>I don't buy it. FAANG pays X, so other companies know they need to pay 1.3X to hire FAANG level engineers.
no. The rest knows that they can pay 0.3-0.5X to hire the rest of the engineers. C people hire C people and there are always more than enough C people around. Our BigCo has no talent shortage for example(we'll even be cutting 5-10% in the next few months - just fat trimming, the company has no financial issues forcing to do it), and i have hard time imagining what would a FAANG level engineer would be doing around here - try to imagine a Stanford CS MS grad with the thesis in deep learning helping a huge enterprise customer through 6 stages of grief during the escalation call :)
The overall stagnation is only overall. Inside the tech salaries distribution there is a structural change of it becoming strongly bi-modal. So there is very high competition for talent and very high salaries (Google L5/6/7 medians being like 550/650/750 with the rest of FAANG being similar) at the high segment, and the rest just happily chugging along with 2% yearly CPI increase at best which actually means slowly sliding downhill instead of mere stagnation.
no. The rest knows that they can pay 0.3-0.5X to hire the rest of the engineers. C people hire C people and there are always more than enough C people around. Our BigCo has no talent shortage for example(we'll even be cutting 5-10% in the next few months - just fat trimming, the company has no financial issues forcing to do it), and i have hard time imagining what would a FAANG level engineer would be doing around here - try to imagine a Stanford CS MS grad with the thesis in deep learning helping a huge enterprise customer through 6 stages of grief during the escalation call :)
The overall stagnation is only overall. Inside the tech salaries distribution there is a structural change of it becoming strongly bi-modal. So there is very high competition for talent and very high salaries (Google L5/6/7 medians being like 550/650/750 with the rest of FAANG being similar) at the high segment, and the rest just happily chugging along with 2% yearly CPI increase at best which actually means slowly sliding downhill instead of mere stagnation.