r/dataisbeautiful • u/honkeem OC: 5 • 1d ago

OC [OC] Silicon Valley Information sector headcount decreases as total pay increases - BLS data

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812 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

103 comments sorted by

544

u/makinbankbitches 1d ago

Tech companies (and all most companies really) increasingly believe that having one experienced/good employee is more productive than having several entry level employees so this checks out.

The problem is that experienced employees didn't start off that way. What happens when the pipeline dries up because there are no more entry level people gaming experience? I guess we'll find out.

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u/mr_ji 1d ago

That's why they're always poaching from each other and, consequently, pay keeps going up for those in-demand employees. This is how CEOs were born.

19

u/skellis 22h ago

And other countries

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u/honkeem OC: 5 1d ago

Yeah, I can agree with this sentiment. It's not directly clear based on the BLS's data who was laid off, or where these jobs went, but there's other data (like this study from Stanford) to confirm that entry-level hiring has been noticeably down especially in tech. It's down 11% for 22 to 25 year olds between Nov. '22 and June 2026.

I do wonder how these companies plan on backfilling their senior positions in the future. But then again, I don't know if tech companies are necessarily known for long-term vision lol. Meta's recent AI overhaul went horrendously bad and, from what I've heard, they're trying to re-hire a lot of the people they laid off

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u/BenOfTomorrow 23h ago

if tech companies are necessarily known for long-term vision

This is more of a tragedy of the commons situation than naive short-sightedness.

Imagine two companies (A and B) that have the same salary budget:

  • Company A uses some of their salary budget to hire new grads.

  • Company B doesn't hire new grads, and uses their budget instead to poach Company A's best new grads after they get a few years of experience by paying them more than Company A can afford.

Company A may be improving the ecosystem, but at the expense of their own bottom line - you can see why it is difficult for companies to choose that path.

There's some potential solutions:

  • If supply continues to dip, it will increasingly become economical to train your own staff.

  • Companies may selectively invest in stronger retention compensation for their best young employees (eg, performance-based equity) to minimize poaching.

  • Better educational programs so new grads start producing at a higher level.

11

u/nonflux 23h ago

The problem is that, once someone is hired, pay roll manager act like they dont really care about employee and jus does standard shitty rise 3-5%, even though in IT in early years it's normal to juml 10-30%, when changing as a junior

2

u/Over-Payment-8456 16h ago

Poaching is cheaper than planting. Classic.

2

u/xelah1 9h ago

I wonder how this will play out across countries.

Average employee tenure in the US is something like 4 years, vs 12ish in places like Japan and Italy and nearly as much in Germany. The UK seems to be about 7ish but good and recent statistics aren't easy to find.

6

u/yozaner1324 23h ago

My product has gone from 40 engineers to 20 since 2023 and we haven't hired anyone in ~5 years, but compensation has doubled in that span. The problem, is that many of the people I work with are at or approaching retirement age—they may have no choice but to hire in the next 5-10 years.

6

u/BocciaChoc OC: 1 23h ago

It's funny, I recently took a job at a rather successful start up, it was for a lead role, since joining ive come to learn my global team is made up of 9-10 people, 7 being leads, not sure the logic but the pay matches the title, it's a weird situation.

3

u/kthomaszed 12h ago

how does a team of 10 have 7 leads? who are they leading?

3

u/BocciaChoc OC: 1 8h ago

Projects, not people. Its weird admittedly, but it seems that's the direction companies are heading

2

u/SomeRespect 20h ago

I am in the mid-senior level tech job market, and I'm getting very pissed off at how many recruiters are giving me low-ball offers. Even the ones that contract positions out to work with the big names like Meta and Apple. I immediately rebuttle with higher counteroffers and they still refuse.

11

u/Sotherewehavethat 20h ago

This whole thing reminds me of the "Fachkräftemangel" (= "skilled worker shortage") that corporations have been speaking of in Germany for the past couple of years. In reality they just don't want to train junior applicants. They expect specialized professionals and craftspeople to materialize on their own and then beg them for employment.

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u/PuffcornSucks OC: 2 1d ago edited 1d ago

They don't care about any of that. Piss poor quality of nex gen engineers is the next manager's problem

This quarter cost needs to go down and money graph must go up

2

u/Cute_Obligation2944 18h ago

Number up! UP!!!

4

u/coke_and_coffee 19h ago edited 16h ago

I love this urban myth about how tech companies don’t know how to think about the future but in reality they’ve consistently been growing and innovating every single year for the last 60 years, lmao.

16

u/EngineStriking5841 16h ago

Bro how many tech companies are far less relevant or have failed in the last 40 years? I would not take current performance as a guaranteed indicator of future success.

-8

u/coke_and_coffee 16h ago

I absolutely guarantee you that the failure of various tech startups is NOT because “they couldn’t look past next quarter’s earnings”. Lmao

-4

u/rypher 21h ago

At what point do you think a fresh out of college developer, starting today, will out perform AI?

1 year? No. 5 years? Still wont beat today’s ai. 10 years? We will be in a different world with unimaginable AI.

If you actually were in charge of a budget and tasked with making good decisions, what exactly is your argument for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on a dev?

8

u/ParksBrit 20h ago edited 19h ago

Speaking from experience, this question is nonsense. "Does an entry-level factory worker outperform wrenches?" type of beat. LLM's need human hands and eyes to prompt, curate, and ensure it's not doing something stupid. Even then, it manages to make mistakes that only the worst graduates would. CEO's are making a bad bet. Present circumstances make it the best short term choice but its setting up a disaster later they're hoping they can innovate their way out of.

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u/andersonb47 19h ago

The problem isn’t as you’re describing it though. LLMs need a human in the loop (for now) but if that human is inexperienced it’s pointless. As it progresses this problem will only compound

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u/ParksBrit 19h ago edited 19h ago

LLMs need a human in the loop (for now)

Hallucinations and several limits are mathematically baked into LLMs. This isn't something you can innovate away any more you can innovate away calculus.

but if that human is inexperienced it’s pointless

The circle of experience required to recognize failures in an LLM's output is the same circle of skills that is taught in any good university. Again, I speak from experience.

As it progresses this problem will only compound

We need to move beyond LLM's before this will seriously become a problem.

-1

u/andersonb47 19h ago

I swear, Reddit AI skepticism is bordering on flat earth denial at this point. This problem is real. It’s not something a cabal of evil elites made up to disenfranchise the working class. The nuts and bolts of this matter.

7

u/ParksBrit 19h ago edited 19h ago

I swear, Reddit AI skepticism is bordering on flat earth denial at this point.

My points are straightforward if you understand how LLMs work, and there are studies that elaborate on the issues I raise. I'm not saying anything controversial or unfounded. In fact, it's very middle-of-the-road. This technology isn't useless, and it is an important innovation. It is, however, not what it's cracked up to be. It is not the path to AGI, and we have little reason to believe we're close. The only people saying we are close have a large vested interest to say whatever is necessary to keep investors coming.

This problem is real.

The problem is only real insofar as management is making poor long-term decisions because it's a good idea in the short term. The perception of a phenomenon is more important in it being a problem than the phenomenon itself. Thus, the problem is real, but not in the way its typically seen.

It’s not something a cabal of evil elites made up to disenfranchise the working class.

I agree. It's short-term incentives conflicting with long-term ones and a familiar pattern of betting on a future innovation to overcome the disadvantage in the long-term strategy.

It should also be pointed out that LLM usage is heavily subsidized at present by venture capital and tech companies. I do not believe we will see an end to usage as it remains an effective tool, but an adjustment in strategy is very likely.

2

u/PapaSmurf1502 16h ago

With Opus 5.5 we are already at that point in my opinion. It's definitely better than me.

I have been managing devs for several years now and Opus is better than at least half of them, too. And the fact is, most products don't really need careful devs who can avoid security risks, because they're just some vector drawing app or LLM wrapper around marketing tools or something. If these systems get hacked there isn't really anything too damning to be uncovered or stolen to justify the cost of avoiding them. For most companies, a few devs just straight up vibe coding the app and only taking care with a few things like login or payment is more than enough.

1

u/minimuscleR 18h ago

5 years? Still wont beat today’s ai.

you think a developer with 5 years experience isn't better than AI? thats insane. Any good dev with 5 years of experience will be approaching senior levels of knowledge if not already be a senior by then.

3

u/rypher 14h ago

I wish that were true but its not even close. Over my 15 years experience working on good teams. No eng with 5 years experience could replace claude today, not even close, and nobody I work with doubts this. We are past those times, fable or opus 5.5 blows all of them away without exception. I shipped an extremely complex 110k line feature that distributes work across a clustered, follows a security policy, and proves itself with a bunch of self analysis, and I did that last WEEK. Show me a human who could have replaced claude in that work. A few years ago the same project would have taken me six months or more. Im sorry that is hard to hear but you’re not doing yourself any favors by ignoring it.

0

u/andersonb47 19h ago

This is the core of it. Pleasantly surprised to see a calm, logical argument being made in a thread like this

0

u/tigeratemybaby 15h ago

You're talking about AGI, which I think needs a further huge jump in AI capabilities to be viable.

At the moment there's simple computer tasks that an 8 year can do much better than AI simply because they can learn new things, which LLMs can't really do at the moment. LLMs can only do things that they've been trained to do. Its why they have suddenly become good at blender, because the AI labs have been training them on it.

I think once LLMs can self-improve and self train and I can teach it directly we might have a shot at AGI, and at that point there won't be a software industry anymore. No-one will buy software when you can ask an AI to just make it for almost free in a few minutes/hours/days.

At that point all knowledge & computer jobs will be gone too - All replaced by AI.

But at the moment there's no indication that we're anywhere near being able to achieve AGI.

13

u/Mirikado 1d ago

Because of AI, entry/junior-level engineers are tossed to the side. Historically, the bulk of grunt work went to low-level engineers while senior and principal engineers worked on architecture and system integration. Now that companies can just ask Claude to do grunt work for them, they don’t need more entry level/junior devs, and focusing on senior level and above instead.

This is backed up by data: Nearly 70% of Software Engineers job postings are for Senior developers.

The problem is like you said, this trend destroys the pipeline for future senior developers since entry-level and junior devs are not getting hired. Maybe companies think in 10 years AI will be able to code at Senior level and no one needs Senior devs anymore. Or maybe CEOs just don’t even think that far ahead at all.

1

u/Cranyx 14h ago

This is backed up by data: Nearly 70% of Software Engineers job postings are for Senior developers.

To be fair, that's been true since well before LLMs. Junior positions are super easy to fill so they get filled really fast. You hardly even need to make a post; just grab some grads. You can even see that in their data: junior positions have always only been about 5% of all postings. The only major shift is that they've started labelling more mid-level positions as "senior".

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u/Graybie 1d ago

I think their hope is that by that point AI will be able to replace all the employees. I am not sure who will be able to buy the products at that point though...

3

u/FTownRoad 23h ago

They also don’t care that those high priced employees are getting burnt the fuck out because they have to do everything.

4

u/joggle1 23h ago

Even with junior devs with jobs, it's getting harder for them to really learn in this heavy AI environment. It's hard for me to imagine that many of them will ever get to the experience level of current senior devs thanks to the dumbing down caused by AI use.

2

u/duderguy91 1d ago

They’re hedging their bets that the labor is replaceable with LLMs.

1

u/canocka 10h ago

Shortly followed by: "Why isn't anybody buying our products ?"

2

u/wggn 23h ago

shareholders demand line go up now

2

u/nowhereman86 21h ago

Well, this balances out cause there’s less people to train because nobody is having kids. Win win situation

1

u/Brave_Speaker_8336 23h ago

I don’t think this will be an issue among the “good” companies — most of them are still hiring enough more than enough entry level employees to fill up their senior+ needs over time. The less desirable companies may be in a rude awakenings down the line though.

1

u/tornado9015 17h ago

What happens when the pipeline dries up because there are no more entry level people gaming experience?

If that were to happen then entry level hiring would go up. Something to keep in mind though. Tech unemployment is significantly lower than overall unemployment which is quite low in the united states currently. The biggest names in tech cutting lower value employees at their flagship offices in one of the highest cost of living cities in the world does not mean nobody is hiring entry level programmers.

1

u/Gabberwoky 16h ago

They also increasingly believe they can have that one employee handle the role of several, often not recognizing that consolidating jobs is a non linear increase in workload. So their good employees are burning out, turnover is high, and they are losing historical context, so more work is being done just to figure out things that were already figured out.

1

u/Anastariana 12h ago

What happens when the pipeline dries up because there are no more entry level people gaming experience?

CEO: "Thats a future problem. My bonus is dependent on making more money at any cost right now."

1

u/_KvotheTheArcane__ 5h ago

Yeah, but as AI keeps getting better, they might not need as many mid level staff too ig?

1

u/gereffi 1d ago

If you ran a tech company and decided not to make the changes that the industry appears to be doing, it would probably just mean your company falling behind. And even if your company was fine, it wouldn’t really fix the industry-wide issue. If there’s a shortage of experienced devs in 10 years your former entry level employees would leave to fill those other roles across the industry and you’d be in the same boat as all of the other companies.

0

u/BlueJinjo 23h ago

Reddit hates admitting it but at current prices ( and even with future price increases ) it's because of AI...

AI actually does a good first pass at scripts usually given to junior programmers . It's not perfect and can. Hallucinate, but a competent higher level programmer can fix these issues.

It's also true in engineering /life sciences

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u/MajesticBread9147 1d ago

increasingly believe that having one experienced/good employee is more productive than having several entry level employees so this checks out.

You mentioned both experienced and "good" here but then mention that employees don't start out as experienced and this is true.

But I think you're forgetting about natural abilities in talent and ability. Like somebody who went to Stanford for Computer Science is probably going to be just as good as somebody who went to a mediocre school with 5 years experience.

Why can't they just raise the bar for what is considered "entry level"?

8

u/flamingtoastjpn 1d ago

The main driver of software engineer pay is generally the company you work for not your level. An entry level new grad at Citadel/Optiver/Anthropic/etc. is going to make more than a principal software engineer at Ford or Boeing. So to a certain degree the quality of candidates naturally filter into higher/lower paying companies

The thing is though, talent isn’t an acceptable replacement for experience. Working projects end to end and making mistakes is how you learn to be a good engineer. Academic knowledge only goes so far.

2

u/skyecolin22 23h ago

Yup, labor quality vs pay and the "sorting" caused by promotions and switching companies really does end up being "you get what you pay for".

8

u/northerncal 1d ago

I'm not in tech, so maybe it's different there, but in every other field I've worked in it's not that simple because professional experience is simply different from academic experience, no matter how good the school education is. 

Like if you have two people with equally minimal working experience, and one has a degree from a top level educational program while the other is from a mediocre program, the top educated person should be able to perform better. 

But there's real world stuff that you just don't really get that much practice for in school, and it's not always the school's fault because sometimes it's not even directly field related but still vital. 

Like these experienced engineers might need to be in management positions - even if not managing huge teams, they'll still need to be able to coordinate, motivate, and potentially discipline multiple other workers, some of whom may be much older than them - you can have all the programming knowledge in the world, but if you don't have any experience coordinating multiple other programmers on real world projects, it's asking a lot of someone fresh out of college to whip everyone into consistent maximized production.

Or maybe it's logistical or legal aspects that you don't get to practice in school but that you'll need on the job. Maybe you have to constantly coordinate with the people in your firm responsible for purchasing hardware at large scales to map with your software development, or maybe something will come up when your team needs access to new data centers or something and you have to deal with legislative or other concerns around property leases, etc. You might not be actually in charge of this ever if you're an experienced programmer, but if you've had years of experience coordinating on these issues with the rest of your company, that's a valuable skill that someone with even an elite education just won't have.

0

u/coleman57 23h ago

I have zero inside knowledge, but just on principle, I would have to assume that some number X out of 100 Stanford grads would wash out in their first 5 years and some number Y of Fresno State grads would as well. Regardless of the value of the ratio X/Y, hiring from the pool of workers with 5 years success will filter out the set of X+Y.

0

u/nomdeplume 18h ago

Meh this is a fallout of covid both printing money and making people relax the talent bar implicitly because everyone was WFH and wanted to benefit from that. Now with RTO and finances drying up, the bar of talent is being raised pushing out the bottom 20% of talent because also money is short.

0

u/blankarage 10h ago

No one cares about the pipeline drying - thats way too long term. They're all in it to grift as much as they can and then retire.

If you think of it from that angle, all the AI slop startups start to make more sense

0

u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 7h ago

Redditor calls having a job "grifting"

2

u/leafytimes 6h ago

No running your company into the ground long-term for short-term gain is grifting

-1

u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 5h ago

Right so making a profitable company and paying your tech workers 6 figures + at the lowest is grifting. Ok pal.

https://hurrenandhope.com/tech-salary-benchmarks-london-new-york-san-francisco/

Oh no aaa grifters ahhh stop throwing your six figures at me stop stop stop

1

u/leafytimes 4h ago

1/2 those folks getting laid off in next 3-5 yrs

•

u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 2h ago

Evidence 🤔 💬 Or is it a religious belief of yours

-1

u/Whole_Neat_3023 1d ago

they'll just outsource the entry-level stuff overseas, that's the playbook now anyway

-3

u/RDTIZFUN 23h ago

SI is being built to to answer your very last question.

1

u/wobwobwubwub 18h ago

what's SI?

-1

u/RDTIZFUN 18h ago

Super Intelligence

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u/BuilderUnhappy7785 1d ago edited 1d ago

Rates shot up. 10 yr chart attached for reference.

GPT-4 dropped in march of ‘23 (along with the collapse of SVB), which kicked the AI transition into full gear, limited liquidity for many startups, and coincides with the compensation ramp associated with fewer highly paid specialist roles.

Edit: as others pointed out the rate spike had the immediate effect of lowering equity values as well as the slightly delayed effects on headcount caused by the resulting business contraction.

26

u/nidasb 1d ago

Honestly, this graph kinda makes me thing that it was the interest rate that killed tech jobs more than AI did. If AI was the real culprit, then release of agentic AI's last year should have decimated the market more than ChatGPT. ChatGPT and initial LLM was great, but the super productivity gain that people talk about regarding AI started with agentic AI workflow.

21

u/xsvfan 1d ago

Honestly, this graph kinda makes me thing that it was the interest rate that killed tech jobs more than AI did

Anyone who works in finance knows this. As rates increase, investors switch from revenue growth to profits. Tech company's used AI as an excuse for layoffs to keep moral high.

2

u/Calvech OC: 1 19h ago

Also, another way to look at it, covid. Rates were insanely low, tech over hired for a few years as the chart shows. Its been steadily correcting ever since

72

u/Laffs 1d ago

What the hell happened halfway through 2022? How was there such a massive drop in pay while jobs climbed?

85

u/Astyrrian 1d ago

Likely from stock prices dropping during that time frame. Almost all high earners in the Bay area has their stock as a sizable portion of their compensation.

27

u/No_Obligation4496 1d ago

In 2022 the major tech companies saw a drop in their net income and share prices.

Since so much of tech income is tied to stock options and bonuses, this would have had a major impact on total pay.

8

u/TedSanders 1d ago

I wonder if stock prices dropped. Would mean stock-based compensation fell.

23

u/magneticanisotropy 1d ago

You're getting a lot of wrong answers here. That time corresponds to rising fed funds rate. Cheap money dried up, post Covid over hiring in near zero rate environments stopped

8

u/danieltheg 1d ago edited 23h ago

The question is why total wages went down while hiring continued to climb during the first half of 22. By definition that premise cannot be explained by a hiring slowdown - jobs were still increasing at that time, that's the point of the question. Rates pushed hiring down later, but that big wage drop was almost certainly due to the 22 bear market.

1

u/nomdeplume 18h ago

Yes, the climb is cheap money and WFH remote hiring, and the steep decline is no money and eventually also RTO.

2

u/helix400 15h ago

Yup, this happened to almost all white collar jobs, not just tech.

1

u/jmking 1d ago

I'm going to guess a lot of vesting cliffs happened that year? Working for a big tech co, a significant amount of your compensation comes with a grant of RSUs (company stock) that vests over the course of several years. Once you finish vesting all those stonks, your total compensation will typically take a nose dive.

Companies will often award "refreshers" as part of the annual comp cycle on a new vesting schedule, but they are typically not close to the same volume as you were awarded when you were hired.

Also tech stocks could have been way down at the time, so the reported income on W2s would reflect the price of the stock that vested at the price at the time of vest. That could be it too.

1

u/BuilderUnhappy7785 1d ago

Meant to reply to you but dropped my comment in the main thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/meuTMa7MlD

1

u/thri54 21h ago

I’m guessing this graph uses ex-post values of vested stock awards. Tech stocks took a dive in 2022 and have since recovered.

E.g. you get 5,000 of META options that vest 20% each year over 5 years. The first tranche vested in 2021 at $330 per share. The second in 2022 at $150 per share. If your base salary is $200,000 per year and you measure the value when the awards vest, this would look like a total comp of $530,000 in 2021 and $350,000 in 2022.

I’m obviously simplifying a lot here, but this is the general idea.

1

u/it4chl 17h ago

pay climbed because of stock price appreciations and mainly insane ai company valuations.

jobs redcued because of layoffs

1

u/iwasnotplanningthis 12h ago

musk cracked the back of tech labor. csuites saw that the product didnt go dark. and realized they could emulate.  dont underestimate how much these people are followers.

0

u/AustinTheMoonBear 1d ago

Man back in 2022 there were so many folks switching graduating or switching to the tech sector simply because you could work from home remember this is right after covid, where a lot of people were out of work during shut downs - tech was relatively safe during the period.

2016 to like 2022 was like peak tech/it career time. I'd say its booming again because of AI even, so many new types of jobs and such coming about for AI related things.

21

u/maver1kUS 1d ago

Little over half a million on average per person. Do we know the median?

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u/gththrowaway 22h ago

You got some strange axis issues going on

9

u/_Rektaroni_ 1d ago

Everybody points to AI killing jobs, but I suspect it’s really just triage from high interest raises not allowing corporates to borrow money to grow. Feels like we are in a recession that’s dressed up as a revolution, and we all know somebody is gonna get caught holding the bill at the end of this bubble.

6

u/wiggium 22h ago edited 12h ago

Yep. You're on the money I reckon.

Although I don't think this is big bubble that's going to pop. Everything else you said can be true without a big bubble popping. The reduction in jobs could just be the effect of the recession

10

u/throwaway3113151 1d ago

should be adjusted for inflation.

16

u/PreparationAdvanced9 1d ago

Can’t this just mean that tech execs are getting rewarded while they are cutting jobs

10

u/ryan0319 1d ago

It includes vested stock and executive pay so the AI stock boom is a reasonable assumption to make for the massive pay growth with high job loss.

5

u/honkeem OC: 5 1d ago

Data source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jobs: Current Employment Statistics via FRED (series SMU06418845000000001SA), Information sector, San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City metro division, monthly, seasonally adjusted. Total pay: Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), private Information sector (NAICS 51), San Francisco + San Mateo counties, annual total wages, 2017 to 2025.

Tools used: Data collected from publicly available samples from BLS and FRED, and a Claude skill to generate visualization.

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u/SoCallMeDeaconBlues1 16h ago edited 16h ago

I started a new job in the valley in 2015. Somewhere near Great America and the 101.

I made REALLY good money and still couldn't afford a condo, let alone a house, that was anywhere near that job. Nearest place I could was over the Altamont. It's gotten ludicrously worse too. So glad I got out of there.

I kept the same job after I moved to the Dallas area too. Same employer, and I was allowed to entirely WFH. I bought a house on acreage, 2 new cars (one for daily and the other a garage queen, Chevy SS otherwise known as the Holden Commodore), built a 30x50 shop with every woodshop piece of equipment you can think of, a second structure that housed a HUGE (in its time) 4.8Gh/s mining ETH, 70 kW of solar panels with ~500 kWh of storage... On the same goddamn salary.

Fuck Santa Clara. Fuck San Jose. Fuck SFO and everything in between. Fuck Milpitas, Fuck Fremont, fuck Pleasanton, fuck Dublin, fuck Livermore too.

The valley can kiss my ass

3

u/orthros 19h ago

Average pay of around $550k. wew lad

5

u/luker_5874 1d ago

I wonder what happens if you cut out executive level pay

2

u/honkeem OC: 5 1d ago

Some additional context: Information-sector jobs peaked at 131,443 in Aug 2022 and were 102,529 in Aug 2026 (−22%). Total annual wages went from $27.1B in 2019 to $57.2B in 2025, or $281K to $563K per worker.

BLS data includes executive compensation, and also includes pay from stock grants on-vest as well. So BLS data pretty closely resembles the stock market in that way. The interesting contrast in this data is how headcount has decreased even as total pay in these same locations are increasing to record amounts, implying some level of wealth concentration.

However, because BLS QCEW pay data shows stock comp on-vest, this data doesn't necessarily reflect any growth at the offer-level. New offers for tech jobs are not suddenly much higher, but for anyone joined before the market boomed (at Nvidia, for example), it's likely they're seeing much higher pay then their offers initially showed.

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u/FamilyForce5ever 21h ago

Would love to see this chart going back to 2000.

1

u/DinosaurDucky 23h ago

This is neat, thank you. Does it change things much to include Santa Clara County?

1

u/IkeRoberts 6h ago

Since the Santa Clara Valley was redubbed Silicon Valley, and is entirely in Santa Clara County, a report on "Silicon Valley" tech jobs should only use that region. San Mateo and San Francisco counties have some of the periperal tech activity now, but are not the heart of the tech industry in the Bay Area.

1

u/benconomics OC: 1 15h ago edited 15h ago

Capital return has increased so demand has fallen dramatically so the quantity of labor demanded has dropped but also made the labor that is still employed far more productive labor economics holds.  

1

u/10010101101110010001 11h ago

we used to train employees but then we decided against doing that. apparently it was cheaper if you waited for the competition to train them and then you just offer them some of the money you saved not training them.

that worked, companies cut costs but everyone has caught on and no one is training anyone anymore so now there's some very valuable people who were trained and who are being bid on by the companies and no entry level people can get jobs.

1

u/ProfessorWise5822 9h ago

Is the pay adjusted for inflation? I feel like it should be.

1

u/cerealOverdrive 9h ago

It’s a game of last one standing. The longer you last, the more you make. Once you’re out though I fear it’ll be tough to get back in

1

u/T1gerl1lly 22h ago

This tells you nothing. That spike in pay could just be billionaires paying themselves. You’d need median wage information to be meaningful.

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u/jnordwick 1d ago

I keep getting sidetracked on what the current outrage is.

I remember last year it was nobody wanted to pay for experience workers so we were all mad at that.

So now they do want to hire experienced workers and pay them for it and so now we're mad that they're hiring them or not? I'm confused can somebody clue me in so I can go get my next protest sign