Tech workers are willing to give up on high salaries and take a pay cut amid mass layoffs, survey shows

• The majority of tech workers in a Blind survey said they'd accept equal or lower pay.
• Many of those surveyed attributed their willingness to accept lower pay to an uncertain job market.
• Tech workers have been questioning for months whether its the end of the era of $500,000+ pay.

It might be the end of a very lucrative era in tech. Mass layoffs appear to have spooked many tech workers into being willing to accept lower salaries, according to a new study.

About 56% of tech workers in an official poll from the anonymous job posting site Blind said they would accept equal or less pay in a new role and some 45% of those respondents said they'd accept equal or lower pay due to a lackluster job market amid a series of layoffs across the tech industry.

While tech workers are struggling to find security in the job market, they're also concerned about working in a healthy environment. Other top reasons for accepting equal or lower pay included concerns about company culture and work-life balance, as well as workers who preferred to stay remote as many companies continue to push for staff to return to the office, Blind reported.

"I'd rather make less money and be happier," one Meta worker wrote in a response to the survey.

Another Meta worker said that companies that offer high pay "are in layoff mode, and their culture is a dumpster fire." For example, Meta and Google, which are known for offering high compensation packages, have each laid off thousands of workers over the past few months.

Neither company responded to a request for comment ahead of publication.

Blind's 2023 Engineering Salary Expectations Trends Report is the result of an April survey of over 7,300 US tech workers, as well as data the platform pulled from over 50,000 workers that used the company's talent marketplace, Talent by Blind. Insider did not independently verify the employment of users cited in this story, but Blind verifies workers' employment status using their work emails.

The Blind report found that average expectations for pay in tech across the industry have dropped about 5% over the course of the year. Though, salary expectations dropped at the highest rate for junior and mid-level engineers at about 8% to 10%, respectively, according to the Blind survey. The platform attributed the higher impact on mid-level tech workers to an "oversupply of mid-level talent" in the market.

What's more, tech workers in major hubs like San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle — where the cost of living is much higher — have been hit the hardest by falling minimum salary expectations, the survey found. Mid-level engineers in the tech hubs have experienced a year-over-year salary drop of about 13%, Blind found.

Meanwhile, minimum salary requirement for machine learning engineers have stayed the highest among their peers, according to Blind, which attributed the higher pay to the surge in interest in creating AI products.

The study echoes concerns from tech workers on social media. Over the past few months, hundreds of tech workers have taken to Blind to question whether it's the end of $500,000-plus salaries due to mass layoffs and concerns about AI replacing software engineers.

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