Tech Workers Are Freaking Out Over Whether The End Is Here For $500,000plus Salaries

• Technicians at the anonymous job site Blind debate whether his $500,000 salary is overdue.
• While most of the users surveyed said it would be the end of an era, others disagreed.
• Insiders report that some companies have used layoffs to justify taking pay cuts for new hires.

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Tech workers fear the industry is reaching the end of a highly lucrative era.

Last month, a poll on anonymous job site Blind garnered thousands of votes as users debated whether the tech industry could do without a $500,000 salary.

In one post, a user who works at Oracle says that between 2019 and 2022, program managers receive $500,000 in total compensation, while the "average" software engineer earns $350,000 and recruiters $200,000. bring home dollars.

"Are those days over?" ask the user. “There will be a rebalancing of salaries to 2015 levels, when only directors with more than 100 referrals received 500,000.

Over 14,400 users took part in the poll, with 51.7% of voters agreeing that the industry has reached its end.

Blind allows its users to post anonymously, but requires them to verify their status via their employee email address. Insider has not independently verified the usage of the users mentioned in this story.

“This technology is still very profitable,” wrote one Amazon user in a post that got 150 likes. "Wages are not going anywhere, but the ridiculous overpayment is over." I doubt our Meta/Google/Doordash etc. 500,000 would be a drop for someone currently making 200,000."

Another Twitter user claimed to have received "several offers" totaling over $1.1 million in compensation.

“With all these layoffs, people are starting to receive lower wages and this trend will continue unless there is a huge demand for the technology,” wrote company user AI Tractable. "I think the supply for developers is very high and therefore the demand may decrease. If you can get good (not great) talent on the cheap, managers can adapt."

Oracle employees aren't the only ones wondering if technician salaries have been cut.

"Do you think salaries like 250-500 thousand etc. are stable in the field of technology. Or are we in a bubble that is about to burst? - wrote an employee of the cloud computing company VMware in a separate post, which collected more than 900 comments .

Big Tech employees have long been earning more than their counterparts in other companies.

The average salary for program managers in the United States is $98,578, while program managers at large technology companies like Google can earn around $220,000 a year at GlassDoor.

GlassDoor estimates that the average annual earnings of software engineers and technical recruiters are $130,887 and $75,489, respectively. Big tech companies are known to pay significantly more: Glassdoor has set a general salary range for Meta software engineers at $187,000 to $283,000 and for enterprise recruiters at $104,000 to $171,000.

Earlier this year, a tech recruiter told Insider that some companies are using layoffs to reduce new employee paychecks. Major tech companies, including Meta, Microsoft and Google, have laid off thousands of employees in recent months.

A further concern is the rise in artificial intelligence capabilities, with dozens of tech workers turning to Blind to ask if their jobs will be replaced.

"Be warned, the golden age is over," wrote a Microsoft engineer. “Software engineering is a dying profession. And since the GPT have gotten good at writing their own recommendations, you are out of your league."

Do you work in technology? Call the reporter from the broken device and email gkay@insider.com.

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