Hopefully their skills get redistributed to the wider market so more companies can ship decent products and innovate instead of only a few ones holding the brainpower hostage
> ...their skills get redistributed to the wider market so more companies can ship decent products and innovate...
There is a larger technical culture and corporate political element with a strong undercurrent of budgets that has more to do with "products and innovate" at these non-BigTech companies, than someone from leading edge BigTech might be used to. BigTech companies also have such characteristics in most teams, but those leading edge teams due to incentives get all the public relations press internally and even externally.
Many of my non-BigTech clients have some full time staff who are plenty proficient in technical matters to seek BigTech employment. However, the rank and file staff of developers are almost invariably majority outsourced H1B's for budgetary reasons. This sets up a perverse incentive.
No matter how much the developers might agree with the advanced concepts promulgated by the full time staff developers, at the end of the day their outsourcing companies' contract renewals rely upon how many tasks assigned to them get "done" on time. And the project managers / scrum masters / etc. all the way up to and including middle management do not act upon the full-timers' advice (pretty basic, like build security and SRE in from the beginning) and encode it into the definition of "done" because they don't directly benefit from doing so.
There are ways to fix this situation, but they don't directly involve fancy tech or tech stacks.
I think there is a bit of a contradiction in this logic. Why would redistributing 'skills' that lead other companies to lose cash at an astronomical scale help other companies improve? If their product and innovation was truly transformative perhaps the tech industry wouldn't be in the state it is in as sustainable business.
If someone is fired from a start-up that just has some kind of nebulous speculated future value, it doesn’t mean they lacked skills — they might have been successfully creating some part of it. The market just has decided that what they were working on might not actually have that nebulous future value.
They might be able to for example go work for a company that produces objects, and then sells them to consumers in exchange for money. Then the value of their skills will be a little more obvious I guess.
How many engineers feel restricted by management? Putting them in smaller and more flexible companies can help them shine and finally put their experience to full use
You are assuming that in these companies the managers are a completely separate class, but the truth is in most of big tech most senior developers / architects feed directly into product roadmap and management. In fact most of big tech make a point of trying not to hire pure managerial folks.
In other words it is not purely management who are responsible for most user-hostile interfaces, ethically dubious business models (how to optimise gaming addiction) or bloated infrastructure (kubernetes when it is not needed,...), highly-skilled tech folks need to own up for these low-interest rate phenomena as well.
> Why would redistributing 'skills' that lead other companies to lose cash [...] help [...]?
My guess at the parent commenter's presupposition would be that they had been overpaid and will now be forced to work for normal wages. At those lower wages, it might become economical to employ them, while those same people weren't economical at silicon-valley-scale wages.
That seems plausible to me, at least in some cases. I don't know the full picture in other companies, but in the case of Meta/Facebook, the company actually asked managers to transition to individual contributor jobs.
