> Tech historically has a chronic staffing shortage, which has been why it has paid so well.
Companies really don't want more staff at these salaries if they are seen as a cost center in the billions each year, Twitter, Meta, Snap, Coinbase, Robinhood, etc are great examples that showed this in the past.
They really are screaming for a staff shortage of people who want to accept their very low-ball offers.
A decade ago, the amount of VC capital contributed to such inflated salaries as the standard to lure people working at banks, wall st, hedge funds or older established tech companies.
As soon as those places started to lose staff to startups, they decided to raise their salaries and comp packages to discourage them from leaving, and those companines can afford to do such raises or bonuses. Startups? Not so much, unless they are immensely profitable.
> Hey folks, staffing is getting expensive. Competing for staff is hurting us all. What do you say we all coordinate and put our projects on ice for a while, do major layoffs for 18 months or so, and push wages back down to 2014 levels?
...and off shore the laid off staff and hire developers in cheaper countries as a skeleton crew to keep costs down and beat Wall St. expectations.