I don't think demand for engineers is necessarily that elastic - even if candidates were willing to accept less money, it would take a long time for companies to respond by hiring more and they might never match supply.
I've personally applied to several jobs offering less than $80k TC (government, nonprofits, startups) and heard nothing back. That's a small sample size because I'm currently employed and only looking at particularly interesting positions, but I'm also only applying to good fits, writing an individualized resume/cover letter, etc.
Anyways, I agree with GP that there seems to have been a breakdown of the old post job -> cold submit resume pipeline. You have to have some kind of an in these days.
My anecdotes last year and the year before was that when I was looking for my preferred jobs - full time positions at cloud consulting companies and a couple of product companies as an “architect”, I had a 100% response rate.
When I looked for my Plan B jobs - just regular old C# enterprise dev jobs looking for AWS experience paying less - crickets.
It’s seems harder to get interviews for jobs you are overqualified for than ones you are slightly under qualified for.
I have seen some YC startups offer absurdly low "fucking money" for the ask.
If you want a founding engineer for on-site only full-time work in the Bay Area at 50-80K and a fraction of a percent of equity, you deserve every volley of AI shitspam resume dumping that awaits your inbox.
And I think it was only two or three months ago that I saw a hiring post offering exactly that.
I have to double down on what I just said here especially these days because startups are dumping their early stage employees to keep them from actually keeping any of that equity more often than they should be.
You take all of the risk of early stage startup employment and as soon as the company gets long term traction you get shown the door.
I've seen this mostly in NY startups but have heard it's a wide trend.
So far we haven't had a candidate pass because of salary yet. Typically candidates looking for that stable $400k salary never even talk with startups, because they know that's only a FAANG position.
My bad, looking at the page from mobile it didn’t look like a salary range. I misinterpreted it. I just saw $125K.
That being said, I would hope that position is remote for $175K. I would have jumped on it when I was a pure software developer working in Atlanta. But working locally in SF for that amount?
And according to the calculators I saw, it would be 46% more expensive than living in Atlanta. But we you can choose other metro areas that are not on the west coast for comparison where you could also make $175K as a senior
No people want the amount of money that the market will give them. If you can’t afford the inputs that are required for your business, that’s a you problem. Come back when you have enough funding to pique my interest with cash comp - not worthless “equity”
