The people I know who are still inside (Google) seem optimistic that maybe the company is taking a pause to deal with some of its bureaucracy and internal politics issues and with people's complaints about perf. I suppose that's good.
From my perspective: They've got way too many people doing a lot of meh work and feeling really ... important about it. And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry.
> And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry.
My understanding was that asphyxiating the industry was always the plan.
For those who worked in industry pre-2008, one of the major drivers that allowed new startups to be so disruptive was that startups could very often compete with the then major tech companies on compensation. If there was a difference in pay, it was usually minor and could easily be made up for by better quality of life and a nice promotion in title.
Once Google and Facebook started growing it's clear they realized that every talented engineer on the market is a potential threat. As time has moved on the gap in pay between startup and FAANG and now startup and any company offering RSUs is just too large for startups to compete for talent.
I generally prefer startups to large companies, but can't find a single startup offering comp even remotely close to what I have in my current role. Unless I started to absolutely hate my current position, and found a startup that had essentially my dream role, there's no way I would seriously consider a switch.
My suspicion is that as funding for startups starts to dry up as money becomes more expensive, we'll see large, high paying tech companies start to let go of more staff and start driving comp down. When the market cools Google and similar companies asphyxiation strategy will have been completed. Startups starved of talent and finally starved of dollars will be no threat, that means they can safely reduce labor costs while maintaining market dominance.
Yes, I mean, I came to Google through an acquisition (of an adtech company) and it was pretty clear to me that the goal of the whole process was a) make your company go away and stop your customers from using you instead of us and b) get as much of your talent out of the job market as possible.
They totally didn't care about our product or the productivity of the employees they brought in. They let us sit and twiddle our thumbs and "rest and vest" for at least a year, after making a big show for the DOJ about how this aquisition wasn't an anti-competitive move ([1])
And I hung around there moving protobufs around and fixing the odd bug for 10 years but getting paid stupid money to not go and do anything for anybody else or keep on top of industry trends etc. (Not claiming I'm some shit hot engineer, just speaking for my personal situation)
I don't think most people who are 'organically' hired into Google see it this way because for them it's a thing they seek out, a life goal they pursued. For me it was always in the back of my mind.
Which is one of the reasons I eventually had to leave despite it putting my family in a more precarious financial situation. It wasn't a place I was ever going to find meaning in my work or feel like I fit in.
Re: startups and compensation one major thing that has changed since 20 years ago is that it is simply not possible to become wealthy (like "I can afford going to retire wealthy" or "I can now afford to seed my own startup wealthy") out of the equity package that a startup will offer unless you're the cofounders or a founding employee. The packages they'll offer will be a fraction of a % of equity, which if you're really really lucky will turn into a few hundred thousand in an exit after busting your ass for a few years. From a strictly financial POV there's no reason to choose working at a startup over a FAANG. Most will simply not offer anything to make it worth the risk. You should only choose to do it for lifestyle or enjoyment reasons, really. (That said, I'm working for a startup again right now.)
It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer.
Hire Canadians. Currency conversion advantage. Same time zones. Same language. Mostly same culture. Very well educated. Cheaper health care benefits. And $150k USD is a generous compensation level, and $250USD is about what a Canadian Googler @ L4 gets paid. $100-$125k USD gets you reasonable non-senior talent.
I think the reason this isn't more popular is that our talent pool is small enough that unless you already have a Canadian presence it's not really worth opening up a business unit/office/whatever here. Obviously some big players have done it (MS, Amazon, EA) but if you're a medium sized company it may not be worth it.
I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive.
> I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive.
It's extremely easy to be self employed in Canada with a foreign corporation. You just start getting your money wired through Wise or whatever service and declare it on your income taxes. As you work for a foreign corporation, no need to charge sales tax. That's it, no separate entity or incorporation needed. You can still expense your tools expenses, part of your housing, etc.
Sure if you want to incorporate, it becomes more complicated. But you wouldn't be incorporated either if you had a salaried job for a tech company locally.
But "extremely easy" is relative. It's still more hassle than being a salaried employee. If you make a non-trivial amount of money you'll need to pay your income taxes in installments and set it aside yourself (no deductions after all). You need to pay 100% of your CPP contributions. You're likely getting paid in non Canadian currency so need to get set up with a good forex provider or get ripped off by your bank (I use xe, but there's a few out there).
Also your point about not needing to charge sales tax depends on what country your employer is in. In my case it's true I don't need to charge because we have a tax treaty with the USA; for other nations this may not be the case. If no tax treaty is present, you need a GST registration #, charge your employer said GST, hold it yourself and then pay it out just like your income tax.
Also the extended health can't be overstated. If you have dental issues, bad eyesight, are on prescription drugs etc. it can make a real difference.
Generally I'd recommend contracting to people but I just want to be realistic.. it has it's downsides.
Yep I had a job offer fall through after several months of verbal offering & negotiation because the company was acquired and the new parent company had logistical problems hiring Canadians. Though mostly due to their own incompetence, it sounds like (their employer of record situation was charging insane overhead for Canadians).
So I'm also working as a contractor for a US (well, international remote but US incorporation I guess) company right now. And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself.
Also a bit of a bummer that CRA has tightened up incorporation stuff a bit since the last time I did this. Given I have a single client only right now, I'll just be doing sole proprietorship.
> And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself.
The idea is you scale your rate to include enough for a benefits package.
Or they use a POE/EOR service, that's possible in Canada I think.
Either way, incorporation still has some advantages, one being that you time shift your pay as needed. It can make it easier to subcontract people too. And it's easy, and only costs a few hundred dollars.
CRA will screw you if you incorporate and only have one client.
My employer is using Deel, paying me as sole proprietor, and that's fine. Deel can also act as an EOR and I could be "full time", and that could offer benefits. But it feels like a bit of a veneer overtop over what feels like contracting anyways, and it would mean less $$ in my pocket. It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Especially now that pharmaceuticals in Ontario are free for kids whose parents don't have a plan.
Also, it seems that telling my dentist and physiotherapist that I don't have a plan seems to make them behave more responsibly, on the whole.
If I end up at some point landing more clients and I end up being more consultant than single-client contractor, then I will incorporate.
As I understand it, it's not really about the 1 client, so much as about demonstrating you aren't really an employee-employer relationship masquerading as something else. It sounds like that's what you actually are, so in that case you shouldn't be incorporating. If you change contracts often enough it might make more sense.
FWIW an EOR/POE is more about the convenience for the employer, not you - they don't have to establish a local business presence, register a bunch of tax accounts, etc. You can end up technically employed by the EOR with access to a decent benefits plan etc., and paid directly by payroll. At least that's how it works in some jurisdictions, as you note. It's different all over, but can make a huge difference in somewhere with crappy medical coverage, or other benefits you want to keep consistent.
As a Canadian PR I've always thought this would be a good option except that the Canadian government seems determined to make it difficult.
When the most practical option is to form a corporate entity with a single employee, and BTW you may have to pay GST + PST on labor depending on if other Canadians use the service, it begins to look really unappetizing.
I get that employees as contractor relationships are rife for abuse, but, like so is exempting tech employees from overtime protection (BC and Ontario).
It really just shouldn't be this hard to do work for a company that isn't in Canada.
CRA now frowns heavily on "personal service corporations." There is no tax advantage (in fact there's disadvantages) to incorporating unless you have more than one client.
So it ends up being sole proprietorship only, which has far less tax advantages.
I mean, as a tax payer and citizen who paid exorbitant personal income taxes for years as an employee of a FAANG, I think this is probably equitable. But as a contractor, now... damn I'd like to be able to take advantage of corporate tax rates like I could 13 years ago when I did this last.
It's what we ended up doing (indirectly through an acquisition). But it didn't end-up costing less in the long run. I'd say about a third of employees ended up coming to the Bay anyways during the first year.
Something you have to keep in mind is that there are two parallel markets over there: SV caliber developers and the rest. The former won't have any issue getting a job in the US (takes maybe a week for a talented engineer to get one). Therefore, comp has to be priced appropriately. The later can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier and the quotas are close to 10x per capita compared to the US). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary.
The "SV caliber" developers you identify [honestly, that's kind of offensive, but whatever] who can and do actively consider relocation to the US.
The same caliber of developers, but have no interest in ever living in the US, for personal or obligation reasons.
The permanent resident non-Canadian citizen category you allude to.
Google Waterloo for example is mostly full of the second category. Plenty of high caliber talent who are there and not in Mountain View because that's where they chose to be. Because any of them could relocate / transfer to MTV any time they liked, but prefer not to. In my last few years there, there were dozens of people who I met who had transferred (back) into Canada from SV/Bay Area because they simply couldn't stand living there anymore because of cost of living, politics, family, home sickness, etc.
There are other companies that set up shop in Canada merely to siphon the first. They offer an "ok" experience for people who choose to stay, but push hard to get talent to relocate. I get the impression there's lots of this happening in Vancouver in particular.
The prominence of the last (recent immigrant / PR) category is really something that has held back the Canadian tech scene in general TBH. It's a product of international recruitment by the Canadian immigration system. There are shops full of people essentially fresh off the boat from the PRC or Eastern Europe. Many of these are highly qualified -- but in the context of our industry as a whole -- underpaid/mistreated. Others are not as competent. And it's all mixed up, and it has messed up the local tech market, compensation ranges, and quality of work produced.
Of course all of this is in flux and changing because of the rise of remote work.
Implicit in your argument is that people would always value SV > the rest of the US > Canada > Poor countries.
There are a lot of very talented people that have values that don't align that way for a variety of extremely valid reasons.
As someone who has the right to work in both Canada and the US, and who has been attempted to recruit by SV companies, I prefer the benefits of living where I do in Canada over the lifestyle costs of living in SV with 3x the money.
Not that simple for startups/small businesses. Dealing with labor law is no joke. I've been unable to hire FTE Canadians due to the legal burden that was going to come with setting up those operations. Larger corps can take advantage while small businesses sometimes can't deal with the paperwork overhead.
Anyone whose good in Canada is already in the US or they don't care about compensation to begin with. Either way you're not getting a top engineer working on your ad-tech business for a third the cost. But if you're building a startup that uses ML to look for 3d printable compliant mechanism you'll be drowning in applications and starved for cash.
As a Canadian that's not really how I see it. I worked for a bit in California and while I was earning more than I do now, the cost of living was probably double what I have right now so the math really wasn't as simple as "move to the US to make more money".
Having a team completely unavailable during the USA working day is a real pain for collaboration and it's hard to sue people in other countries that "borrow" your source code to make their own version. Also, knowing exactly how to pay (say) a German developer and how taxes work and what the labor laws are is always an issue.
Aside:
The very best contractors I ever hired were Ukranian. So many absolutely fantastic talents at around $30 an hour. Then Russia invaded (the first time) and annexed Sevastopol and the USA made it illegal to pay them any more.
I'm in Uruguay, South America, and we're on the East Coast timezone and IP laws are friendly, and if you hire as a contractor, there's no labor law issues.
Of course, people realized that and there's 0 unemployment in IT, however, there's still a long way to go before we get to the Bay Area salaries - 6 figure salaries are only for the top 1% devs and only working for the USA and usually short term contracts, but a decent developer makes north of 50.000 dollars a year which is a pretty good salary here.
+1 I've only had incredible experiences with Ukrainian devs and designers- I hesitate to say best because I've worked with amazing people all over (I was at two gig economy companies that did custom software dev with freelancers) but Ukraine as a destination often stood out for high quality, low prices, and not needing a ton of supervision/detailed instruction.
Shameless plug- a buddy runs a dev shop out there, they have great devs and exceptional designers (and also are doing a fund for Ukrainians impacted by the war). If you're looking for help in that region, they're great people to chat with: https://beetroot.co/
Ukrainians were given full employment rights in Poland after the Russian invasion, so they can just move to Poland (at least the female ones, as males aren’t allowed to leave Ukraine for now).
1. timezones are a PITA. Collabroation with Europe/East-Asia is barely manageable from the West Coast. India is the most painful.
2. english language barriers - half the people I have worked with in South America (Colombia, Brazil) and China were so bad with English that it seriously affected the team's productivity.
Canadians fit the bill on both counts - same timezones and language.
Canadian here. Canadians are clearly the best developers out there and yes, unfortunately, you can slide quite a bit down the payscale to afford us.
I'm surprised cross boarder hiring hasn't become even more popular with the pandemic and forced work-from-homeness. Canadians mostly speak English (even most Quebecois do!) and are in a compatible timezone with the majority of the developers either in St. Lawrence valley or Vancouver and thus being either EST or PST.
Also, while the holidays differ I think the total number of stats is pretty close to the same.
I am quite uncertain about the cheaper portion - but the timezones hurt quite a bit and the costs for in-person visits are extremely high. Australia and New Zealand are awesome places (and I'm highly jealous of New Zealand in particular) but a 13+ hr flight to get to the west coast is extremely fatiguing so meetups are highly unlikely - compare that to flying someone down from YVR to SFO and it's a huge price and time difference and SEA and YVR are close enough that the train/bus is usually a very reasonable option.
But who doesn't love a trip out to Oz to 'meet the team'! Same thing with lots of US companies in Ireland (whilst mostly for tax reasons initially, Ireland now is stacked with talent) - trip to Ireland to 'meet the team', pre-covid ain't no one going to say no to those off-sites.
It is going to be an interesting decade, the rise of working from home and ai creeping into every profession will make for some radical changes. Engineering managers can only hold their accountants overlords back for so long. I do hope SFO stops being the centre of the tech world as it is very inefficient, but that's probably 30-40 years away at the earliest unless all out war is triggered.
You're projecting a very specific SV bubble. More than enough decent developers exist outside of it, willing to work for a fraction. It's the fat profits and the big boys' eagerness to poach talent that got us this far, which subsequently inflated the QoL in these tech hubs, in turn creating the current standard.
Yeah, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I or most silicon valley coders making 250k+ can singlehandedly outperform a dozen "decent developers" by pretty much any metric you can pick.
I'm not saying we're smarter or innately better, but coding is a tradeskill and the masters of the trade are almost all here.
I'm interested to see how much this changes over the next decade, though, since a lot of people have scattered across the globe thanks to remote work finally catching on.
I seriously doubt that. Developing things is the same thing all around the globe. Just because you have worked five years building react apps in silicon valley (and from what I can tell, 250k total comp is reachable at that experience level) does not make you more skilled at building react apps than someone who also built react apps, say, in Barcelona. But you probably make 5 times as much, if not more. That's not because you are more skilled but because your company makes way more money, or is expected to make more money and thus gets funding from rich people. The company makes way more money because of a lot of reasons, e.g. like access to the enormous US single market which is way bigger and more homogenic than the EU single market, or any other market out there except for maybe the chinese one, as well as historic reasons that turned SV into the western world's digital innovation center, and thus turned a lot of funding attention into SV.
I don’t think it’s as much about the challenging technical problems as it is the ability to get shit done. Wherever I’ve worked, most developers are unable to own e2e work. At big tech, you are expected to be decent in a lot of related areas (communication, project planning, etc).
Software is a people problem and what big tech looks for is top notch technical skills and the mindset/ability to solve them in a chaotic environment.
Doesn't jive with me. Many companies paying at best domestic market rate are asking for top notch communication skills and people persons over tech skills. Meanwhile, most FAANG have far higher tech requirements, but would hire individuals who can barely speak proper English and even put them in the spot of hiring managers. If you value communication, you need a really good argument to look past hiring practices preferring to hire someone who'd be hard for strangers to understand in a presentation setting.
I'm fairly certain you're confusing anecdotes and culture with "big tech vs. your local shop". Software being a people problem meaning big tech is more people focused is a false dichotomy.
I think my post sounded more indexed on communication than the "get shit done" part of things. What do you think of the perspective if I changed the desired skill to "ownership" instead?
Most of the big tech companies' engineers are doing the same type of work as outside big tech. However, their internal practices are scattered and faster than outside (IME), which means you have to be able to keep your head above water, drive your own career, and deliver impact. You need to understand the product space quite well, as you are expected to be a partner. Rather than delivering code, you are delivering value.
Maybe 1 in 20 engineers that I've worked with outside big tech had this trait. I think they set the tech bar high, but the real skill differentiation I have seen is ownership.
You are right that in backend, at FAANG scale, you face some unique challenges that smaller shops don't face. And of course, unless you work at FAANG scale, you haven't faced these problems so you haven't learned know how to solve them, so you will lose if you compete with people who know how to solve them.
But that's far away from the claim from above, that any 250k+ total comp developer from SV can outprogram good people from outside the US who don't make 250k+ total comp in basically any benchmark.
Most SV employees never have to solve these problems.
I picked frontend intentionally because it's probably the area that's the furthest away from these problems, but still compensated at 250k+ levels, if you work in SV for the right employers.
But even among backend engineers, most have never touched hard to parallelize problems. I'd argue that most (definitely not all) FAANG backend tasks are easily scalable. Implementing them still takes work, whch is done by most FAANG engineers. FAANG level tooling definitely helps, and while developing that tooling is hard, the people who have built such tooling are only a tiny subset of FAANG employees (regardless whether they are more skilled than the average FAANG employee or not).
This isn't quite right. I can see how you reached the conclusion you did, but you're missing a lot of context.
For one, developing frontends at the scale and complexity needed for quickly growing organizations is just as complex as backend scaling in a variety of ways.
If you're a frontend expert and can operate in the way needed to support a rapidly growing business/product - you can make just as much if not more than backend engineers (500k+ easily at senior levels). This instinct around large-scale abstractions is not developed by building small sites over and over gain. This is just simply experience not everyone has because it requires context.
Also programming ability alone is not the sole reason for the outsized comp packages. In my view, it is at most 1/3rd of the reason. There are a lot of other qualities that are important that can only be gained through a specific kind of experience.
> This instinct around large-scale abstractions is not developed by building small sites over and over gain.
What do you mean by large scale abstractions?
Generally, small frontends are different from large frontends. Already because you need to work on a team instead of being able to do it alone. But adding features is a quite orthogonal concern to scaling by the number of users I'd say. There can be extremely complex frontends that only have a dozen concurrent users (think some company internal admin console), and nothing prevents a small frontend from targetting billions. E.g. Google search used to have a quite simple frontend 17 years ago, and it still looks quite simple to the outside, but the results side has obviously been heavily enriched since.
From the frontend point of view, it is just calling an API, and processing its results, while there is backend magic happening to make it scalable. I'm disregarding SSR here for a moment. It shouldn't matter if the same frontend code is loaded by ten users or hundreds, or billions.
> There are a lot of other qualities that are important that can only be gained through a specific kind of experience.
Can you list some of those qualities? I'm curious.
You run into all sorts of bugs you'd never even conceive of when things scale up, even basic frontend code
Some problem that would hit one customer every few years and go away on refresh for a local mom & pop website will irritate thousands of people a day on Google.com, and those people will band together on Facebook into a support group, and that support group will get media coverage
You try to look into the issue and you can't reproduce it at all, you just have to figure it out from tiny wisps of clues
The average SV developer knows nothing about building Facebook.com to scale.
More precisely, the number of people who were there when "scaling products that big and that fast" applied to Facebook (or other comparable companies) is a tiny fraction of all SV developers.
The absolute hubris of SV people thinking that they can individually perform the jobs of 2-3 competent teams of people at literally any company outside of SV is why a lot of talented people want nothing to do with SV.
And yet, I show up at a company as a consultant and in two weeks I singlehandedly take care of something ten people have been struggling with for a year
Has it occurred to you that hiring a consultant is, by definition, an unusual situation?
That, perhaps, you have never had to come in and save any team at my company, or thousands of other companies, because we are competent developers?
Being able to do the work of 10 people once, does not mean that you are able to take 10 people from any company outside of a specific geographic area and replace them with one of you.
Have you considered that a consultant hired to fix a specific problem, and salaried employees seeking to justify their existence, may have slightly misaligned incentives?
Small startups need to be poaching ‘Big Boys’ employees, not the other way round. I see many boutique shops offering (nearly) the same pay, and poaching from FAANG+M (The M is Micro$oft)
They have to because that's the status quo now. Go back a few decades and ask yourself who started this trend.
If paying 250k+ for a developer is insane, then so is a company able to pay 250k+ without running huge losses. Those developers still make peanuts compared to what the stakeholders and executives do, despite these salaries. It's ignoring the elephant in the room which is fat profits being with a few companies, subsequently making it tougher to compete for anyone not born in wealth or able to get VC money to play with.
SV could both bankrupt dozens of companies outside SV, slash that 250k locally and up to ante globally if it had a mentality shift, in less than a few years. That's how insane the profits are.
Who will then fuck up the interview process and then return to complaining that there are no decent developers. There isn't a lack of them, there's a lack of being able to identify them.
Thanks for this. It's not just the interview process either, it's the entire industry which works against utilizing decent developers. If we really needed more decent developers, we've got thousands of companies pushing them into management, obtuse hiring practices and wades of middlemen to account for.
I think software engineering is actually quite difficult. If it feels easy it’s probably because you’ve been at it for a while. This severely constrains supply but demand is huge because even at high cost, software automation can deliver big returns for a company.
Learning programming is throwing yourself at a wall until you figure it out, a natural gatekeeping force that is exacerbated by the unfriendliness and complexity of development environments. An intentionally designed tool and system could enable far more developers at reasonable yet respectable salaries.
> It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer.
While I think the premise is wrong - not anyone can learn to code - there are also levels of "learn to code" so it's simpler to spin up a create-react-app and modify it a bit for a code school credit compared to advanced Scala - it's also true that learning to code is nowhere near the hardest part of software engineering productivity.
It doesn’t have to cost that. You probably can hire people remotely. E.g. Almost nobody in the EU will cost you that much. Most good devs are less than €100k total cost.
Well then we should just keep moving Eastwards from California until we find the cheapest teams we can and outsource to those, right? Let me know how that works out.
Plus if you are US based communicating in real time with Europe is a pain. And many EU countries have strict labor laws that limit working hours. Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports.
I hear you, I think software is different because it has very few physical constraints.
My appetite for food is not infinite, I can only eat so much. Same, but less so, for cars, clothes, etc. in some abstract sense, maybe, there are people that want 100 cars, but not really.
Even with housing, demand is not really infinite. I don’t want to redo my kitchen every year.
But software, every company has a backlog far longer than they will ever be able to do, and the ROI is there for the most part.
This most certainly is not true. There are plenty of free things that don’t result in 100% consumption. Demand is based on peoples needs and preferences, not on how much is out there already. Think about libraries as an example.
Oxygen is definitely still monetized. Think about the canisters or the tanks that people use to go into high altitude environments. Hell, even in Denver or Aspen or Telluride you can go to an 'oxygen bar' for absurd prices. Hospitals will put you on oxygen and then bill you thousands for the service.
Beyond that, I have no doubt that there are some people who would willingly charge everyone for oxygen, if there was only a way. This would be driven by the idea that even though there is plenty in the atmosphere, a person only needs to be deprived of it for a little while before the situation becomes dire.
I do believe that everyone should learn to code, but not be a professional software dev. They are vastly different things. Coding can be just automating a task to reduce the human factor or making it more frictionless, with throwaway code of 100 lines.
You literally can go on indeed.com and check for "$250-500K/yr for a single developer". It. Does. Not. Exist. Yes there are a few at FAANG that do make this, but this isn't the current market.
Yeah, not really - L3 and L4 are entry level roles, for folks just out of college. No FAANG is paying a newb college grad $400k/yr. Either your friends didn’t understand the comp plan and how equity is paid out, or they were BSing you.
e.g. Amazon was giving out SDE II (google L4 equivlant) @ 400k (first year no RSU but cash bonus paid out monthly) about 2 months ago.
re L3 level, if you have a master's or 1+ yr exp, while you're still at the entry level, you are considered "industrial hire" and 300 is very attainable
in my current company for new hires (again justed to google's leveling) we have L5 550+ and L6 650+ (200~300 cash + RSU , not pre-IPO bs)
In my earlier years I used to doubt those "ridiculous" numbers until I simply asked for more. There are plenty of companies out there, many medium-big sized non-FAANG companies pay just as well.
It's not "easy" to achieve this, but it might be possible. One doesn't just wake up and decide to go work at a FAANG and get a >90% percentile salary from them for the level.
Go on angel.co and filter for jobs in the Bay Area and you'll find roles around 250k base salary. 250k including bonuses and stock is far more common. This isn't just Bay Area btw, take a look at the contract market in London and there are multiple > 200k GBP roles (roughly 250k USD).
There are well over 100k US-based software engineers at the five FAANG companies alone, plus a long tail of other companies that compete with them for talent and offer similar (and in some cases higher) compensation. All of those companies can go over $250k in total comp for the equivalent of Google L4, i.e., one promotion above entry-level.
Non-FAANG, not even a company you've probably heard of, and all of my coworkers and I have TC is in that range.
I started my career in small companies and startups and it took me a long time to understand how TC works. Both in tech and finance base salaries are typically around 200 or less, but total compensations factoring in both bonuses and RSUs brings the amount of money you bring in each year much higher.
It's gotten much better in recent years with levels.fyi and the like helping more people to see this, but I found that a few years back if you didn't go to an elite school you likely didn't have someone explain to you how comp works.
If you want to make > 250k you absolutely can, and it doesn't mean selling your soul. Don't convince yourself that these TC levels are myths.
Though I do suspect we'll see dotcom level changes in comp soon.
I think the original post that gave that range was thinking of salary and not TC. Obviously, only a few companies can afford to give away crazy valuable equity.
are these all onsite FAANG? Know of any good companies hiring remote (US) in that range? Here in LA we have most of the FAANGs, but I'd rather not drive three hours a day.
> one major thing that has changed since 20 years ago is that it is simply not possible to become wealthy (like "I can afford going to retire wealthy" or "I can now afford to seed my own startup wealthy") out of the equity package that a startup will offer unless you're the cofounders or a founding employee
Statistically that's likely, but it's not always the case.
If you luck into one of the companies that IPOs and grows big (and doesn't need to be FB/GOOG-level big, just in the handful of billions in market cap), even the tiny sliver of options of a regular employee can become retirement-level money.
There are many public companies in SV that have market cap in the dozens of billions who made their regular employees who joined pre-IPO very rich even though the companies aren't FAANG and don't have such brand recognition.
Toss in dilution, liquidation preferences and other financial engineering put by the people who actually know the rules of the game, and your "tiny sliver of options" will still be worth less than 5 years of FAANG salary.
No, not always. Having been in SV over 20 years, I know plenty of people who've scored very comfortable retirement money out of IPOs despite having joined late as regular ICs. And a handful who became insanely rich even though none were founders or single-digit early employees.
>Re: startups and compensation one major thing that has changed since 20 years ago is that it is simply not possible to become wealthy (like "I can afford going to retire wealthy" or "I can now afford to seed my own startup wealthy") out of the equity package that a startup will offer unless you're the cofounders or a founding employee.
I guess it depends how you define a "founding employee". I know several engineers who made enough to retire who joined unicorns around the pre-series A time or at the time of the raise itself but were not founding engineers.
'Back in the day' the graffiti artist who painted the first Facebook office got shares that ended up worth $200 million [1] because in those days, investors hadn't figured out they could get away with offering a lot less.
More recently, last time I was on the job market and interviewed with startups, their offers were more along the lines of "If the company value rises to $1 billion, your stock options will be worth enough to buy a 3 bedroom family home within 30 minutes of the office" - a decent chunk of change, no doubt, but not enough to retire on, and far from guaranteed.
The average price of a decent 3 bedroom home within 30 minutes of Palo Alto probably IS enough to retire on (modestly) as an individual if you move to a cheaper state. Few Americans have several million dollars in retirement savings.
Even for most engineers, somewhere between five and ten million is enough to retire on (3.5% safe withdrawal rate) at a nice standard of living, again assuming you don't want to live in the bay area, NYC, Seattle or LA.
Join an early stage startup as a senior engineer and you'll probably be getting less than half or a third of a % of equity. If they even deign to tell you how many outstanding shares there are. Say that company gets super lucky and sells for a $1B? You might be lucky get $1M out of it. Assuming they didn't play funny business with the paperwork during acquisition, or dilute your shares a whole bunch.
$1M is a lot of money, but it's not "goodbye workforce" or "I'm off to invest in seeding my own startup" money, not when you have a family, home, and are still youngish.
Meanwhile the founders and other major stock owners will be doing quite well for themselves.
It's not unjust necessarily. But it definitely should inform just how much passion people put into the startups that hire them. Don't be fooled. Treat it like a job.
>Even for most engineers, somewhere between five and ten million is enough to retire on (3.5% safe withdrawal rate) at a nice standard of living, again assuming you don't want to live in the bay area, NYC, Seattle or LA.
Especially if you already own a place you're happy to live in long term, money in that range is enough to live very comfortably anywhere in the US. No, you're not flying private jets and maybe not employing multiple full-time domestic staff, but $200K-400K per year without even touching principal is absolutely enough to have a nice standard of living even in Manhattan.
I work at Google so my perspective is to be biased, but that's not what I see.
I work on infrastructure, and so a few years back, when I proposed a major project, I had to demonstrate how it would save *many* times the fully loaded cost of the engineers on the team, by reducing the Storage TCO for all of Google (for example). It was not enough for the project to "break even" --- the benefits had to do more than just exceed the "nominal" SWE cost. It had to be multiple times the cost of the SWE's, to account for the opportunity cost of those SWE's --- SWE's are a constrained resource, which is why a project needs to save $$$ (or increase profits) by many multiples the fully loaded SWE cost. (That project has since been completed, successfully, and I got a promotion to Sr Staff Engineer out of it.)
The reason why SWE's are a constrained resource is becaused finding good SWE's is non-trivial. As a TL, I don't want to waste my precious approved headcount on people who just want to rest and vest, or people who believe in the crazy talk of only needing to work 30 minutes each day. I'm trying to find highly motivated, smart, and talented SWE's who can also be team players. And if they need to have domain expertise (say, be proficient kernel engineers), it's super-duper difficult.
So I don't see any indication of people getting hired just to starve statups of talented engineers. We need every single talented engineer we can get for the projects that we want to accomplish. And in the time when we may need to slow down our growth, it may mean that we will need to slow, or shut down some projects. That may suck, especially if it's a project that we had invested a lot of passion into. But it's certainly no reason to panic. Slowing down growth is not the same as layoffs, and there is no shortage of work for us to do.
You also wrote major parts of Linux, so it's possible your contact with Googlers might be biased towards the more functional parts of the organization. Your bar for "talented engineer" may be higher than average parts of Google.
> As a TL, I don't want to waste my precious approved headcount on people who just want to rest and vest, or people who believe in the crazy talk of only needing to work 30 minutes each day.
And yet these people exist and get hired, even at Google. Perhaps not on your team, but they’re definitely there.
SV talks the big talk about hiring the best of the best of the best, then hires 30 thousand people in three months. There probably aren't that many 10x programmers in the world.
Interview process gatekeeping notwithstanding, the idea that you can hire 30,000 people (admittedly a decent proportion is probably backfilling/growing administrative, etc. positions) who are all "the best and the brightest" doesn't pass the sniff test.
As so many people learned over the years in storage org, essential modus operandi was “just do your current shit, this new shit you are proposing is too hard and we don’t want to do it”. I lost count of improvement proposals that ultimately were not getting supported (there was a funny one with (first) hosted NFS prototype, when they tried to turn it off, turned out there were pissed-off customers running business workloads already). Instead we tried to fit square pegs into the round holes “by using existing technology”.
Oh, you can certainly do big projects. My project[1] spanned 3 departments, and involved dozens of engineers, and required that we work with multiple hard drive vendors (our first two partners for Hybrid SMR were Seagate and WDC) on an entirely new type of HDD, as well as the T10/T13 standards committees so we could standardize the commands that we need to send to these HDD's. So this was all a huge amount of "new shit" that was not only new to Google, it was new to the HDD industry. You just have to have a really strong business case that shows how you can save Google a large amount of money.
On the production kernel team, colleagues of mine worked on some really cool and new shit: ghOSt, which delegates scheduling decisions to userspace in a highly efficient manner[3]. It was published in SOSP 2021/SIGOPS [4][5], so peer reviewers thought it was a pretty big deal. I wasn't involved in it, but I'm in awe this cool new work that my peers in the prodkernel team created, all of which was not only described in detail in peer-reviewed papers, but also published as Open Source.
I'm not saying storage didn't do big projects. I'm saying that over time it got calcified and instead of doing proper stack refactoring and delivering features beneficial for customers, it continued to sadly chug along team boundaries.
For example:
RePD is at just wrong level at all. It should have been at CFS/chunk level and thus benefit other teams as well.
BigStore stack is beyond bizarre. For years there were no object-level SLOs (not sure if there are now), which meant that sometimes your object disappeared and BigStore SREs were "la-la-la, we are fully within SLO for your project". Or you would delete something and your quota would not get back, and they would "or, Flume job got stuck in this cell, for a week...".
Not a single cloud (or internal, for that matter) customer asked for a "block device", they all want just to store files. Which means that cloud posix/nfs/smb should have been worked on from the day 1 (of cloud), we all know how it went.
No one asked for a "block device"? Um, that's table stakes because every single OS in the world needs to be able to boot their system, and that requires a block device. Every single cloud system provides a block device because if it wasn't there, customers wouldn't be able to use their VM, and you can sure they would be asking for it. Every single cloud system has also provided from day one something like AWS S3 or GCE's GCS so users can store files. So I'm pretty sure you don't know what you are talking about.
As far as "proper stack refactoring" is concerned, again, the key is to make a business case for why that work is necessary. Tech debt can be a good reason, but doing massive refactoring just because it _could_ help other teams requires much more justification than "it could be beneficial". Google has plenty of storage solutions which work across multiple datacenters / GCE zones, including Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable. These solutions or their equivalent were available and used internally by teams long befoe they were available as public offerings for Cloud customers. So "we could have done it a different way because it mgiht benefit other teams" is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence. Speaking as someone who has worked in storage infrastructure for over a decade, I don't see the calcification you refer to, and there are good reasons why things are done the way that are which go far beyond the current org chart. There have been a huge amount of innovative work done in the storage infrastructure teams.
I will say that the posix/nfs/smb way of doing things is not necessarily the best way to provide lowest possible storage TCO. It may be the most convenient way if you need to lift and shift enterprise workloads into the cloud, sure. But if you are writing software from scratch, or if you are internal Google product team which is using internal storage solutions such as Colossus, BigTable, Spanner, etc., it is much cheaper, especially if you are writing software that must be highly scalable, to use these technologies as opposed to posix/nfs/smb. All cloud providers, Google Cloud included, will provide multiple storage solutions to meet the customer where they are at. But would I recommend that a greenfield application start by relying on NFS or SMB today? Hell, no! There are much better 21st century technologies that are available today. Why start a new project by tying yourself to such legacy systems with all of their attendant limitations and costs?
> So I'm pretty sure you don't know what you are talking about.
Trust me, I intimately know what I’m talking about.
Without personal jabs, let me explain in a bit more detail:
App in VM (kinda posix) -> ext4 (repackaging of data to fit into “blocks”) -> NVMe driver -> (Google’s virtualization/block device stack, aka Vanadium/PD) -> CFS. The moment data got into ext4, it goes through legacy stack that only exists because many years ago there were hardware devices that had 512 byte sectors (as illustration, upgrade to 4K took forever). All repackaging, IO scheduling to work with 4kb block abstraction is wasted performance and cycles.
From customer perspective, all they want is VM with scalable file system. With Kubernetes, etc. they don’t want to ever think about volume size, which is major hurdle to size correctly and provision. BTW, both small and large customers run into volume sizing issues all the time.
There are also internal customers that need posix-compliant storage “on borg” because they run oss lib/software.
Anyway, optimal stack in this case is to plug in into VM on a file system level. Now, is it hard problem to solve? Yes. Would it eliminate PD? No, still required for legacy cases. Would it be enormously beneficial for modern conteinerized cloud workloads? Absolutely.
As I said, there are apps that need a Posix interface although my contention is the vast majority of them are "lift and shift" from customer data centers into the cloud. Sure, they exist. But from a cost, efficiency, and easy of supporting cross-data center reliability and robustness, the Posix file system interface was designed in the 1970's, and it shows.
If you have an app which needs a NoSQL interface, then you can do much better by using a cloud-native NoSQL service, as opposed to using Cassandra on your VM and then hoping you can get cross-zone reliability by using something like a Regional Persistent Disk. And sure, you could use Cassandra on top of cifs/smbfs or nfs, but the results will be disappointing. These are 20th century tools, and it shows.
If customers want Posix because they don't want to update their application to use Spanner, or Big Table, or GCS, they certainly have every right to make that choice. But they will get worse price/performance/reliability as a result. You keep talking about ossification and people refusing to refactor the storage stack. Well, I'd like to submit to you that being wedded to a "posix file system" as the one true storage interface is another form of ossification. Storage stacks that feature NoSQL, relational database, and object storage WITHOUT an underlying Posix file systems might be a much more radical, and ultimately, the "proper stack refactoring". A "modern containerized cloud workload" is better off using Cloud Spanner, Cloud BigTable, or Cloud Storage, depending on the application and use case. Why stick with a 1970's posix file system with all of its limitations? (And I say this as an ext4 maintainer who knows about all of the warts and limitations of the Posix file interface.)
Of course, for customers who insist on a Posix file system, they can use GCE PD or Amazon EBS for local file systems, or they can use GCE Cloud Filestore or Amazon EFS if they want an NFS solution. But it will not be as cost effective, or performant as other cloud native alternatives.
Finally, just because you are using "oss lib/software" does not mean that you need "Posix-complaint storage". Especially inside Google, while those internal customers do exist, they are a super-tiny minority. Most internal teams use a much smarter approach, even if that means that an adaption layer is needed between some particular piece of OSS software and a more modern, scalable storage infrastructure. (And for many OSS libraries, they don't need a Posix-complaint interface at all!)
Posix-complaint means sticking with an interface invented 50 years ago, with technological assumptions which may not be true today. Sometimes you might need to fall back to Posix for legacy software --- but we're talking about "modern containerized cloud workloads", remember?
Don't get me started on how many times Google Cloud started and then killed cloud NFS (I see now they have an EFS-like product). Or how hard it was to buy a spindle.
Here are the latest development statistics from the just-released 5.19 kernel. (Please consider supporting Linux Weekly News by subscribing if you find content like this useful; one of the benefits is you can help share subscriber-only content to friends and colleagues via Subscriber Links):
If you scroll down to the Most active employers in 5.19 by commits you'll see:
1. Intel 10.9%
2. (Unknown) 7.5%
3. Linaro 5.7%
4. AMD 5.5%
5. Red Hat 5.2%
6. (None) 4.3%
7. Google 4.1%
8. Meta 3.5%
9. SUSE 3.1%
10. Huawei 2.9%
The statistics are slightly different if you count by lines of codes changed, but either way, it's not all FANNG companies, not by a long shot. There are plenty of people who get started coding via kernelnewbies.org and other resources.
If you're only talking about salaries, I feel like even pre-2008 most big software companies always paid better than startups. It was stuff like RSUs and cash bonuses; which came AFTER the IPOs, that REALLY tipped the scales and made it difficult for startups to compete. Startups themselves never responded with more generous stock options; in fact, compared to the 90s, some became stingier.
I think a lot of candidates (speaking for myself here) just don’t care too much to negotiate equity at privately held companies. Given the highly unlikely probability that a company I work for will have a successful exit at all, let alone while I am either employed or hold exercised stock options, it’s all Monopoly money to me. Benefits, salary, and bonuses is the only compensation I negotiate and judge a company on. All the other stuff is just lottery tickets.
Meaning, startup or no, I’m expecting to be paid what I ask. levels.fyi shows that my pay+bonus at my startup for my role matches FAANG compensation so I’m happy with it.
I have worked for places that offered equity a few times. It did turn into something once (Google bought my employer). But the actual equity conversion was minor in quantity compared to the rest of my Google TC.
There's no way out of "serfdom" other than starting your own company. I don't think this is healthy. The incentives are not there for engineers in startups to really put themselves out there.
You can just save your way out too. I started on the path to FIRE (check out /r/financialindependence on Reddit) about 10 years into my career, and it was a huge quality of life improver
Now I'm always sitting on an enormous pile of savings and I have short- and long-term plans to move my career and life forward. It spares me a lot of stress.
This is likely a more "reasonable" path unless you "go into business for yourself" as a plumber or a consultant, neither of which actually makes a salable business.
Especially since you only need to keep your expenses 10% lower (or so) than your after-tax income to hit a reasonable target.
Yeah, I looked into it on my own early in my career, and I thought "Damn, I'd have to save two million dollars to live in retirement off 50k a year for forty years"
Turns out the numbers are a lot more favorable, though. You can count on some level of compounding investment growth even after inflation, you can slash your living expenses after you retire, etc. Suddenly early retirement is a possibility even at a pretty modest income level, without compromising your quality of life too much in the mean time
Are you counting the equity at a large public company to be lottery tickets? Because it's absolutely not. Every quarter a bunch of real money appears in an account with my name on it, that's not a lottery ticket.
That's the plan for all industries and competition. It's a little weird to see it for employment pricing, but that makes sense too.
Years ago my town had a bunch of lumber yards where you can get market rate lumber. Home Depot moved in and provided way lower than market rate lumber until all of the independent lumber yards went out of business in the area.
Then they raised the price above market rate and that's that. Everyone hates them for that but we all shop there.
Absolutely. I've come to believe that this is the nature of money i.e. an abstraction for power.
Power is meaningless unless you're hurting somebody: otherwise, what even is the point? Money is abstracted power. For this reason, ANYWHERE you are seeing accumulations of vast amounts of money, somebody or something is being hurt.
In this case it appears to be that the whole 'make 500k as a dev' thing, which has always seemed weird to me, turns out to be 'FAANG is trying to control all access to devs worth having, after which they can starve the market and do whatever they want'. It comes down to power, always.
You'll note that the open source devs upon which their internet relies, upon which so much rests, are NOT making 500k as devs. If you're doing something worth doing and it's not harming but helping, you are not getting paid. If you're getting paid in a big way, you're doing something that enables harming somebody, whether it's people or a more abstracted thing like a market. The wealthy FAANG folks are part of a situation where an employment market is being harmed, and that's why the money is there for them.
I don't think it's that simple. Google needs devs, it's a competitive market. Controlling or limiting the dev supply is definitely a benefit for big tech, but it's a separate benefit. I think competitive pressure on salaries is the top forcing function.
Google & friends have a business where they can turn a $500k engineer into $2M+ in revenue
I think that's really the bottom line here. They aren't overpaying to starve out the industry, although I'm sure they're perfectly happy to benefit from that indirectly
Yeah, I find it really weird that people are seriously entertaining this conspiracy theory, when the more mundane explanation is that, on average, tech workers generate insane profit.
Start-ups don’t have to pay Google or FB size comp to attract people who like to work in start-ups but my feeling is that if they want to compete for the senior end of the talent pool they are going to have a hard time. Most start-ups are offering what I call below-mortgage compensation. Simply put to not be house poor your mortgage is supposed to be 30% of your pre-tax income. You can calculate what a typical mortgage on a property looks like and extrapolate the payment but $90,000 USD is pretty reasonable in the Bay Area. That takes $300,000 USD/year to not be house poor. As long as start-ups continue to treat unsellable equity as sellable RSUs and offer similar base to google they get almost no one who needs to pay a mortgage. And I’m willing to bet a fair number of start-ups have failed from being too junior in engineering.
I can't help but feel that this is by design by VCs. Rip through younger talent and see what shakes out. You can polish the turd later. You're not looking for beautiful gemstones in most startups. You're just mostly throwing things against the wall to see what sticks, and it's later generations of devs who come in and deal with the tech debt.
Jokes on them, though, my mortgage is almost paid off, so I can work for less than I was. I'm the old guy working with all the young people at the startup. I can almost feel their eyes rolling into the back of their heads when I start going on about "back in the 90s"...
It's not just startups. If someone wants to and can get an offer from one of the richer big tech companies (FAANG isn't really the right acronym as Microsoft at least is also in the mix) and is just going to go with the best offer, just about no one is going to be able to compete--at least in the US. I've heard plenty of stories of companies not even trying to match offers.
Yes in my job hunt over the last 6 months basically the first thing I have had to say to potential employers is: "No, I'm not expecting to match what I was getting at Google."
Pretty sure that a lot of places I simply didn't hear back from was because they didn't expect to be able to even come close on comp. And I've had other Xoogler friends who applied for places, got promising initial results, and then insanely low offers (like 1/3rd or less of Google comp).
I'll do 2/3rds or even 1/2 for the right job, but not 1/4 or 1/3rd.
Now, part of that is the domestic market (Ontario Canada) has been underpaying SWEs for years and getting away with it, since most of the good talent flees south after graduation anyways.
But part of it is that FAANG compensation is just far more than anybody else could ever afford.
> But part of it is that FAANG compensation is just far more than anybody else could ever afford.
I don't think this is true. I've had friends getting comparable comp offers at HBO and NatGeo, for example. And of course it's been known for some time that successful startups like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Dropbox, etc. were doing comparable offers.
Once a company decides to really compete digitally, and that they can leverage economies of scale properly there, it suddenly makes sense to compete for the same class of engineer that can work at Google, Meta, etc.
> As time has moved on the gap in pay between startup and FAANG and now startup and any company offering RSUs is just too large for startups to compete for talent.
My reading is that founders and VCs got greedier (or they were always this greedy, but the reality distortion field has since failed). Back in the day, working at a startup appeared to offer a plausible path to life-altering wealth to employees with stock options - these days, the cat is out of the bag: dilution by endless funding rounds, no route to IPO, preferred stock fuckery, and a countless other ways of being screwed over by information and/or power asymmetry.
Way back in the day my Borland friends told me about Microsoft doing this to Borland. Supposedly parked a limo across the street from the building at lunch and hired people whether Microsoft had work for them or not.
This is a very prescient idea, if so it would be a way to control the job market in a way that was not blatantly illegal - ala Steve Jobs and Google and a few others refusing to hire from each other to keep wages down. One issue I have with this is that google in particular pays alot less than it used to compared to industry(fangish companies), a friend of mine left to go there and his pay has somewhat stagnated where mine has gone up, up, up.
An alternate explanation is that managers in tech crave headcount, they want to feel important and to have their projects and teams very well staffed. During the past year they may have gotten excessive with hiring and now you see the end results which are hiring freezes, rescinded offers and small layoffs across the industry.
So the argument I see proposed again, again, and again here on HN, is that companies are paying programmers too much money and they should all agree to offer <$100k or something.
> Once Google and Facebook started growing it's clear they realized that every talented engineer on the market is a potential threat.
You could count on one hand the number of startups that are serious threats to either. And when one arises, they can pretty much just buy the company, as Facebook has done repeatedly. They hardly need to be concerned with individual engineers, and even if they were, the idea that they could hire them all is pretty far-fetched
You don't have to hire all of them, You just have to raise the market rate and raise everyone's expectations. That's all.
The more money you got, the more you can manipulate the market.
Its the inefficiencies of the first price auction.
I _might_ be able to find comparable salary, but I sure won't find the other benefits of working for my employer. The 401k match, the on site clinic with a doctor that I really like, etc... those things do add up.
If that’s the case why have they always had such astronomically high hiring bars? I’d they wanted to deny anyone else talented engineers why would they reject so many?
They need to start at the top. The current phase of complacency, organizational lethargy, repeated pr disasters, people wondering wtf people are doing at Google, and general tone deafness started with the current CEO. Time for him to go. His vision is speaking in corporate cliches almost exclusively and just looking after things. If there is a grander plan other than "get people clicking ads", I have yet to learn of it. The current CEO is just riding the success of his predecessors, who for all their failings actually built a great few products and company.
The organization is a reflection of its leadership and their vision. Or lack there off. MS and Google are almost polar opposites. Google is MS under Balmer. Just failing, tone deaf, never quite doing anything right. Enter Satya Nadella and suddenly MS is re-engaging with developers, doing all the things that were simply unmentionable before, and generally delivering great share holder value. Google needs somebody like that. The current CEO is not it. He's a caretaker. Not a leader.
I'm not a shareholder; so no stake in this game other than observing what is obvious to me.
I might be unusual but I actually wouldnt mind things to continue like this. I'd rather see FAANG crumble than have tech end up consolidating on three dominant, vertically integrated players like the auto market.
More corporate shooting-self-in-the-foot means more space for a vibrant built-in-a-garage startup ecosystem to compete - the kind the auto industry hasnt had since, like, 1955.
I mean, Google+, the end of their do no evil reputation, the start of the killed by Google era, all date back to the previous CEO. Not saying Sundar shouldn't be considered responsible for not fixing it by now given how long he's been in the job, but the people who decide if he stays or goes seem happy with "share price go up" as a result
But maybe you mean a hypothetical "you" of other people still working there. Obviously it's a mix, but I suspect on the whole most people are smart enough to see that these kinds of things are unlikely to accomplish much.
But they're also likely happy that upper management is finally acknowledging these dysfunctions.
When I was just a coder at a fortune 500 company, I was voluntold to be on a "Morale Committee". Not much came of it (one meeting with about 20 of us, they had an ice cream social, because people like ice cream and the work environment was very siloed people weren't interacting). It didn't do much, but employees took notice that management realized morale was low. The round of layoffs that came soon after overshadowed that however.
A friend did some high-end contract work for Google, and was hired many months before the project started. This person was paid a very high contractor rate to "review documents and onboarding" and was told by a director this is a common tactic that Google uses to ensure availability of high end engineers, and to prevent their competitors from hiring.
From my perspective: They've got way too many people doing a lot of meh work and feeling really ... important about it. And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry.