> Engineers with 5 YOE are making $500k+ a year at these companies because they are generating much more than that in revenues and profits for the companies.
AirBnb lost billions of dollars last year, and it has rarely made positive quarterly earnings. Based on your example, the engineers are highly overpaid as there efforts rarely generate a profit. They are being paid by funds from speculators (stockholders and venture capital) that are betting on huge profits in the future.
In reality, these engineers are being paid due to labor market forces and extremely focused recruiting policies (eg only hiring those with degrees from top engineering schools or poaching workers from other companies that have similar policies).
it all looks nice and rosy and everybody patting their back about how impactful they are when scales come into play... and then you as a user are just wtf-ing given app because UI has been overhauled yet again, things that worked before are nowhere to be found, there is basically no migration guide.
The simple truth that most software engineers don't want to hear is - people are quite conservative in this. If it works once, most folks would be extremely happy to keep using it for next 20 years in exactly same way, as it is. Bug-less has higher priority than shiny (which is highly subjective) and constantly changing.
This is the unintuitive thing about growth stage companies and just the scale that internet companies can achieve today. They might already have a million users who are happy with how it works and would rather that the UI didn't change. But they are on track to grow to 100 million users, and so if making things a little bit more flashy improves the new user activation rate by a small percentage for the next 99 million users, that can dwarf the preferences of the existing users. Especially if the existing users grumble for a few days but then mostly continue using the product.
I believe most users see a tech product as a tool, "The thing that gets you to the thing". Whereas a majority in tech view those tools more as experiences. An experience puts more focus on the process itself, at the expense of the end result.
Unfortunately this tech oligopoly landscape doesn't leave users many ways to express this preference, but I often wonder if the culture will change at some point in the future as the industry matures.
An aging western population might have an influence here as well, in the long term. Older folks have less tolerance for having to relearn how to do the same thing they already knew how to do for the umpteenth time.
The one guy's thesis that we're wasting effort is probably correct, given the valuation is due to low interest rates. What's the Keynes quote about paying people to dig holes?
AirBnb lost billions of dollars last year, and it has rarely made positive quarterly earnings. Based on your example, the engineers are highly overpaid as there efforts rarely generate a profit. They are being paid by funds from speculators (stockholders and venture capital) that are betting on huge profits in the future.
In reality, these engineers are being paid due to labor market forces and extremely focused recruiting policies (eg only hiring those with degrees from top engineering schools or poaching workers from other companies that have similar policies).