I can't stop thinking about Amazon raising their base cap to $350K per year. And for so many reasons. The market is FIERCE. Hiring talent is HARD. I get it. They can do it. So they did it. The ripple effect....how this impacts other people, other companies, startups, the housing market, etc.
My friend and competitor (;-)) Albert Squiers said it best on Geekwire yesterday, “Startups in Seattle were already having a difficult time poaching Amazon engineers; this will make it even more difficult.”
As far as what smaller companies & startups can do to "differentiate themselves", what I hear and see as the #1 ask is "work life balance". I think that the past couple of years people have really, really evaluated what matters the most to them and that is, time. All we have as people is time. In most of my conversations, I hear "work life balance" as being the MOST important thing, of course pay is in the top five but at what extent do you hand your life and time over for golden handcuffs? Does increasing pay come with a greater ask of time as well? So many questions and I realize everyone might not agree with this train of thought but I can't help but wonder......
Curious to hear others thoughts on this as well and how startups can compete and how smaller companies can hire people if they can't offer cash like this.