I'll pass on all the class warfare melodrama, but it does seem a bit strange to be blasting tens of thousands of employees you paid through the nose to identify, recruit, and retain during a period of time when the biggest actors in tech are facing a level of competitive pressure that they haven't in a long time.
Maybe some cuts were needed to reassure the Street and support the stock price, and maybe that's easier to do with some air cover about interest rates and shit, but everyone remembers what happened the last time even one of the big actors broke ranks and started doubling people's salaries: Google has had a little problem called "Facebook" ever since. I'm not sure I'd be keen to repeat the experiment with OpenAI/ChatGPT and ByteDance/TikTok running around. FANG has had a good run but they're not invincible.
So I don't think they're going to be able to meaningfully depress big tech compensation for very long. But who knows, I've been wrong before.
There are multiple classes of tech workers. Historically all of FAANG has been more or less part of the upper-middle and upper class. I think there will be a bifurcation along those lines within FAANG, and the big tech companies will look more like the big banks than like high finance going forward. You even see this in the layoffs, which hit folks outside of engineering harder than folks inside of engineering and within engineering really took a knife to the folks below "senior".
I think you could see a bifurcation in Eng tracks at FAANGs.
Maybe some cuts were needed to reassure the Street and support the stock price, and maybe that's easier to do with some air cover about interest rates and shit, but everyone remembers what happened the last time even one of the big actors broke ranks and started doubling people's salaries: Google has had a little problem called "Facebook" ever since. I'm not sure I'd be keen to repeat the experiment with OpenAI/ChatGPT and ByteDance/TikTok running around. FANG has had a good run but they're not invincible.
So I don't think they're going to be able to meaningfully depress big tech compensation for very long. But who knows, I've been wrong before.