
Tech Salaries Stagnant Despite Low Unemployment: Survey - rexarex
https://insights.dice.com/2019/01/29/tech-salaries-stagnant-low-unemployment-dice-salary-survey/?CMPID=EM_RE_UP_JS_AD_DA_CP_A_&utm_source=Responsys&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=&utm_campaign=Advisory_DiceAdvisor_A
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iaw
A trend I've seen is using salary consultation services that peg the company
compensation to rest of market. When enough of an industry does this it has
the same result as price fixing but without collusion.

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jgalt212
I don't buy it. FAANG pays X, so other companies know they need to pay 1.3X to
hire FAANG level engineers. So the info sharing may help FAANG collude, but it
won't suppress wages for those who can be poached from FAANG. That's assuming
there aren't any behind the scenes no-poaching agreements.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-
po...](https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-poaching-
lawsuit-for-415-million/)

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kamarg
Are there many companies that can pay 1.3x of FAANG compensation? One of the
big reasons people go work at the big 5 is the pay.

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codemac
Just SV unicorns usually, and even then a lot of it is speculated value.

But the unicorns definitely pay if you're above a certain experience level -
and if you build the correct professional network you can basically demand it.

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ummonk
Decacorns more accurately. Lots of mediocre paying startups out there with 1-2
billion valuations.

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m0zg
Job market is sort of similar to the real estate market. If you're shopping
for a house (or looking for a job), it's pointless to look at the "market as a
whole", because that's not the segment you're in: you're shopping for
something narrow and specific.

A much better statistic would be to break things down by specialization,
seniority, and whether or not a person had a stint at FAANG (which, and this
will be deliberately misinterpreted, is a proxy for not completely sucking as
an engineer). It's plausible that things have stagnated or gone down in the
lower-skill segments with over-saturated labor supply. But anecdotally, on the
higher end and in the segment where the talent is relatively scarce, I've
never seen it better than it is now.

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matco11
You can apply the same reasoning, perhaps in an even simpler way, to the “low
unemployment” part of the statement. “unemployment” is a stat defined at
general population level, reaching well beyond the engineering space. Low
unemployment means it is probably harder to hire someone out there, but it
does not contain any information about how is now harder/easier to hire
engineers, let alone tech engineers.

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m0zg
Absolutely. Talking averages is pointless on most topics where stats are
presented. I always want to see both the distributions conditioned on several
important variables, as well as marginalized versions thereof for each
variable, but such nuance is not commonly available in public discourse. And
when it is, people are shocked that it contradicts the simplistic world view
they've been sold earlier.

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jkingsbery
The article doesn't say, but I'm curious about the effect of the changing
population has on this. I don't know the exact numbers, but if tech
unemployment is low and salaries have remained on average the same, that could
also be due to adding a lot of entry-level engineers. If that's the case then
saying that tech salaries are "stagnant" could be misleading, because
individuals in the population are not generally stagnating.

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oflannabhra
Wow. In this thread, I am seeing a lot of people severely overestimating the
percentage that FAANG employees comprise of the total market.

Just as the Bay Area and New York have real estate markets that are outliers
of the rest of the country, so are the salaries outliers for the rest of our
industry.

The report covers the industry as a whole, and demand for developers is
growing just about _everywhere_. The questions the report raises can't be
answered solely through the lens of Silicon Valley.

There is a lot of evidence that wages aren't rising across the entire economy,
even with a tight labor market. I don't know of anyone that has proposed a
solid economic theory for why that is, but it looks like our industry is only
part of a larger trend.

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GVIrish
I'd be curious to see what job descriptions made up the survey. There's easily
more than $100k difference between the something like a junior help desk
analyst vs a senior sw engineer, and that's not even getting into FAANG
compensation levels.

If you mix all of those roles into the same bucket for this survey, it makes
the average salary number somewhat useless. Not to mention that geography
plays a big role.

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trextrex
This link has a pretty good explanation of why the supply-demand model for the
job market doesn't work:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-05/supply...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-05/supply-
and-demand-does-a-poor-job-of-explaining-depressed-wages)

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seem_2211
In tech sales at startups there has been a significant uptick in base salaries
and total compensation packages. The most lucrative companies two years ago
are fighting to remain relevant (when they haven't updated their compensation
packages). It's not all good as it does mean that there's much less margin
than there was a few years ago, but as other commentators have pointed out,
this data is less than worthless.

I have a pretty good pulse on B2B software sales comp data (because that's my
job), but I know nothing about how marketers or engineers or FAANG pay. It's
like trying to make a generalization about "Finance" but then putting together
a compensation survey that takes in the M&A rainmakers at Goldman Sachs in
with retail tellers at Bank of America and gives you an average. Pointless.

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polskibus
That's all with a fairly strong USD. It means that outsourcing buys you more
developers abroad than with cheap USD.

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justfor1comment
The barriers to switch jobs (tech interviews) are so high that people who are
willing to switch may not be able to. This reduces their negotiating power in
asking for raises.

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ummonk
I wonder how much of this is because students don’t count in unemployment
statistics. Most new grads from non-elite schools have trouble finding their
first job, but do manage to line one up while they graduate. However, during
the time they’re trying to line up a job, they’re effectively behaving as
unemployed job seekers, rather desperate and willing to accept low wages for
example.

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_bxg1
I'd bet it's just a function of what people are willing to do the job for.
$93k gives you a very comfortable lifestyle, and tech workers tend to be much
more motivated by the work itself than their peers. Those who really care
about getting rich will go to SV and do a startup. So there's not as much
pressure for increase.

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toomuchtodo
$93k supporting a family (stay at home partner, two kids) is most definitely
not comfortable, whether in the Midwest or the coasts. Insurance premiums
alone would be ~$15k/year (pretax, but still). Throw in a mortgage or rent @
$1500/month, that's another $18k/year, you've already consumed a third of your
wages.

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jriot
Im at a $100k, my wife stays at home with our two school age kids, we live
quite comfortably.

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toomuchtodo
I assume you live somewhere rural, with low cost of living, and not a suburb
of a major metro. Is my assumption accurate? You might even be remote, in
which case you've traded higher wages for lower employment mobility (which is
a reasonable compromise to make, but not common).

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jriot
I am in the process of moving to live 30 minutes from New Orleans and yes I
work remote.

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lgleason
Most of the salary surveys on sites like dice show numbers that are lower than
what people who know what they are doing actually end up getting. Sites like
Blind etc. tell a better story.

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dawhizkid
Anyone go from engineering to sales? Everyone talks about high programmer
salaries but from what I have seen enterprise sales is where the real money
is.

