Tech workers are freaking out over whether the end is here for $500,000-plus salaries

• Tech workers on the anonymous-job site Blind debated whether the end of $500,000 salaries is here.
• While the majority of users polled said it would be the end of an era, others disagreed.
• Insider has reported that some companies were using layoffs to justify pay cuts for new hires.

Tech workers are concerned the industry might be reaching the end of a very lucrative era.

Last month, a poll on the anonymous-job site Blind garnered thousands of votes as users debated whether the tech industry could be doing away with $500,000 salaries.

In the post, a user who worked for Oracle said that between 2019 and 2022, program managers were making $500,000 in total compensation, while the "average" software development engineer was making $350,000 and recruiters were taking home $200,000.

"Are those days over?" the user asked. "Will there be a rebalance to salaries back to 2015 levels where only directors with 100+ reports were clearing 500k."

Over 14,400 users weighed in on the poll — with 51.7% of voters agreeing that the industry had reached the end of an era.

Blind allows its users to post anonymously, but it requires them to verify their status via their employee email address. Insider did not independently verify the employment of the users cited in this story.

"Tech is still extraordinarily lucrative," one user who works at Amazon wrote in a post that generated 150 likes. "The salaries are here to stay, but ridiculous overpaying is over. I doubt we'll see Meta/Google/Doordash etc. throw 500k at someone who's making 200k currently."

Another user from Twitter said they received "multiple offers" over $1.1 million in total compensation.

"With all these layoffs people start accepting lower pay and the trend will continue unless there is huge demand for tech," one user from the AI company Tractable wrote. "I think supply for devs is really high and so demand might go down. If you can get good (not great) talent for cheap, managers might adjust with that."

The Oracle employee was not the only one to question whether tech salaries are on a downward spiral.

"Do you think salaries like 250k- 500k, etc are sustainable in tech. Or we are hitting a bubble that soon will burst?" an employee of the cloud-computing company VMware wrote in a separate post that generated over 900 comments.

Big Tech employees have long earned more than their counterparts at other firms.

The median take-home pay for a program manager in the US is $98,578, while a program manager at a major tech firm like Google may earn closer to $220,000 a year, per GlassDoor.

GlassDoor estimates the median annual earnings of software development engineers and tech recruiters are $130,887 and $75,489, respectively. Big tech companies are known to pay much more, with Glassdoor putting the total-compensation range for software development engineers at Meta from $187,000 to $283,000, and for the company's recruiters from $104,000 to $171,000.

Tech recruiters told Insider earlier this year that some companies were using layoffs to cut the salaries of new hires. Major tech companies — including Meta, Microsoft, and Google — have laid off thousands of staff in recent months.

Additional concerns are being raised over the growing abilities of artificial intelligence, with dozens of tech workers taking to Blind to question whether their jobs would be replaced.

"Face it, golden age is over," a Microsoft engineer wrote. "Software engineering is a dying profession. And since GPT is already great at writing its own prompts, you're up the creek without a paddle."

Do you work in tech? Reach out to the reporter from a non-work device and email at gkay@insider.com