Many are going to start their own startups and the seeds for the next Cambrian explosion are being cast today, just as they were in 2001–2003 or 2008. That said not all Big Tech employees can deal with the hustle required at a startup.
When layoffs happened in the past, they were laying off old school enthusiasts because the companies just weren't working. Now, they are laying off people that went into tech because it seemed like easy money. It's not the same caliber of tech person.
Ah yes, the just world fallacy of layoffs makes its unsurprising appearance.
The difference between $200k and $80k soothes the ache of that $7204 quite nicely, I suppose.
This is the big thing. The bigger salary more than covers the difference. And it's not just tech. Nurses in the UK make 25,000 pounds per year, nurses in the US make $85k or more. I would rather have the higher salary with student loans, my own health insurance, and no subsidized childcare than make 25K GBP (at a higher tax rate!)
Fine as long as you're able to keep earning said salary. It's the state you end up in when you're not for whatever reason that's arguably the big difference. My own partner's a nurse and has gone through extensive periods where her income has been low or non-existent and while it wasn't really an issue given the presence of my salary to fall back on it's not hard to see how difficult things might become esp. if there were no/limited government subsidized healthcare and high levels of student debt (again, thankfully not such a problem in Australia - even as a foreign student, as she was, there are measures in place to ensure they don't saddle themselves with unreasonable debt. Citizens can often pay off higher education fees within a few years of graduating, and no repayments are required in years your salary is below a certain threshold)
I've never heard of any big tech co fully subsidizing healthcare. I pay ~$160/week between health/vision/dental
Is $160/week just for your coverage? I've worked at small startups and medium sized public companies, and my healthcare coverage costs have been far less than that.
I can believe that for a good family plan. But that's probably more than you'd pay without a subsidy for a pretty good individual plan.
We also have to pay a lot more out of pocket for basic services like healthcare,, transportation, childcare, etc.
The wonderful part of this is that you get the choice. Choose where you live, who you have for healthcare, who you use for childcare/schooling. We have the opportunity to make that choice instead of having a bureaucracy making those choices for us.
In countries with socialised health insurance systems any political party that threatens to take it away (or defund it) tends not to get chosen at election time, strangely enough.
Active shooter events are but one way to get shot in the US. If we go look at other categories of shootings for 2022 we see that more than 20k people died from non-suicide gunshots. And there were 647 mass shootings. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls
The vast majority of those gun homicides are inner-city gang-on-gang shootings, which is easy to avoid as a white-collar software engineer.
Citation? Numbers? What do you mean by "vast majority" and "gang-on-gang"?
I don’t understand what the opportunities for startups are these days. Anyone know? I feel like the world doesn’t need more saas companies or otherwise you’re doing a chatgpt api company.
There are still a lot of “boring” apps to build for regular people, I think. The classic problem of everything being in spreadsheets or tracked with paper and a clipboard is still totally real. You won’t be the next Google, it isn’t glorious, but it’s a viable and genuinely valuable way to build a business still. One of the largest and more obvious examples in recent years was logistics. I’ve worked with a couple com…
Lots of small/medium opportunities in "unbundling Excel" indeed.
We also have to pay a lot more out of pocket for basic services like healthcare,, transportation, childcare, etc.
The wonderful part of this is that you get the choice. Choose where you live, who you have for healthcare, who you use for childcare/schooling. We have the opportunity to make that choice instead of having a bureaucracy making those choices for us.
I wouldn't really call it "having choices". Most services are duopolies at best.
Many are going to start their own startups and the seeds for the next Cambrian explosion are being cast today, just as they were in 2001–2003 or 2008. That said not all Big Tech employees can deal with the hustle required at a startup.
I’m skeptical that the same patterns we saw in the early 2000s are going to play out again. Last time, tech was in its infancy. There was a small universe of people who understood baseline concepts like getting to product market fit, how to measure and implement growth patterns, etc etc. Today these are practically household concepts, and they have been for years. There aren’t a few hundred other people in SV you are…
The same feeling of tech 10-15 years ago is what the current AI scene feels like. There's definitely an emphasis on higher education now, but outside of that look at what hackers have been able to accomplish just solo. It's a burgeoning scene with the potential to be as impactful as software was. Except now instead of if/else, it's going to be inscrutable arrays of numbers representing learned programs :D. It seems super fun and the barrier to entry is a lot lower than people think!
You’re paying for healthcare at a tech company? Usually your company provides this as a benefit. Same for commuter subsidies.
Outside of FAANG experience. Dental plans rarely cover anything more than basic maintenance costs. One procedure and you can end up pretty deep into pocket. If you require regular medication, that can run pretty deep over a year too, since pharmacare plans have copays.
Yeah, dental plans are honestly kind of stupid. They typically have a MAXIMUM amount they will cover, after which you have to pay out of pocket. Which.. is not what I purchase insurance for. I purchase insurance to cover me for the huge bills I can't afford that would destroy me.
That said, if my employer is going to subsidize it, I'm going to take the free money.