People who work for BigTech are still making those “absurd “ total comp levels. I see no indication that the offers are much lower or that when reviews come, they aren’t attempting to offer more stock to keep them at somewhat decent levels.

I’ll know myself in a couple of months…

Maybe not. Probably so. Do you have any indication that tech is dead?

The amount that Big Tech can afford to pay is correlated to their revenue.

The amount that Big Tech is willing to pay is correlated to the market supply of employees.

But I'm unconvinced that a very profitable company will decide to pay less than it can afford, in order to acquire the best engineering talent it can, when their revenue is directly linked to their engineering products.

The only thing that would make FAANG pay nosedive is if they made an organizational decision that they didn't want to prioritize software development.

So basically, if one of them decided to hire an Eddie Lampert type.

> I'm unconvinced that a very profitable company will decide to pay less than it can afford

They are not o paying maximum of what they cam afford, they are making huge profits.

If they are not paying maximum that they can afford what are they paying? Provavly the minimum they think they can get away with.

Its all mind games.

I agree that they could indeed be paying their engineers far more and still make a profit, but that’s just supply versus demand. They found the pay bands that provide the sweet spot:

Relative maximums for profit and talent willing to accept those salaries.

Big tech includes more people, and pays more, now than it did in 2019. 2020 and 2021 hiring and offers were unprecedented. Things have slowed down, but this is no where near a dead, or even cold, industry.

Yea, I was just told by an AWS employee that they're desperately trying to hire as many people as they can still. Those companies are massive. The layoffs and divisions with hiring freezes don't seem to even make up a tenth of their capacity to hire.

Have you looked?

https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/job_categories/software-developme...

https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/?q=Software

https://careers.microsoft.com/professionals/us/en/

Good luck putting that particular genie back in a bottle now that people know how much money is just floating around.

What do you mean? It's a market. Knowing the money is there does not magically make it get paid out to employees.

Sigh. No one has stopped hiring SWEs. Only 5% of those laid off were SWEs[1].

[1] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...