That's not the same situation. Of course you're going to see the $150-200k premium for engineers fall once startups, funding, and jobs disappear. It's already happening in the form of cutting RSUs and bonus packages.
And it has happened before. Why is it so hard to understand this?
Regardless, I was stating that your dismissal of "basic economics" was wrong. It's not basic economics, there's a lot that goes into the equation. Wages might go down. Wages might not go down by a ton. They might drop like a rock. It all depends on a number of factors, but blithely dismissing people with some nonesense about econ 101 is not being intellectually honest.
You're still talking macro 101. I'm not talking about nationwide unemployment figures here.
The key is that wages for /engineers/ will fall if funding and jobs disappear in the tech sector. Today's wages for engineers are high and will be unsustainable when things go bust.
How much they will fall is anyone's guess. But the reasoning behind why they will fall is very straightforward.
Wages probably will fall but it's probably also more complex than that.
Your extremely talented engineers who build things at scale and understand the fundementals, who are basically a safe per of hands, are still going to be in deep demand. Profitiable companies that work at scale are still going to have real problems and are unlikely to turn around and tell their engineers that they're going to be getting significantly less money, as those engineers are already in their own market and these companies will still want to compete for them.
The startups filled with architecture astronauts who spend most of their time overdesigning, learning new tools, and basically doing anything that isn't meeting user needs, delivering the product or tackling some tough engineering problem, then you're likely going to see a drop because they're not really worth it in the first place.
This strikes me as a bit of a fantasy. Very few people can recognize, and even fewer value, a "safe pair of hands". Let's not also forget this industry's rampant ageism, which even in good times sidelines experience in favor of hipness. I have no idea why you think this will magically change just because times are tough.
I'm not sure the industry suffers from ageism in the way most people here think it does. The start-up community hiring cocky 24 year old team leads who refuse to heed advice from their seniors definitely aren't going to be hiring the older guy, sure.
However, remove the funding and force these companies to actually compete on merit and only those who are actually capable of delivering will still exist. At that point, hopefully, we'll see a rise of new leaders who actally value excellence.
The point is, we can only afford to value hipness over experience in bubbles and it looks like this one's about to burst. Of course, I'm not from the future, so I could be wrong.
I disagree completely. I think there are really two markets for dev jobs: the startup economy which is over-inflated but also exists in a smaller high COL location, and everyone else which had lower COL and wages to begin with and likely won't see much of a drop in wages due to the fact that their company needs those services to function efficiently.
You can argue that the drop in employment in startup land may see some movement outside the bay area and into boring lower paid dev jobs, but I doubt that it will be more than a small blip.
TL;DR: If you're at a start up the good times might be over. If you're not, don't expect much change (maybe less likely to see a pay rise). If you're just coming out of Uni and into the job market, you may see interesting times.
Agreed. But I'm still a little surprised by this. I would expect anyone at least 30 yro to have /some/ recollection of what happened, if not a good understanding. Or to have the curiosity to find out what did. I'm 31 myself, but knew what was happening with the bubble during highschool (thanks pud and F'd company).
