Of the large salary companies - Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are in the cloud space. Google doesn't make most of its profits from cloud. Netflix and Facebook don't sell these services at all. Dropbox and Digital Ocean (and sort of Cloudflare) are also in the cloud space and aren't known for such salaries.
It's possible everything is in a bubble from the low interest rates. My prediction is Adtech is far more likely to be in a bubble than cloud computing. The productivity gains and small number of people who can fill the role for cloud are going keep it dominate probably for a long time even in a recession.
I only ask because it is has been around for a few decades now, has steadily been on an incline while old advertising methods has slowly been on a decline. Those trends are more likely here to stay…
The pandemic fueled weird economics everywhere but I don’t think we will see falls below pre-COVID
Interest rates go up -> VC Money goes down -> Advertising budgets go down
Online advertising is "theoretically" better than other advertising. You can track exactly how it converts to sales or not. It is still the best way to advertise in my opinion so will beat out any other method for sure.
Just one company, sure, but it did make me wonder about adtech in general.
The margins are so insane that it just doesn’t matter. They are trading engineering time for time to market.
It's always so hard to nail down AdTech, to the outsider it seems like a world filled with bots and bad data and fueled by FOMO. Probably a good chunk of Google's revenue comes from companies that don't really need to advertise, but do so anyways so they won't loose their "competitive edge"
In the end major financial decisions have many tradeoffs, but the micro optimizations are less important than having a high savings rate. If you make 150+k and make reasonable choices more money hits serious diminishing returns.
If you believe we're in a low-inflation economy, you may want to have an argument on that subject with folks that don't. :)
Central bank interest rates don't really matter much for investors or borrowers. Typically investors would use the 10y treasury yield as an approximate risk free rate and apply a risk premium to that calculate their required ROI. Central bank interest rates only matter to banks.
For the last decade 10y treasury yields have ranged from around 1.5% - 3%. And as recently as 2018 they were around 2.8% - 3.1%. Today the 10y treasury yields around 4.2% which is meaningfully higher, but I think people are vastly over stating the impact of this. It's also quite possible the 10y yield is currently peaking and will move down over the next year. The long-end of the yield curve typical moves with inflation + economic growth expectations. I'm not committed to any side of this argument but I will say there is good reason to believe inflation pressures are likely to trend lower globally over the next several decades because of global demographic trends and slower rates of productivity growth. This is why interest rates probably haven't been as recklessly low over the last decade as many people in 2022 like to suggest - they've needed to be as low as they have been to prevent deflation and economic contraction.
Similarly to investors, companies don't borrow at the Fed funds rate, they borrow at a premium to what the treasury market yields. So while corporates will need to borrow at a slightly higher rates to fund growth going forward, I again think people are vastly over stating the impact of 1-2% higher borrowing costs.
That said, it's totally reasonable to expect margins to fall as industries mature - especially when there is a lot of competition in that industry. I do believe cloud margins will contract slightly over the next decade, but I'm not convinced pricing is in a bubble either. Firstly, investors (collectively) are far from stupid. If you think the market is wrong and that you're the only one to see these risks then you probably haven't been humbled by the wisdom of markets enough. Cloud company will be growing for many years to come and valuations today imo do already allow for some margin contraction. But we've seen this all before... As OP mentioned SSL certs used to be ridiculously expensive, now you can get them for free. I personally remember having to pay several hundred dollars a year for a VPS, dedicated IP and SSL cert back in the mid 2000s. Hell, it cost about a $100 a year just for a domain + decent webhosting back then. I mean if pricing is in a bubble today then you should have seen it a decade ago...
Finally, when it comes to mortgages obviously it's important to ensure you can afford your repayments even if the unexpected happens, but as a long-term borrower inflation is your friend. Even if real wage growth for software engineers decline the likelihood of significant nominal wages declines for software engineers is practically zero. As an example while the real wages of cleaners and factory workers may have declined in real terms over the last few decades, in nominal terms they're making more than ever, and that's really all that matters in terms of servicing debts.
Plan like everyone else in your country who has to deal with this uncertainty on significantly lower salaries.
Budget. Save. Trim expenditure. And enjoy your career because you chose it as a career, not because it allowed you a lifestyle.
This whole "its your calling" thing is how the abuse and low pay in adjacent industries, like game development, are maintained, and frankly it's BS.
I'd go back to school and into something that will maintain my lifestyle.
And then, when you are prepared, you can be more calm about a lot more things. Yes, it's possible for the Zombie Apocalypse to hit and make a mockery of all my prep... but because I'm more-or-less ready for more realistic scenarios, I'm also more chill about the possibility of them happening.
And they may not, in which case frankly I won't have wasted many resources anyhow, any more than it's a waste to buy an insurance policy that you never get to collect on.
But that also means that you need not be too alarmed. Even just one year of making the aforementioned $300,000 allows you several years of not working at all before you are making less, on average, than a typical low risk job. As you've already priced in the risk, you'll be fine.
And if the market is wrong then you've gained a nice reward.
That, from an employer point of view, is certainly what makes the difference between offering a high risk premium and deciding that the work isn't worth doing.
> which is partly because of the value of experience, which takes time to build
All jobs value from experience. The question the worker has to ask himself is: Where am I going to allocate my time to gain experience? One can't do everything. They have to make a choice. Tech is a risky place to allocate your time, but compensates for that by offering a premium to compel you in that direction.
Tech is risky because it is all about exploring unknowns. You get periods of fruit, but you are also likely to get periods of dead ends, and when those dead ends start to accumulate people start to back away. That is quite unlike, say, road maintenance where there is a strong belief that roads will be around for the lifetime of one's career. That isn't a guarantee, but it is lower risk. Tech is known to disappear.
Tech has crashed many, many times before after too many dead ends. It feels to me like we're in a dead end period. When was the last time you were excited about new tech? The WFH period during the pandemic brought some small excitement in tech emergence, but it seems we're trying as hard as possible to back away from that.
But who knows? This time might be different. And if that's the case you've got your risk premium as a reward for taking the risk.
That said it's always a good idea in general to live below your means, and to be specific, not get the biggest mortgage your lender thinks you can afford.
You're not exactly risking your life and limb by taking a job at a cloud firm. Demand for software isn't going anywhere, and no hiring manager at any future job will give two cares as to whether or not your previous employer's revenues were inflated or not.
You are risking opportunity elsewhere.
Let's say your options are working as a developer for a random Fart App startup or a government job sweeping floors that has been around for centuries. Which are you going to choose? If they both offer $50,000 per year, the choice is clear: The government job. It is the one that is almost certain to have more longevity.
But if the Fart App startup increases their offer to $300,000, well, now it's a harder choice. The startup still isn't likely to last, but with $300,000 in your pocket you're not so concerned about it disappearing into the void on a whim. And if on the unheard of chance they do make it as a lasting company that spans centuries then you're in a really great position.
> Demand for software isn't going anywhere
Thing is, it does crater approximately every 10 years, as we've observed since software first became a thing. It is more entrenched now than it ever was, so there is some reason to think this time is different, but the market is pricing in the risk regardless. The market can be wrong, but the market likes to be prepared.
It slows down, along with the rest of the economy during recessions, because it, like everything else, is driven by the same market forces.
My point is that in the average case, there is ~zero opportunity cost or damage to your career, because you worked at MS Azure, instead of... Somewhere else.
You cite fartapp startups that run on rainbows and free VC money, but cloud providers are about as dissimilar from the fartapp as you can get, in terms of their economics and prospects.
You may be bearish on them, that's fine, I can't predict the future, but I see no reason to believe that you're going to have a better life working at literally any other random software firm, during an economic contraction. There's always a few workplaces that tend to be counter-cyclical, but they are, by definition, a minority.
... Also, many government jobs are a political football, that are only as secure as the next election. The best part is that after you worked one, and had half your compensation deferred to retirement, some politician will come along, and campaign on reneging on your pay, after you've given your thirty years of service.
Tech has been the darling of late exactly because it hasn't followed the general economy. In 2008, when virtually every other industry was about to sound death knells, developers were making bank producing apps. Similar story through the pandemic, when people were locked out of work during lockdowns tech was making a killing selling them things to do with their free time. Not having a good reckoning like everyone else only makes it appear more risky as time marches forward as it is assumed its day will come.
> but cloud providers are about as dissimilar from the fartapp as you can get.
I can't imagine Firebase, which is supposedly the fourth largest cloud provider according to a recent article here, is used for anything much beyond fart apps. As the fart apps die, where does that leave their business model?
Providing tooling to the gold prospectors is a good business to be in... Until people stop prospecting for gold. Firebase is Google at the end of the day, but if that division dies, that's still significant.
I appreciate the concern though :).