> There's a lot of hiring going on at YC startups, so "everyone now knows and agrees on this take" is a considerable overstatement.

Consider this sentence in my response:

"It's widely accepted that you'd look at any non-unicorn non-pre-IPO startups only as a fallback option after completely failing to get an offer from any of the above."

Only a minority of engineers can secure employment at top-tech and pre-IPO unicorns. The rest will have to settle. My claim isn't that companies below the top won't be able to hire at all, but rather that they will have to settle for engineers:

1. Who couldn't get hired at top tech or pre-IPO unicorns which are universally seen as better options.

2. Who would leave if they can get a shot at these better options.

> (2) startups need to adjust to this. I've felt for years that the equity shift that took place from investors to founders needs to be followed up with a comparable shift in favor of early employees.

Yeah, I agree. When I get startup offers these days, the equity portion is so small that I just ignore it.

So when I get the startup offer, I hear "$200k base + <some equity number I just ignore>", while FAANGs are offering me $400k of cold, hard cash. The startup simply don't have a chance.

> On the other hand: while this shift has been happening somewhat, it's surprising to me that it hasn't taken deeper hold yet, which makes me wonder what I'm missing.

My theory: startups just accepted that they'll have to initially scramble with 2nd tier, overworked staff. This isn't actually new, just the well-worn B-team/A-team strategy of startup staffing: you start out with a small team of B-players willing to take the risk (often for a very small upside) because they have no prayer of a better offer so just paying them market rate is good enough to get them to work hard and sacrifice their WLB. If your business pans out, you are now in the coveted "pre-IPO unicorn" position and can start hiring the A-team to replace your current B-team.

> Startups continue to thrive, even though there haven't been massive structural changes yet.

Indeed, as long as founders and VCs see it this way, then the situation will continue. I suspect the A-team/B-team strategy is just working well-enough for their needs: the B-team gets them a pretty minimal viable product, and by the time they need to deal with the difficult scaling and reliability issues associated with success, that success allows them to hire the FAANG-grade A-team that can actually deal with these.

It's hard for founders and VCs, the hoarders of startup equity, to give it up unless they absolutely have to. There are no clear statistics like "if we gave up X% we can expect Y% better chance of success", and like you said, the current state seems "good enough" and still far from the catastrophic failure mode that would force them to act.

So all that's really happening is that the B-team/A-team paradigm reigns unchallenged, and under that paradigm, it's actually expected and accepted for engineers to see B-team startup positions as fallbacks.

> It may not be thriving to the extent that FAANG is, with some exceptions—but that's because nothing is.

Personally I think there are huge long-term issues with the level of concentrated success that FAANGs are enjoying, but that's a topic for a different conversation.