I think people who are graduating now will have a hard time replicating this. My cohort (now in our early 30s, cs majors from a top school) were incredibly lucky because we were in a permanent bull run so as long as we were invested in almost any tech stock, we did well. Almost all of us hit one million mark before early 2020 and that became 2 million at the end of 2021.
I would love for this to continue forever but can it really? For example the author (and my friends) are in similar situation where their compensation are now in the ~500k range but that number is based on the stock value at the time of offer. It is now essentially double that. So we're in a situation where your everyday senior FAANG engineers are locked in a golden handcuff unless they are offered million dollar packages to jump ship.
Golden handcuffs are a good thing. It's such a first world problem to complain about golden handcuffs. "Oh no, I'm making $300k/yr over my nominal market value!"
The golden handcuffs are only handcuffs if you’re in a terrible environment. I’ve walked away from a 7-figure TC. Handcuffs be damned. I wasn’t going to take the abuse anymore.
Some people don’t have the strength to walk away and instead will obsess over money for anything. It’s funny how I’m sure people would require much bigger numbers if they were given an offering where they’d have to go to a terrible prison for 2-3 years in their prime years.
There's no question that equity valuations are due for a massive collapse, the federal reserve has even admitted this. But there are a few things that make me thing that software engineer compensation has nowhere to go but up:
- The world is becoming increasingly computerized. The demand for software is skyrocketing.
- Software engineering is extremely economically efficient. You can produce infinite quantities of a piece of software with no marginal cost.
- Outside of the HN / CS bubble, most regular people still think coding is either boring, stupid, or too hard.
I really think it would be tough to do this job without some major interest in computers that most people simply don't have. And you can't really fake this. This puts a cap on the supply of engineers.
I would love for this to continue forever but can it really? For example the author (and my friends) are in similar situation where their compensation are now in the ~500k range but that number is based on the stock value at the time of offer. It is now essentially double that. So we're in a situation where your everyday senior FAANG engineers are locked in a golden handcuff unless they are offered million dollar packages to jump ship.
We're in weird times.