Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

The way I've seen this go with companies that care about their contractor workforce is that assignments and their working practices are thoroughly checked to ensure they remain outside IR35, so the take-home is just as good as it used to be.

Some contracts I've seen involve a liability shift clause from the agency/client to the contractor's Ltd co - and the client will often insist that you have fee-payer/agency IR35 insurance in place to protect the supply chain (Kingsbridge sell this sort of product) if such a clause is in place.

You need to be in an in-demand role and present enough value to be able to demand this though and avoid blanket 'inside' determinations.

Of course, if you continue supplying small companies, it remains the contractor's liability.

Most of those countries were below living standards/salaries of western europe while having for some of them a very strong education system. Romania for instance trains a lot of good devs/it ops. All this qualified workforce can work in any country of europe. Add to this qualified workforce from syria/turkey for germany, North Africa for france and you see that while European companies did not grow like the US one, the pool of talent they can grab is larger than ever. the cake became smaller and Europe did everything it could toblock ambitious tech companies to grow and use the stock market as a wealth tool. they don't even understand that they operate in a global market and that if they tax or limit growth in their own country then the companies will move out. Dublin and Amsterdam for instance became hubs for this reason.

There is also the perception in the old world that being a "Techie" is like being a white collar factory worker. Developers are definitly not considered as stars in Europe. Most of the engineers in europe that want to make money work for an american company.

In the good times when VCs are falling over themselves to fund anything that might be the next FAANG there is a huge amount of money pouring into the industry and a lot of hiring going on and none of that is necessarily tied to getting good results. Businesses can survive for years while hiring lots of people for crazy money without ever making a profit. The VCs can still do very well because every now and then they do back a unicorn but on an individual company basis this disconnect between how much money they have and how much money they make is not "normal" and severely distorts the employment market.

It's unrealistic to expect the magic money tree to continue growing gold leaves in the economic bad times. Big tech firms aren't immune to a downturn and we'll see hiring slowing down in the places where it was artificially boosted before and compensation falling with it. That will partly be because compensation that is based on stock is probably going to take a big hit at a lot of companies.

With this in mind it wouldn't be entirely surprising if salaries today were similar to those 15 years ago. In the meantime there might have been rapid growth in some years but we've also had two multi-year black swan events. Time will tell whether the ups and downs have cancelled each other out in this case but I don't think that would be a big surprise.