The (Overdue) Collapse Of Big Tech Salaries

that's not how front loading vesting, or any vesting package, is presented. when you're given an offer, you are told the total stock grant over 4 years. if it's frontloaded, 25%, or backloaded, it doesn't matter when comparing to other packages from other companies. a company will always tell you the total comp not only for 1 year but for the vesting period.

That is a bold Lie!!! Tech salaries have not gone down its the amount of people who didnt do JACK!!! has gone down plus the programmers whom were mostly jerking around are caught easily and that is why the SALARY is not equal to what it used to be!!! also the new algorithms ( I will not use terms which are not actual Ai based lol) which can replace programmers use as you can automate the whole process!! so again its not cause of greedy people but the reality check after covid companies found. Also wrong hiring practices didnt help as you can see IBM and RHEL what they are going through right now!! google also did the same thing!!

The highest salaries aren't in big tech, they are in big pharma

All these jobs were considered lifetime. But it all collapsed so quickly

Good. Stop coming to SF and be remote. Saves everyone trouble. It's Internet companies, no need to go onsite

These might be shady practices but they are 100% legal - lawyers earned their keep -, soo is down to the job seeker to negotiate as they see fit. These vesting schedules will forever change in the company's advantage; unless the employee gets educated in the basic finance (applied to the tech startups) they will forever submit to this practices.

Wait until I release my superapp framework!

I was a software engineer working for these companies for precisely these salaries. The salaries never made sense to me.

yet housing prices hasn't fallen yet even though it's been unaffordable for years

Getting paid $500k per annum and complaining … sad real sad

Yeah I always was suspicious of the salaries for years, and when I told people about the split compensation (before it was well known), they called me a "conspiracy theorist". Then when it became more known, I would tell them about how it's tiered and split. "Conspiracy theorist" they'd chant! Then when it finally became more well known to the online community, I would say "yeah, guess what happens the day before your bonuses fully vest? Your manager says 'can you come into my office, WE NEED TO TALK'". "CONSPIRACY THEORIST" they online community chants at this. Uh, it's not a conspiracy. They're gonna make up some reason to fire you before they pay out, unless you're actually among the top 1% of $hit hot programmers AND a very well loved brown noser. It's funny seeing so many people naive about the reality of corporate culture and how the companies are out to look after their interests, and that's it. These kids don't seem to be aware. You're one of the few exceptions. I think the realistic number of those bonuses that they promise that the average fresh programming hire will see is probably about 1/3rd of it. So then that means like earning $150,000/yr in San Francisco, which has severe quality of life issues and also a very high cost of living that's about double of what it is in the Midsouth or Midwest or other areas. Yeah it MIGHT look ok on the resume, but my experience is hiring managers are wary of applicants that are "overqualified". So moving on to a similar position programming at somewhere less "prestigious" might be hard. Management wants someone they can control first and foremost. Proficiency, and even competency comes second (or further down the list), sad to say. So glad I didn't bust my butt to jump through all these hoops to get hired at one of these Silly-Con valley companies only to end up making the equivalent of less money!

what he says isn't entirely true, missing some key points

Sounds more like speculation than a real economy! The end is near...

Some flawed logic in this video

Greed on both sides will be the down fall of all these tech companies.

yeah... you should realize stock compensation is not actually something that the company pays but rather it comes from diluting the existing shareholders so more like the investors and stock owners who are paying for their salary

जय श्री राम🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

what sucks is the lack of accountability. its their fault but both employees and job seekers have to pay for it

The tech market is clearly in contraction and likely wont be as bad as it was after 2000 (It needs to be because of DEI and economics).

However, I can see that capital funding is getting harder and that will certainly slow down startups and SME for sure. I will also state that the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion nonsense needs to go away, totally ridiculous placing people in roles that they have no business in. Sadly, the reality is that this discrimination against Asians and White males has its consequences which we are seeing the tide finally turn on.(so i think, Elon Musk summed it wonderfully)

It's not that much money. Think about what it would take to live like your parents or grandparents did. Everyone deserves more and these salaries should be normal across various industries if not increased given how expensive things are

I've been in tech for 20 yrs, NEVER met anyone making more than $280k, who are these indivisuals making salaries of over $300 k??

I need to correct this. When company grants you RSUs, it is not the $ that are vesting, but the number of stocks. Say the company gives you $100k in stock, that $100k is instantly converted to invested stocks at the current stock price. What is means is that it doesn't matter if Google vests 40% in first year and 10% in last, you get the same amount of stock regardless and if the price of stock goes up, it goes up for both vested and unvested RSUs

It looks like these companies are using a lot of trickery with the year to year stock options. Maybe someday there will be a day of reckoning.

To be fair front loading gives you more time to grow them wages.

“It’s like the NFL draft” [describes the exact opposite of how the NFL draft works]

Also someone who is in the system for longer usually gets short end of the stick unless they are promoted.

the most important thing is that they them support pride

You are really wrong about Amazon - they give you fixed bonus over the 4 years but early its paid mostly in cash and later it becomes mostly stock, that is under assumption stock will be worth more in 2 years. First year you will still get a bonus equal to 40% stock but it will be 85% in cash. Its better if you pull out the cash bonus first as your stock appreciates for 3rd and 4th year. This is really good for the employees.

Part of my job as a UI/UX Designer and Researcher is to track and quantify the impact of the designs I/my team create or adjust. This supports more funding from the higher-ups and is part of job security.

Not bragging, giving an example -- In 2 weeks of research and presenting a small, quick design revision for our B2B ecomm checkout funnel, I single-handly increased cart conversion by about 30%. This was tens of thousands of dollars in added revenue. And that was only 2% of our customers onboarded to the site. That would be 100s of thousands once all customers were onboarded, not to mention the savings from fewer customer support hours required.

So, yeah, when I make the company about *40% of my annual salary in 2 weeks*, I want to be compensated well for that lol. I acknowledge this may not be the case everywhere, especially at large, bloated companies with too many cooks in the kitchen and a maze of red tape. Its exactly why I prefer to work at startups.

I want to make a correction: Amazon has a back loaded RSU vesting schedule but they have a bonus structure that equalizes pay between the first and 2nd years with the 3rd and 4th years. I know this because I worked at Amazon.

Nobody deserves more than $75K a year, there is nothing you can do that can't be outsource to Asia. How can your $200K salary make the company any profit?
Some type of pyramid scam going on, maybe government is involved do jack everything up in cost, so it to afford to pay the interest payment on the previous $34T debt.

Inflation is going down = Interest rates will go down = Mush more investments in tech and high risk growth stocks = Pumping money into tech start ups = FAANG even paying more to retain talents.

It's a cycle and it will repeat.

It would be interesting if you would cover not only the engineers but the executive compensation package during these changes. Because I guarantee you the top of senior management and executive packages are still increasing.

In Germany at least, RSUs are taxed as income at the time of vesting. Hence, subject to up to 49%-ish income tax rate. If you sell the RSUs later with a profit post-vesting date, you must again pay 25% capital gains tax.

Is it different in the U.S?

Around 25% of information in this video is completely incorrect.

They show diversity walking in the pictures but look at the pics of the people actually working?

One of my coworkers moved to CA and bought a house for 1.5 million at 6.5% interest. That comes out to over $9k per month. Add to that taxes, insurance, costs of living, he needs to spend at least $15k per month. He is married with 2 kids. He works for a big tech company and gets RSU's but still I can't stop thinking about it. Is this money going to continue in the future, not guaranteed. If RSU's stop since it's pulling from the market, everything breaks down. How much money can companies keep pulling from the market?

With years of industry experience and pursuing a phd in biochem rn. I don't think I can even expect that level of compensation at my mid 30s. Software engineers getting paid like crazy fresh out of colleague is still mindboggling. The fact that it takes next to nothing to start these companies do save a ton of cash to pay for workers.

Lol, just like old factory workers. Say bye bye to your money Zoomers.

Meanwhile the rest of the tech world that has to make the stuff the big tech companies produce work in the field get compensated a lot less for their efforts. For those of us in IT outside of the big tech companies who just keep the network, PCs, and servers running at the non-tech companies, we won't shed any tears if big tech has a major long overdue collapse.

We recognize and appreciate their expertise in building the tools and products we use, however whether or not they're actually worth the money many of them are making has always been a matter of contention. Especially when big tech was doing all that hiring and had literally had people doing no value work making more money than overworked engineers who keep IT systems up and running at non tech companies.

Sooner or later the bubble of inflated tech worker salaries had to start letting the air out and start coming down to earth. The market will always eventually correct and the bloat will be cut. If FANG can do more with less and just make the crazies willing to stay work more, they're going to do it if they haven't started already. Just look at what Musk did to X when he gutted the company and X is still somehow online and full of controversy as per normal. Microsoft, Google, and others will be more than happy to start doing that at some point.

The celebration of programmers' salaries dropping or getting laid off is cruel, as if all of them are slimy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or NFT hucksters. Most are normal people who enjoy the field or entered it because of the salary hype. Is it so wrong for people to want a comfortable job/life? Market conditions are forcing a correction, which is an unfortunate reality, but is that really something to be celebrated?

The front-loaded investing sounds fishy. As I understand the typical 4-year vesting, you are offered an amount, for example, $1 million over 4 years. That is all converted to RSUs. These RSUs have annual vesting time periods. If the vesting occurs at an equal 25% schedule, at the end of the first year, 25% vests and you can sell it all or keep it invested. The next year, an additional 25% vests. And it's not the $250,000 that vests, but whatever the current value of the RSUs are at that time, which could be less or more, depending on the value of the stock. It's unclear what the percentages mean in front-loaded investing. If in the first example, $250,000 represents 33% of the total four-year grant, then the total grant would be $757575 over four years. I think that's what the narrator is saying, but it was not communicated very well.

Edit: I think the benefit of front-loaded investing is for employees who don't anticipate sticking around for the full 4-year term who want to get a majority of their RSUs vested before they leave after a year or two. The other thought may be that if they do stick around, they could get a promotion or more RSUs granted later on that would be more favorable if they stay longer.

tldr; Don't go by what you're going to get in stock grants in the first year, find out the full value of the RSUs over the typical 4-year grant, and negotiate based on that.

Wrong. Salaries will keep going up. THE JOB will become harder and harder. Soon, if you don't know your calculus based probability, and have 20 projects, and research published, you won't be able to get a job in industry. Plain and simple. AI is difficult, hardware is difficult, and Augmented Reality (graphics) is difficult, and as industry moves towards that, it WILL be much more difficult than now, which is based on learning a programming language now and then knocking out algorithms questions and that's practically it.

That is a lot of money

There are so many mediocre Devs and Managers hiding under the desks of FAANGs who joined 15 years ago and still maintaining some legacy codebase for fat paychecks. They are due for layoffs in big number this year due to AI.

click bait again.

What the hell kind of salaries are these people on??? That's insane, even doctors and lawyers would be ecstatic to get these kind of figures. Top 0.1%.

Ever heard of aspect ratio?