Numerically, it is difficult to credit VC-fueled startups for driving the quick increase in engineering wages. First, they don't pay top salaries. If a bidding war erupts for a particular candidate it is highly unlikely that a VC startup wins. It will be won by everyone's favorite multinational advertising company which will this quarter hire enough engineers to staff approximately 1023signals worth of product dev companies, or their close bretheren AppAmaFaceSoft, which together could a) fill the SuperDome with engineers making more than $120k apiece (and substantially more these days) and b) which cannot reasonably be said to be paying engineers with money they swindled out of gullible investors. No, they pay the money with the hundreds of billions of dollars of sales they make directly attributable to software.
The price of butter is the price of butter. If one hypothetically thinks butter is too expensive, sell butter, don't buy butter. (i.e. offer your services as an engineer rather than trying to hire engineers.) It think it is highly unlikely that anything happening in the capital markets, positive or negative, will make cause engineering (and related trades) to re-transition to the days where you could e.g. find perfectly adequate programmers for $40k. (P.S. Not to slight anybody making that, as I was at $30k like two years ago. Get a wee bit more sophisticated about who you work for and what you work on. You'll do better monetarily and quite possibly have more fun.)
There exist repeatable ways to scalably build product businesses with millions of dollars of actual revenue out of a few man months of work. Unless that economic reality goes away, engineers (&etc) will continue to be cheap at essentially any price.
This is great news for everyone selling talent here. Is it bad news for those buying talent? Meh. If you could pick any time in the history of the world to start a software business, it would probably be now, because the markets are bigger than ever, the distribution channels are fantastic, the SaaS billing model allows us to 10x prices without business customers perceiving any increased difficulty to justify the purchase, the non-human capital costs associated with a software business are asymptotically approaching zero, etc etc.
The price of butter is the price of butter. If one hypothetically thinks butter is too expensive, sell butter, don't buy butter. (i.e. offer your services as an engineer rather than trying to hire engineers.) It think it is highly unlikely that anything happening in the capital markets, positive or negative, will make cause engineering (and related trades) to re-transition to the days where you could e.g. find perfectly adequate programmers for $40k. (P.S. Not to slight anybody making that, as I was at $30k like two years ago. Get a wee bit more sophisticated about who you work for and what you work on. You'll do better monetarily and quite possibly have more fun.)
There exist repeatable ways to scalably build product businesses with millions of dollars of actual revenue out of a few man months of work. Unless that economic reality goes away, engineers (&etc) will continue to be cheap at essentially any price.
This is great news for everyone selling talent here. Is it bad news for those buying talent? Meh. If you could pick any time in the history of the world to start a software business, it would probably be now, because the markets are bigger than ever, the distribution channels are fantastic, the SaaS billing model allows us to 10x prices without business customers perceiving any increased difficulty to justify the purchase, the non-human capital costs associated with a software business are asymptotically approaching zero, etc etc.