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Comment by BowBun | Hacker News Reader

One important point I didn't see mentioned was the other side: engineers also think they're worth more than they are.

I posit the big VC-backed or FAANG companies 1) can offer huge initial salaries to not have to deal with competition 2) hire juniors at high salaries because they can afford to spend 1-2 years training them. Combine with the sheer volume of hiring they all perform, and it starts to set some false expectations. Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing?

Anecdotally, I have seen engineers refuse pretty good gigs because they were expecting to be treated like royalty without much to back it up. This industry is skewed, in many ways.

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In one way I do agree with you (there are some clear cases where a junior candidate is asking for way too much, without skill to back it up), but my impression of recruiting in the tech space is that, in large part, this industry is undergoing a shift in the balance of power, where employers are finding it difficult to dictate salaries for job titles. In my opinion, it is really refreshing to see that talent actually feels empowered enough to ask themselves if they are worth more, and confident enough to turn down roles for ones that pay more.

My personal anecdote is that I took the first tech job that was offered as a junior, a little bit before this reversal started taking place, and as a result, I left a lot of money on the table. Years later, I realized that if I had just said no, and extended my search a little bit longer, or had role models telling me my knowledge at the time was worth a lot more, I might be worth a lot more right now (factoring in compound interest with sensible investing of excess profit from work + modest lifestyle).

I don't really blame either the engineers or the small companies. There's just a market situation right now where engineers who can get an offer from one of the big tech firms, are willing to live where they're located, and mostly just care about salary (which there's absolutely nothing wrong with) should probably just take that offer. No one else, except maybe big fintech, is probably going to be able to compete on salary. That's just the way the market is right now.

There’s a lot of brain drain going on at consulting companies as everyone flees a dying industry for 30% raises at FAAMG companies as they start to tackle vertical industry offerings. They’re all aggressively attacking the enterprise space.

These companies just have profit margins high enough to afford to blow everyone out of the water with their offers. They’re competing with each other for the top talent, and it makes it really hard for companies in other industries to retain their best and brightest.

I like FAAMG but it's not pronounceble.

I always though Netflix was a odd company next to the giants. MS is a better one. Maybe IBM should be included as well.

"FAGAMI" ... maybe "FAMAGI" to be less profound.

IBM doesn’t belong; their revenue has been flat for 20 years and they have almost no influence in the tech world anymore. My clients view IBM as a consulting company with a market position somewhere between Infosys and Accenture.

On the other hand, Microsoft is still quite relevant to the future; Azure is getting a lot of traction in the enterprise world as an alternative tech stack to AWS. VSTS is rapidly displacing the whole Jira ecosystem and VS Code needed 6 months to become one of the most popular development tools.

Ye, there are not much hype around IBM. But IBM is surely more technically forerunners than Netflix.

Is VSTS any good? Or is it from the ash into the fire? I would love to get rid of Jira at work.

I agree; and if you want to have a conversation about media you need to include the top 4 telecoms as well. Netflix doesn’t really belong with the company it’s often mentioned in.

And yes, VSTS is good. The interface and tools are easy to use, the defaults are way better than Jira and it integrates with damn near everything (even tools it replaces, like Jenkins).

The Microsoft of the late 2010s is almost the polar opposite of the late 1990s Microsoft. It’s all about open tools that link together via proprietary orchestration platforms. Those platforms provide the bulk of the business value, so I’m ok with them not being as open.

> think they're worth more than they are.

> Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing?

Pretty much. It makes sense for employees to land where they can create the most value. If FAANG can get 4x the value out of a junior engineer than your small company can, of course they are going to outcompete you in hiring top junior engineers.

Figure out how to extract more value or set your sights lower (and regardless probably want to keep your contempt to yourself).

There's a common economic fallacy that prices have anything to do with the cost of production, but the only relationship is that if the price people are willing to pay for a product is less than the cost, that item simply doesn't get made and sold.

When you have companies attempting to produce goods that cannot be profitably produced, below market wages are a common earmark. Whatever widget the company is selling only has a market at $X, but has a cost under current market conditions of $2X, so they are trying to pay people half market salary to bring the two numbers together.

> Maybe smaller companies are failing at capitalism by not competing?

By not having money?

This is capitalism working as expected, the only reason you would word it that way is out of ignorance.

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