However I can't help but feel the bubble will burst eventually and it will be a success to run a VC-backed startup for a few months without seeing it become a shitshow.
I can't complain though, salaries are skyrocketing in my area and getting a major raise is easier than ever. It must be scary for founders / owners though.
There has been a lot of FOMO from businesses into tech after covid. But most of these tech undertakings haven’t really been fully implemented or had a chance to show their impact.
Its entirely possible that a lot of businesses will realize that their massive new tech teams didn’t really translate into a healthier bottomline. Perhaps they overhired, overengineered, or simply didn’t have the culture or expertise or even the need to go all-in on tech.
This assumes there's another job waiting for you at the end of it. Raises and job offers remaining plentiful at the same time funding is drying up would require quite specific circumstances to continue - namely, that none of the companies driving today's offers depended on cheap money to get to where they are. If a substantial group of them did, there may not be much of a next round.
That said, a lot of what we see right now appears to just be crowd-following, a lot of what really happens will depend on if businesses see substantial customer exits, not just funding tightening. But if, say, there's a big enough startup crunch to hit AWS's bottom line in such a large way that they start laying people off, suddenly you can start seeing potential feedback loops pushing salaries down and difficulty of finding a job up.
I will say there's probably about to be a bunch of WEB3 crypto bros about to need a new job, to which I say good riddance; the days of them grifting people is probably over.
If you're a startup engineer employed by such founders, why wouldn't that mean it's also scary for you?
Not all founders are VC backed . It’s only the ones that are and never thought about how to turn a profit that should be scared.