> Does this signal that its harder to find those young hungry geniuses? Or that other stages of life are now predominating?
It’s much, much easier to get a high paying tech job now than it was back then. Assuming you’re ambitious and willing to relocate, you can now go to Silicon Valley, make all of the right moves, and amass millions of dollars in a decade of working for the right companies.
Making that kind of money with that kind of point-and-shoot career process (not easy, but doable for kinds of ambitious engineers considering startup life) wasn’t nearly as easy a couple decades ago. If you wanted to really accomplish something and make it big, it felt like a startup was the right kind of gamble.
Products were also easier to ship back then. 37Signals (now Basecamp) built a highly profitable empire on top of software that was basically a bunch of web forms. A couple founders eating ramen could very easily launch a new web product back then. Now it’s tough to get recognized without polished UX, flawless features, and a significant customer acquisition budget. It’s easy to forget just how much technology and the industry have changed in recent years.
> Assuming you’re ambitious and willing to relocate, you can now go to Silicon Valley, make all of the right moves, and amass millions of dollars in a decade of working for the right companies
It's quite easy to do it in 4 years or less now.
At current pay rates and stock growth rates, you have to be VERY optimistic to turn down a FAANG job.
Yep and you also can learn to deliver products at scale.
For me the main reason I took a FAANG job was to get enough money that I can chill for a couple years and build a failed startup ;). (And hopefully meet many smart people work with on it.)
That's very much true, even though I had an exit, if I could turn back the wheels of time, I would have spent a few years in a FAANG job. Way less stressful and you (can) have exposure to startup culture anyway there.
I'm an L6 at Amazon and I'm not sure if millions are possible in 4 years, but the replies are right in that you get close to a million. RSUs, investing back into the socket market etc etc gets you there.
Yeah, looking back to the mid-aughts you could probably "launch" a "product" in a few weeks. You could stretch that 5K into a few months of runway as your expenses are rent, food, internet, and maybe $150/month tops in SaaS stuff.
Like you said, it was also easier to find people who wanted to work on that stuff. Tech jobs were less kushy and highly paid. Working at that kind of startup was a dream compared to slogging through crufty code at some company where software was viewed as a cost - rather than profit - center. But I think back then market rate for a mid-level dev was something like 70K.
> A couple founders eating ramen could very easily launch a new web product back then. Now it’s tough to get recognized
The competition was signficantly lower back then as well. Not only is all of the low hanging fruit gone, but those start ups who made it are now the current behemoth incumbents and are trying to clean up the whole orchard (so to speak).
The overall value of a software engineer is higher now than in the past. I think companies recognize this and are paying for it. An engineer that builds a system that controls 1000 machines in some distributed system, that serves content to 100 million people has massive leverage, and is worth paying an extra few hundred grand.
> An engineer that builds a system that controls 1000 machines in some distributed system, that serves content to 100 million people has massive leverage
The idea of individual engineers shipping services on their own is long gone, though. Big companies have an almost unthinkably large army of engineers working on everything these days. It’s never just one person doing the magic that makes a service go. OTOH, decades ago it wasn’t too uncommon to find just a couple key engineers at the helm of key services.
I think the real driver is the amount of money pouring into the tech space. Companies have to pay more to compete with each other for talent because there are so many tech companies trying to do tech things now. It’s as simple as that.
Right, but the market caps have gone up so much. If you run some basic metric like market cap/number of engineers, places like facebook have an insane incentive to pay huge money for talent. The relative scope may have gone down (many people on one project/api), but the wide ranging impact on PnL/Profitability/Money generated by those individual engineers changes have gone up
Yup, nowadays I see most MVPs and at first glance I am amazed at the quality. Back in the day, a well put together MVP was probably enough to make your product go viral
That depends heavily on the product, but yeah it's true. Also what I see is teams are getting better at focusing on their core value and stripping away unnecessary things at the beginning.
It’s much, much easier to get a high paying tech job now than it was back then. Assuming you’re ambitious and willing to relocate, you can now go to Silicon Valley, make all of the right moves, and amass millions of dollars in a decade of working for the right companies.
Making that kind of money with that kind of point-and-shoot career process (not easy, but doable for kinds of ambitious engineers considering startup life) wasn’t nearly as easy a couple decades ago. If you wanted to really accomplish something and make it big, it felt like a startup was the right kind of gamble.
Products were also easier to ship back then. 37Signals (now Basecamp) built a highly profitable empire on top of software that was basically a bunch of web forms. A couple founders eating ramen could very easily launch a new web product back then. Now it’s tough to get recognized without polished UX, flawless features, and a significant customer acquisition budget. It’s easy to forget just how much technology and the industry have changed in recent years.