On the contrary… I’m not seeing any evidence of this. If anything, salaries are going up.

What's your vantage point though? Are you a "normal" senior seeing salaries going up from $175k and GP is a FAANG seeing salaries going down from $400k?

note: I don't have data points for either, I'm genuinely curious

From the hiring side.

This seems extremely counter-intuitive. I'd figure with so many experienced and talented people looking, it would be an employer's market and they'd use it to reign in pay at least a bit. Why do you think this might not be occurring?

I would expect that from the employer's point of view, it's not a sea of "amazing candidates to choose from, any of which would be a good fit for my company." When they find someone who ticks all the boxes, they can expect that person will tick the boxes for other companies as well, so best to make a reasonable offer that the candidate will take.

Are average companies offering $300K to Senior/Staff Engineers this days? Not often. Are they offering < $150K? Not if they're serious about hiring people. The numbers are somewhere in the middle.

This. You can try lowering your salary for the job req but you’ll end up with unfavorable candidates. So you go for the good ones and the good ones know what they are worth and are holding out collectively. Strange how economics works sometimes. Now, ask me again in a year.

As an employer, we have better candidates with more experience at the same salary.

that is just simply not true. all evidence including anecdotal points to much lower salaries than we saw in last 2 years. Where and for which roles are you seeing salaries climb?

All the salary benchmarks. If you look at the trends overall (not entry level, those have dropped 4%, and not outliers, the $300k+ folks) compared to last year, it’s up. For how long I can’t say. I do think there will be a downtick in general for all folks but there’s still a lot of companies looking for talent. Whether or not they still have the budget is yet to be seen outside of FAANG and co. Most won’t know until end of quarter at best.

Not everyone had their chips in FTX and SVB. People are still hiring.

Salaries only rarely go down. They might stagnate for a while (and thus go down relative to inflation!), but nobody likes making less money than before so it is very hard to reduce salaries no matter how much someone is overpaid.