"There's another salary increase." Li Nan (pseudonym) told Silicon Starren. Currently, he works as an engineer at a technology company in the United States. Recently, the same "money rush" has appeared in Apple, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, and a large number of other North American technology companies.
Inexplicable salary increases, unforeseen salary increases, job-hopping double salary increases, and even a one-pot digging salary increase by the entire HR team have simply become a happy topic that North American engineers cannot escape in the past year. When "grabbing people" has become the biggest task of recruiters of major companies, the king of rolls has also been quietly born.
But while the pay rise has brought unexpected happiness to Silicon Valley engineers, new problems have surfaced.
Nothing was done, and the money came
Late last year, while everyone was basking in the joy of entering the holiday season, the days of some engineers who had already received Amazon offers were even more joyful: nothing was done, and the money came.
One user posted on the North American Chinese Engineer Platform that he had accepted Amazon's job offer and then "found that there was no offer pdf in the student portal." Later, the documents he received from the pre-employment job portal showed that the offer salary had inexplicably increased.
For the generous salary increase that has been accepted by the offer, people can't help but ask, is this still the Amazon that "cuts the door"?
Coincidentally, many employees who joined Amazon's Southern California have received similar lucky pay increases. Even on Blind, there are quite a few posts about Amazon's salary increase. The earliest one even dates back to last July.
At the time, an internal Senior manager posted that he had found that the latest SDE3 Offer within the company had invariably exceeded $500,000, and the latest salary for SDE2 had exceeded $300,000, an increase of more than 20%.
At the same time, in his view, Amazon's sharp salary increase is also a major change after Jeff Bezos retired and Andy Jassy took office.
In fact, Amazon's salary increase did not stop in the summer, and even continued into this year. It can be said that the "banana factory" is trying to take off its "lowest paid" hat. Over the past week, Amazon has been exposed by the media that it is updating many employee policies — including more generous stock incentives and high salary increases. Meanwhile, Business Insider said, Amazon even plans to develop an internal tool to keep track of employee satisfaction with the company, thereby adjusting salaries to combat the massive attrition of experienced employees. However, this tool has not been proven at this time.
An Amazon insider said anonymously in an interview with Business Insider that Amazon is considering issuing a special stock reward to employees every 6 months over the next 30 months, which is expected to increase the total package compensation of some employees by 25% to 40%.
Amazon is trying to be a "Nice" company. Interestingly, the effect of Amazon's facelift can be said to be immediate.
Recently, a hot post on Blind has attracted a lot of attention — Google is trying to pull down the salaries of tech companies, and Amazon is trying to get them up.
The comments below are also very interesting, the king of the volume is not Amazon, but Facebook!
Indeed, Facebook's aggressive march into the metacosm in 2021 will unbridled "money lure" employees of rival companies.
The biggest threats include Apple. In order to join the "volume game" against meta and resist Meta's digging in the process of building the metaverse, Apple once threw a killer tool at the end of last year. Without warning, Apple gave employees a high amount of stock as a year-end bonus, ranging from $50,000 to $180,000. Engineers, especially software engineers, received equity awards of $80,000, $100,000, and $120,000.
It can be said that the talent market in Silicon Valley is experiencing a fiery heat that has never been experienced before. A friend who does HR even joked with the silicon star people that HR and Recruiter are rolled up! Searching for software engineer positions on LinkedIn shows that there are more than 210,000 people working together to compete for engineers on the market.
Under the premise that engineers have not yet rolled up and HR has rolled first, the salary package of Silicon Valley engineers has ushered in a lot of increases.
Volume King Meta: Double salary, end up microsoft
Compared with other regions to roll talents, Silicon Valley from 2021 to early 2022, the most rolled are HR and headhunting. In a market where talent has never been hot, they try to solve everything with "money".
Behind this fiery market, to a large extent, the company's talent competition and strategic layout in some new fields. Sometimes this kind of talent scramble is quite straightforward. Among them, the volume king Meta has played a great role - raising the market price, but also caused other companies to lose a lot of talent.
One of the most affected by Meta poaching is Microsoft. Microsoft's Hololens team, which Microsoft has been proud of for years and is also the main force in its march into the meta-universe, has reportedly lost 100 employees in the past year. More than half of the people whose public information on LinkedIn alone can be verified have joined Meta.
A former Microsoft employee told Business Insider that Meta has been scrambling for Microsoft's augmented reality experience, especially for employees on the Hololens team.
In addition to the scale of Meta diggers, the salary is often quite generous. Meta reportedly sometimes offers about double the price to poach engineers.
Many of the Hololens engineers poached by Meta are fairly technical and managerial, and even play important roles in the team. Charlie Han, who collected customer feedback for Hololens, joined Meta last summer. For the previous 12 years, he had grown from an intern at Microsoft to a Principal PM Manager at Hololens. Recent additions include Josh Miller, who has eight years of experience at Microsoft and has been the head of systems design engineers since the Hololens team was founded in 2015. He joined Meta in September 2021 as director of the current Display Design Division.
Judging from the updated work experience on LinkedIn, they both left Hololens to join Meta in August and September 2021.
It can be said that many of Hololens' excellent employees have become Targets for Facebook. And Facebook is wrapping up the income of Silicon Valley engineers for its own meta-universe banner.
It is the birth of this "volume king" that makes Microsoft, Apple, and even Amazon's HR have to roll up together to retain employees.
In fact, this kind of competition between big companies for talent is nothing new in Silicon Valley. But it's often young startups that suffer the most. Mira Labs CEO Matt Stern told the media that large companies like Meta are working in new directions and expanding their scale, and the price of the talent market can easily be pushed up.
"Small companies have completely lost their competitiveness in this talent war." He said.
And the result of this loss of competitiveness of small companies is likely to inhibit the germination of innovation in Silicon Valley to some extent.
Working from home has become a hotbed for job hopping
In addition to the concerns about the epidemic and working from home, the biggest change that the epidemic has brought to engineers is actually easier to interview.
"It turned out that in the office, who went to the interview was quite obvious. The Silicon Valley On-site interview walks around for a day, and everyone around you can guess eight or nine. So unless they have already made up their minds to leave, few people take frequent leave interviews in a row. Zhang Xun (pseudonym) told the Silicon Star people.
But now, working from home gives tech employees plenty of opportunities and time to interview. In the discussion of Silicon Valley engineers, the hot conversation in 2021 is absolutely inseparable from the discussion of "interview" and "package", even more than in previous years.
According to a study by HUMAN RESOURCEs consulting firm Robert Half, 52 percent of tech employees said they had a job hopping experience over the past year. In other words, about one in two people at a tech company successfully jumps ship and gets a better salary.
However, even if there is no job-hopping mind, it is difficult for this group of engineers to never say no to the increasingly enthusiastic HR emails in 2021.
"Hr contacted me about every two or three days before. But now there are several emails almost every day asking if I want to jump ship. Especially in December, this situation is even more obvious. Li Meng (pseudonym) told the Silicon Star people.
Shortly before the interview, he had just blocked an Amazon HR.
"It can be described as harassment. I have said no, but I keep sending it to me. Although it may be a group, it is too exaggerated to be continuous. In the past six months, he has just completed his job hopping, and his salary has doubled a lot.
In the process of his job hopping, he finally gave up the big factory and chose to join a startup. In his view, compared with the large factories that have a good salary, the salary package given by the startup company that has raised several rounds of money this year is obviously more impressive, and from the basic salary, it is one-third higher than that of the large factory.
For now, Lemon has chosen to work remotely in Canada. According to his observations, silicon valley salary increases have already raised Canada's salaries.
However, it is worth noting that at the same time, the impact on wages is not only a factor in job hopping, but also includes severe inflation that the United States has not encountered in 40 years.
Can't get into the pocket of the rich
Although most U.S. companies have provided employees with significant salary increases in the past year, many people are still complaining that the money is getting less and less spent, and the money that is actually saved in the pants pocket has not increased significantly.
"In the past year in Silicon Valley, buying a car has become very expensive, buying a house is very expensive, and even eating a takeaway is almost unaffordable." A friend who is also in Silicon Valley said in the group. All year round, I didn't feel like I had saved much more than in previous years.
This is not just a personal feeling, in fact, some data also confirms this "can't save money" situation.
According to inflation data just released this week, inflation in the United States over the past year was as high as 7 percent, the highest in the past 39 years and even higher than the inflation index at the time of several past economic crises. In previous years, inflation in the United States was about 2 percent a year.
These specific costs are reflected in the rise in the prices of food, gas, rents and other necessities of life. In addition, there are also many increases in large-scale consumption quotas such as furniture and cars.
In addition to high living expenses, crazy housing prices have also been a problem for Silicon Valley engineers over the past year. After a brief summer stagnation of growth, house prices continued to rise wildly in the second half of the year, and the housing market was extremely hot.
Last November, the median home price in the San Francisco Bay Area was $1.3 million. A year ago, overall house prices rose by 18.2%. This is the highest annual increase in California's history. Even if you look closely, even on a monthly basis, house prices in November are up 2% compared to house prices in October.
This monthly, weekly rate has made Silicon Valley engineers inexplicably feel a kind of "rising wealth, declining purchasing power" boredom.
Suddenly, the effect of Silicon Valley's engineers' salary increases was halved. And more people are enjoying it while also worrying: How long can this "prosperity" and "happiness" brought about by the release of the dollar and the inflated stock market continue? There is no answer in everyone's mind.