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

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

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

Last week, 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 works 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."

Nearly 14,000 users weighed in on the poll, with a slight majority of 51.5% of votes agreeing that it was the end of an era.

Blind allows its users to post anonymously, but it requires people to verify their employer via their employee email address.

"Tech is still extraordinarily lucrative," one user who works at Amazon wrote in a post that generated 148 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've gotten "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 cloud computing company VMware wrote in a separate post.

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 a software development engineer and a tech recruiter are $130,887 and $75,489, respectively. Big tech companies are known to pay much more, with Glassdoor putting the total compensation range for Meta software development engineers between $187,000 and $283,000, and for Meta recruiters between $104,000 and $171,000.

Insider reported earlier this year that companies are using layoffs to cut the salaries of new hires, according to tech recruiters. Major tech companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Google have laid off thousands of staff in recent months.

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

"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