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Comment by ghc | Hacker News Reader

Wayfair is not and has never been your typical tech startup. The founders didn't even take VC or give out much equity until soon before their IPO. Given their conservative behavior, I'm not surprised they looked at the diminishing returns of hiring more engineers to work on AR/VR/whatever flavor of the moment and decided to cut costs. Because at Wayfair, engineering is just another cost center.

Having 350 more engineers on the market is only a good thing. Salaries in Boston have gotten to the point where an engineer with no experience just out of a middling CS education can demand $120-150k and often get it. Where does that leave most (non-startup) companies here? With inexperienced and understaffed teams.

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> Having 350 more engineers on the market is only a good thing. Salaries in Boston have gotten to the point where an engineer with no experience just out of a middling CS education can demand $120-150k and often get it. Where does that leave most (non-startup) companies here? With inexperienced and understaffed teams.

Isn’t that implying that most non-startup companies just aren’t willing to pay market rate for the devs that they want?

No it implies that rapidly hiring FAANG divisions are so desperate for talent they're willing to outbid anyone else. One could call that a market, but it's a market distorted by a few tech companies that are far wealthier than the rest.

That's called a market. If you're not a wealthy employer, you lose.

Yes there's a labor shortage. No it's not just FAANG paying those rates. Startups are also paying on par or just slightly below those rates.

Or with very experienced teams that have families and don’t care to live the startup life like the team I work in at an educational research non-profit in the Boston area.

It's non-startups that are having the hardest time finding talent thanks to tech giants (also not startups) getting into bidding wars over talent. Startups are in general fine -- they can sell the "upside" that more established companies can't. And non-profits might be fine too; I don't have much exposure there. But in my experience your average smallish public company has, over the past five years, seen a dramatic drop in level of experience and candidate quality at various IT positions that they haven't experienced in other kinds of engineering roles, despite continuously ratcheting up salaries to compete. Smells a lot like the job market in 2008, right before a lot of talented people wound up unemployed.

How is this like layoffs caused by the market crash caused by dodgy financial instruments?

In weakening financial markets (no matter the cause), companies often stop stockpiling talent and employees perceived as overpaid relative to their value (as valued by contribution to revenue) are often let go. There have been large layoffs in the past few weeks at LogMeIn, TripAdvisor and now Wayfair, but for now it's impossible to tell if it is a coincidence or a trend among Boston companies.

> where an engineer with no experience just out of a middling CS education

uh, what exactly is a "middling" CS education?

middling GPA, middling co-op/work experience, I imagine.

Doesn't that just mean "average"?

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