nations than it is in fact.

I'm also pointing out that it isn't a good measure at all. It's as coarse as GDP and more misleading.

It's a little bit funny to say that a metric is skewed by measuring the thing it is designed to measure...

It's not a very good way to measure what it is trying to measure[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#Limitations

[1] https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/495/images/IZAWOL.462.g...

Use profit margins to determine what wages should be. I wouldn't be surprised if the wages are fine on that basis, actually. But let's draw the right conclusions for the right reasons.

EU - esp. Germany and some other European countries - have abysmal salary compared to rest of the developed world and a poor wage growth over the last 10 years or so.

Heck, even countries like India have experienced faster growth: netto, a senior tech professional in India can earn more than what what they'd get in Germany. And that's not even accounting for 3-5x difference in cost of living.

This salary calculator is extremely accurate https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...

In any case, I agree with your overall statement: even if 86K/year puts you in the top 10% of earners in Germany, in reality it's hard to afford a decent house (not flat) with that salary (unless you wanna work until you're 67...)

Thank you for the calc though, seems really helpful.

But i don't see that being necessarily true and largely depends on type of software you build and the culture of the company. A lot of people are decent engineers and are not interviewing for FANG for a variety of reasons are for no reason in companies that may or may not deserve them. I think its hard to build street cred to get people to work for less, but interviews should always have a good bar.

You don't need some Google genius to do a lot of this work, and sometimes a regular person will do a better job than some wonderkid who spends too much time and effort trying to automate it

My brother moved from FAANG to Atlanta to work for Home Depot. His comp went down from 400k to 140k. Which is still great for Atlanta, but there is no situation where a move from FAANG to any other company comes without wage deflation

I don't notice any request for sympathy in the GP comment.

Of course, that's like $100k or less with current exchange rates, haha

Is this ignoring finance, promotions, or (until recent layoffs) private/public big tech/unicorn-like companies?

Like, even within FAANG the pay bands are huge for the same level.

As an aside, you're talking about switching from a company that supposedly makes revenue selling ads but really is inflated with free money to one that makes revenue from selling hammers. People who made this switch before the free money are going to be fine. Now that 11,000+ people are going to try to make this switch, they're going to wish they had.

The other thing that happens with this is your job becomes much more practical and less oriented to whatever fads are sweeping SV and HN. Some like it, some don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_member_...

Small and Central European would be Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe

Have you seen the second map in the introduction?

Every country changes their belonging to a region based on the perceived value bias of what is being discussed.

A user here humorously put it that Slovenians see themselves as Western European when it comes to how honest and hard they work, Southern European when it comes to weather and food, and Eastern European when it comes to drinking, partying and having fun.

But geographical location however is immutable, so let's stick to that instead of the other more biased definitions.

Proceeds to using precisely biased, political, definitions.

You'd be earning about 50 000 USD per year as a senior developer, but that's plenty enough to live a very good life here. Outside IT people earn about 10 000 USD per year, food and services are very cheap, and there's a pretty comprehensive welfare state.

Impressed to hear that Poland pays well for developers compared to other jobs. 50k for a senior role would definitely be a good salary even in other EU countries

Something similar happened in Ukraine. I had friends in Europe that were running companies in there till when the wages became comparable to the original country. They still kept the Ukrainian office but eventually reduced the growth in favour of other locations

https://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/react-jobs?contract=True

In the UK the rate is between 400 and 600 (450/650 euro) and is one of the market that pays the most in Europe. Many other countries are offer half that amount for a "react" guy

And it is not as expensive as it seems. If you live in a country with strong social safety nets hiring someone is crazy expensive.

The few contractors I know that work normal software jobs have lower rates, but they still make good money.

It's very hard purely on cost of living to match a salary of 500k anywhere in the world, because at some point the extra items / investments all cost the same regardless of geography.

With 100K in Prague you can retire/never needing to work for money after 3 to 10 years Depending on your habits. Not sure how many Bay Area employees can do that staying there.

I am somewhere close and earn 300K which is about 30 times of what you need per year. One year of works covers all my expenses living like a local for the rest of my life in capital returns even at a modest 3.5% SWR.

I take that over 500K Job (of which over 30% goes to US Gov, while i pay max 10%) any time, heck I take it over a 1000K Job in SF/NY etc.

I'd propose that you should also calculate how many years of 300k in the Bay Area it'd take to retire in Prague vs years making 100k in Prague.

I ran these numbers a couple years ago, and it was costing me about ~$8000/month to live in the Bay Area. I estimated we could live in Tokyo or much of the USA at a similar quality of life for $4000/month. With $310k/year (taking home $190k) that meant I was able to save about $90k a year. In Tokyo, I could only get companies to offer about $140k at the time, and it was about the same for remote work in the USA. That meant I could save about $50k/year.

You can make a strong argument that saving $50k and living in one location is better than saving $90k in another, but it's good to have all the data at hand to make the best decision for yourself.

Hard to know this 30 years ahead of time. Maybe after 30 years in the Bay Area you retire to Hawaii? Or lower COL like Portland? Or even a town in Japan? You have tons of choice if you’ve been saving at 500k. If you’ve been saving at Eastern Europe salaries, your options narrow

Retirement/healthcare and education is paid by taxes already in most countries so there's less things to save for. Also cars are optional and distances are smaller.

I agree about the rest (but I wouldn't want to live in US anyway, no amount of money can buy you a walkable city or safety for your kids).

Doubt it. Everybody in my current team has several offers to change jobs with 5-15% increase in salary. Some from the same (American) company for which we work right now (but they don't know that cause we're hired through 2 subcontracting companies ;) ).

Low Cost of living is true if you find a cheap enough place to live, but due to Russia's invasion, housing just isn't that cheap unless you know where to look for and are from Poland. I called 20 people just to be able to check a single apartment out.

50k isn't good for a senior role either; new grad salary in Germany in 2020 was around 60k gross.

That’s already a good salary for a mature dev in France (Paris +20%), and going above requires being intrapreneur/team lead/low manager. Americans usually say it’s shit pay.

Most of meta enigneers won't be working for 120k midwest coding job if they can avoid it. So spread will be focused on similar pay positions vs distributed unifromly.

Seriously, under current law, H1B workers will be even more locked-out of US jobs until these newly RIFed US workers land somewhere, but India doesn’t really depend on H1B contractor revenue like it did during the mass RIFs of the “Dot Com Bust.” No, now Indian citizens can work comfortably, efficiently and economically from India, like many of the far more expensive (and now RIFed) US workers had been doing from their US homes. For those RIFed US workers to compete with more economical India-based workers, they’re going to need to either get very small and crawl under the door to struggling US employers (by lower their salaries while abandoning remote work) or maybe they’ll need to cut expenses by moving to a “small central EU country” and get paid in Euros.

just like we saw in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s

MANGA companies pay ridiculously well.

I suspect a lot of "Reality sh*t sandwiches" will be in people's lunchboxes.

They really need some economy lessons. If I were a true capitalist, I’d teach them socialism for free.

So really what needs to happen is companies need to be reaching out URGENTLY to those have been kicked to the curb.

There is thousands of years of experience this population carries.