I think Stripe is one of the few bad examples they could have picked to compare against FAANG. Among late-stage startups, it seems highly regarded and its employees' options are likely to hold real value in the not-so-distant future.
But generally I think the OP is correct: working for FAANG has made many, many people far more money over the past decade than they would have otherwise made on average in a startup.
I suspect that eventually the tide will turn, as it always does. The companies will get middle-manager bloat, MBAs and accountants start pinching pennies, systems get dragged down in technical debt, and more nimble competitors eventually outcompete. But we're not there yet.
you’re comparing fang to average startup. instead you should compare fang to top tier startup. as that’s the choice people who get fang offers make... in almost all examples i can think of, the top tier startup pays more.
furthermore before they were fang companies, google was the top tier startup and IBM was the equivalent to FANG.
Not according to public info. When I left Google an L5 was commonly clearing 500k in liquid comp. Airbnb and WeWork weren’t even close and that was before the implosions.
> The empty Walgreen's shelves can be seen at the Walgreen's on the corner of Eddy and Van Ness Streets.
It won't be a problem much longer – that location is going to be shut down permanently.
Shoplifting has been a problem here even before Covid. Shoplifters know the law (<$950 is a misdemeanor), they know the police likely won't make an arrest, and even if they did, they know our DA likely won't prosecute.
It might require the added context of living here.
San Francisco has one of the highest property crime rates in the United States [1], and Walgreens is a popular target of shoplifters, who regularly clear out entire shelves of merchandise. The company hasn't come out and said it, but some believe that rampant shoplifting is a reason why eight Walgreens locations in the city have been permanently closed [2].
I have a family member who works at walgreens. The theft is incredible. In the bay area and particularly SF this is not one or two candy bars a week theft.
In SF, if you stop a shoplifter and they are hurt, if they are in a protected class etc, it's game over for you as an employee and possibly the store. Even if you stop someone, even if police come and arrest, DA is never going to prosecute. If they do prosecute, its a misdemeanor. It's pretty wild the first time you see it.
The clerks know who is coming in to steal. The stats above are from 2016. 2020 is worse, and much / most of the property crime goes unreported. If walgreens reported every shoplifting incident the numbers would be nuts.
For sure. But pharmacy is very competitive and at some point it's a losing game.
For example - Walgreen runs about about a 4% margin and profit runs about $4 billion (all very rough numbers).
The problem with theft is that its a total loss so it can really chop into margins - these are shelves that you build a supply chain and staff to stock and then get zero.
Someone walks in with a backpack and just fills it full (maybe 50 - 100 individual items). Meanwhile you have 20 customers buying a few items (1-5). So you sell 100 items at 104% of all in cost (4% positive margin) and 100 walk out the door (if only the knapsack guy steals) at 0% of cost. Your margin is negative immediately (-40%+).
Walgreens actually has budgets for theft store managers try to work with in (pretty high ones actually). But theft the way it happens in SF - you need to understand there are no consequence, the only folks to get in trouble would be employees trying to stop it.
It also drives away customers you do want (older people filing scrips will go to what are perceived as safer locations) and moves other sales to online / delivery etc.
They are robbed while TV crews are filming about robberies :)
SF talks a lot of crap about Amazon, but if amazon offers a safe / delivery to your garage / car / inside door pharmacy service it could be game over for a lot of players.
Proposition 47 essentially decriminalized shoplifting. Californians literally voted for this petty crime wave. As a Florida resident, all I can say is, y'all have fun with that
When I read about them moving to states like Texas in numbers, all I can think is that they will inevitably try to take these same policies with them when they find out wherever they moved too isn't quite liberal enough
Seems like a large portion of people in this thread at least are more concerned about lowering cost of living while still being in a large active city than about local polotics, even if those things do tie together
take the bay area salary, work remote in texas/arizona/nevada because its cheaper and rationalize it by saying its the politics thats making me move.
i've had this conversation 5 times this week with friends and colleagues, and none of them have actually spent more than a week in texas/arizona/nevada.
anyone that wants to live in one of those states, try it for a couple months if you can before taking the dive.
I think you're totally right in some capacity, but there's also a lot of people who are excited to get away from the hyper-liberal climate of California.
I guess it just depends on California's vs Texans definition of hyper liberal. I don't know what level of liberalism it would take to get dislike from the average Texan but I know it has to be miles away from declaring that arresting shoplifters is racist.
Interesting. Is it possible that this is also due to the policy of many states and cities of sending their homeless and mentally ill citizens to California on on way tickets?
I'm excited by the idea of permanent remote work and moving somewhere more affordable. I moved to SF relatively late in my career, and only realized afterwards that I have nowhere near enough savings to own a nice home here.
But most of my coworkers seem eager to return to the office. They miss the office environment, the perks and catered meals, and the socialization. And the managers, who subsist on meetings and in-person interaction, seem even more anxious to get everyone back to their desks. The powers-that-be probably have personal motivations for keeping everyone here as well (e.g., many millions of dollars tied up in their homes, which could lose significant value if the housing market deflates).
All this is to say, I'm skeptical that workers won't be called back into the office as soon as leadership gets the chance.
I agree, but with a caveat. The _very_ top execs of large organizations (Google, Facebook, etc.) may be anxious to get to a lower-salary environment, and remote work may be a necessary part of that. If they are determined to move to a structure where they don't have to pay SV salaries, they might overrule their middle-management and extend remote work in order to facilitate that.
This is a very underrated comment. Many people romanticize the work from home no commute in a rural area, but do not be surprised to find corporations taking advantage of your new found anchor.
Also consider the expanding talent pool and competition. I live in Michigan. I would love to work with Microsoft or Google, because they do some very interesting work. However relocating across the country, away from established friends and family, isn't something I can currently consider.
Average developer salaries for my area are between 60-100k, so if Microsoft can offer 120k+, a lot of (great) devs in my area would probably take that. Local devs get better wages, and companies save some money.
However, they could also outsource to India for even cheaper results, but who knows how well that will go.
Having been present for outsourcing attempts that went badly, I can say that generally they will not (did not) go well. I don't know if it was that the devs were not good, the communication loop was bad, they were supporting too many outsourcing customers at once, or what. But, on multiple occasions I've seen it not turn out well. That ship sailed long before the pandemic.
So, the question is, will it work any better in Michigan? Quite possibly; the timezone and language differences are much less. Plus, if you worked for Microsoft or Google, you probably wouldn't try to also work for 2-3 other employers at the same time. But, if the issue was simply that remote work impedes good communication, the results will be similar.
My guess, it will sometimes work. I guess we'll find out soon.
> And the managers, who subsist on meetings and in-person interaction, seem even more anxious to get everyone back in their desks.
I recently quit my job so I could stop being a manager and return to IC, exactly because of this. In a WFH climate managers have to work twice as hard to stay competitive in the political games.
Effort and business utility are not necessarily linear. For argument's sake let's assume they are. A manager affects the productivity of all of his/her reports. Let's say a manager has 10 reports. If the manager stops working twice as hard, maybe all of the manager's reports would become 1/2 as productive. That means the manager's 2x work provides the same business utility as 5 ICs.
Lots of people in a business aren't submitting code, but that's not really my point. Depending on a manager's style they can increase synchronization overhead between team members and different teams to the point that everyone's productivity is reduced while the manager has never been busier or productive on paper.
A manager's productivity IS the team's productivity, and should be measured in results.
A "productive" manager that slows down the team isn't an effective manager at all, no matter how hard he or she is working.
The manager might be able to scapegoat a poor team member or two when poor results become evident, but sooner or later, he or she will have to pay the piper.
> All this is to say, I'm skeptical that workers won't be called back into the office as soon as leadership gets the chance.
That forget the leadership on top of that leadership though!
Where I work, before covid they were working on expanding quite a bit the amount of office space but as far as I understands, all theses plans got cancelled and instead we won't have permanent desk and instead we will works remotely 2-3 days a week. That's coming from a company that had literally no remote works before Covid (except while travelling).
It represents so much money to have less office space, as long as the manager doesn't play too much with their staff efficiency during Covid, it will just make sense to save money there.
Working from home 2-3 days a week is not what I would consider "remote work," since you'd still need to live close to the office.
From my perspective, this is worst of all possible scenarios. Employees are still shackled to an expensive city, but now they must pay for housing that supports a dedicated "home office" space (e.g., a larger apartment with an extra room, or carving out part of their living room/bedroom). This is just shifting the cost burden of real estate from the company onto the employees.
I disagree. If I only had to come into the office, say, once or twice a week (3x might be pushing it) I'd be willing to live much further out because I'd be willing to tolerate a horrible commute if I only had to do it a small percentage of the time.
For example, in Austin, these days anything located within a half hour of downtown tends to be horribly expensive. But just go a little beyond that and house/real estate prices drop precipitously. You're going to see a boom in these exurbs as these "mostly remote" jobs increase.
At least in San Francisco Bay Area, which has one of the worst housing markets in the country, it would be a net win.
For some people who've lived here a while and bought a house for cheap or have rent control, they're making money hand over fist.
But for the rest of us, a huge portion of our paychecks goes to landlords or paying a mortgage. It would be much more reasonable in almost any other US suburb and most US cities.
Do companies you've worked for in the past normally approach you about promotions?
Maybe it's because I'm shy or bad at self-promotion, but I've never had an employer offer a promotion. Even after getting great performance reviews, I've had to fight tooth and nail or go through a promotion committee song and dance that can drag on for months or years.
What I'm usually offered promotion for is having leadership skills. I don't know why or how, but it's something I naturally seem to be complimented and respected for, even though it's only that in the last year I started looking more into what it takes to be a good leader and truly try be better at it.
With fully remote work it seems the concept of leadership is changing and maybe being replaced with...scrum boards? I don't now how it works fully remote yet :) All I know is there are some successful full remote companies, but they don't really have good reviews on their leadership skills either when reading Glass Door.
I'd also include Los Angeles (Getty and LACMA), Chicago (Art Institute), and Boston (MFA, beating SF by default because it doesn't even really compete in this category).
Getty and LACMA are not good. Los Angeles does however have good museums: the Battleship USS Iowa Museum, Fort MacArthur Museum, Mission San Fernando Rey de España, La Brea Tar Pits, and the California Science Center.
Chicago's Art Institute is not good. Chicago does however have a couple good museums: Museum of Science and Industry, Field Museum of Natural History,
Boston's MFA is not good. Boston does however have Fort Warren and the USS Constitution.
I'll give you the Michelin star restaurants, but cheap or mid-range restaurants are disappointing (understandable given the astronomical cost to open and maintain a restaurant here), the bars and nightlife are similar to what you'll find in other cities, and museums in DC, Chicago, and LA blow SF out of the water.
But generally I think the OP is correct: working for FAANG has made many, many people far more money over the past decade than they would have otherwise made on average in a startup.
I suspect that eventually the tide will turn, as it always does. The companies will get middle-manager bloat, MBAs and accountants start pinching pennies, systems get dragged down in technical debt, and more nimble competitors eventually outcompete. But we're not there yet.