Tech Salaries Have Been Moving Up - But Not Everyone's Invited to the Party
As always, I'm just taking some of my observations and putting them in a blog post. Earlier in '23, amid the huge wave of software engineering layoffs, we saw a pretty significant drop in salaries here in Austin. Senior and even Staff engineers were going all the way down to 160k base but the main reason behind this was simply the huge spike in candidate pools. It was a classic case of supply and demand. While we're hardly out of the woods yet, it has certainly gotten my attention at some of the salaries being offered to Austin based software engineers in Q4 of '23.??
Cutting right to the chase, here are some recent offers in Austin that have gone out in the past two months,?
Regarding the engineers I reference here, they all knocked the interviews out of the park and compared to the candidates they were going up against, they outperformed everyone else. And they were rewarded nicely with salary/annual compensation offers that were very much at the upper end of Austin's current Tech pay ranges.? After they had accepted these offers, I came away viewing these five software engineers are part of the "top 1% class". But that said, is there no room left for anyone else? Why is a top 10% software engineer still struggling to find work right now?
Looking at Austin's tech labor market from a historical perspective, going back to the 90's, the technology company that ruled the roost as far as pedigree and compensation were concerned was a firm called Trilogy. As a recruiter early in my career, I had such respect for the people that worked there. They came from the best schools in the country, they had a true gift for the Computer Sciences and yes, they were paid very, very well. Make no mistake, they earned every penny of it via some very demanding work schedules but back in 1998, you could be a senior software engineer at Trilogy and make 200k+ per year. Some of you might roll your eyes thinking that this isn't that big of a package but please don't forget that at the time, you could also roll right into Westlake and pick up a nice home on a 1/3 of an acre for sub 300k.? So trust me when I say that 200k per annum back in the late 90's was some serious bankroll at the time.?
But even if you didn't have the academic pedigree and engineering prowess to get hired by Trilogy, you could still do every well in Austin. Aside from the Great Recession of '08-'09, Austin's tech labor markets have had a wide variety of firms that have kept the software engineering profession gainfully employed. Whether you were an MIT grad with a CS degree or a boot camper with a UI developer certificate, you had a job and made pretty good money.??
But right now, I struggle with the reality that we still have a significant number of software engineers experiencing terminal unemployment. I have to give some shout outs to the following IT professionals because they're actively looking for work and they are "damn good" at what they do. But if they're not securing 200k offers with technology companies in Austin, can they not land offers for 155k? Here they are,?
I'm no economist but in some very distorted way, are the labor markets made up of these compressed candidate pools for the current software engineering openings? For instance, are the professionals I list here automatically excluded from consideration for the roles they apply to? Even worse, I know that all of them have gone multiple rounds for opportunities only to see the companies go completely dark on them and not offer any feedback at all. I'm just thinking that if companies are starting to go over 200k again for senior individual contributors then why do we still have "damn good" software engineering talent on the sidelines, unable to even find a position that mid to upper 100's per year??
Snowflake, Amazon, Meta, Google, Stripe and many other Big Tech firms are once again hiring in volume so let's just hope what I'm describing here is a short term unemployment cycle for certain groups of software engineers. It's the holiday season right now so things are slow but let's channel our inner optimism and hope that Q1 of '24 brings a nice uptick in the IT labor markets. Should that happen, there is nothing I want more than to see the five IT professionals I reference above immediately advance to onsite interviews with companies and secure some competitive offers.?
In closing, allow me to repeat that salaries are creeping back up but at the same time, not everyone has been invited to that party. Please remember that in '22 and '23 while Tech was crashing, Construction, Legal, Accounting and other professions were humming along just fine. Should next year bring a modest revival to the Tech labor markets, instead of the top 1% continuing to reap the rewards, can some nice opportunities emerge for profiles that are still feeling the pain, ie. QA Engineers, AngularJS Engineers and boot camp certificate software developers? If that happens, we can collectively realize something we arguably haven't experienced since 2019,
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Stability and legitimate job security.?
Thanks,
Mark Cunningham
Technical Recruiter
512-699-5719
Too sexy for this job
11 个月I think many software projects have become too complicated. In the past 10 years or so there's been a huge push for everyone and anyone to do things just like Big Tech, ie. every project has to be Kubernetes, micro-services, SPA, REST, gRPC, bla, bla. Then you inevitably end up wishing for the so-called 10X engineer who can make all that stuff work. However, building your project like Big Tech in itself does nothing for the value proposition of your project (although I'm sure the folks who sponsor those technologies would say otherwise). In my opinion when companies feel like hiring an "average" software engineer isn't a good investment it might be a good idea to revisit the design of their applications.