I've been reading a lot here about how high salaries currently are, due to a shortage of engineers/the Big Quit/startups being showered with funding/whatever other reasons. I see figures like 200k-300k in the Bay Area, and maybe similar for remote positions.
I'm getting FOMO as a young engineer in deep learning/computer vision at a small European company. My plan was to stay at my interesting job with average pay until I stop growing, then hopefully jump to a company that pays better when I feel like it. But what if the market shifts and salaries go down?
Is there any indication of what the job market will become for tech employees in the next few years?
Keep in mind that when everybody gets paid a lot, everything is expensive. That's the real way that high salaries return to the norm: everything else catches up. Bay Area is already the most expensive part of the U.S; you might get paid $200-300K, but taxes eat half that, rents are $2.5-3K/month, mortgage payments are $10K+, daycare is about $2-3K, restaurant meals are $30, etc.
Not sure how that compares to your country - if you're coming from Eastern Europe you're going to get sticker shock, but a lot of central/western European regions (eg. Zurich, Paris, Scandinavia) are already there. It's a different type of expensive though: in general consumer goods, food, housing, and gas cost more in Europe, but healthcare, education, and childcare cost more in the U.S.