And do these “thousand of employees” pay what Microsoft is paying?

Its not hard to beat microsoft packages, they've been under market rate for a while

So name 10 companies that are paying what Microsoft is paying that are profitable and haven’t announced layoffs?

And that doesn’t include meaningless “equity” in a private company.

Microsoft often pays less than half what the other big tech companies pay, so it's actually not that hard to beat

Or you could take a tiny pay cut but go 100% remote and move wherever you want in the world

Another thing to consider is that most companies are working on much easier stuff than the type of problems you face at a company like Microsoft. My first tech job, we had an ex-Microsoftie there. The dude basically just sat around surfing the web all day, worked maybe 4 hours total between Monday and Friday. He was still the most productive person at the whole company, and he taught us all a lot in the process.

And even less than half…paying over $200K is still more than your average senior CRUD/Enterprise developer makes in most major cities in the US.

That’s not meant to be an insult. I spent over 2 decades as your average CRUD developer and only fell into BigTech in 2020 because I added cloud to my toolbelt

Now I wouldn’t have move from my big house in the Atlanta burbs where I was making $160K for the mid 200s. And the only reason I was even interested in my current job was that it was permanently remote.

I don’t wanna dox myself but I work for a public company who’s stock didn’t crash and who hasn’t laid anyone off and we pay similar to MS (or more if you ignore all the random perks MS gives)

Yes, there are tons of companies out there that pay much better than Microsoft (that most people have likely never heard of).

> desperate for good tech people

…great people don’t want to be held back by average people.

Most people who consider themselves to be great are painfully average.

Absolutely. But because they think they’re great and others are average, they still glom together.