Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zaheer | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind that new hire salaries at the same level are typically higher than folks internally who have been at that level for some time. The market rate has actually gone up significantly in last 1-2 years.

View on HN

I have 16 years of engineering experience and Google has made me two offers (original and revised) for a T4 position in NY that are well below the numbers reported on Levels (in fact, below the average on the site). So, either I am getting low balled like hell or there is skew in the numbers.

Edit: there is skew in the numbers, not some in the numbers.

Did you have strong competing offers? From the discussions on Blind most folks get strong offers from Google only if they have another really strong offer. Keep in mind most of our data presented right now is Bay Area-centric. We're working on filtering all views of data by location still.

There was a sheet shared around in Seattle some time ago with salary information. Some interesting points that came out of that were that salaries for women and minority engineers were significantly lower. Also, there were clearly a lot of misreported numbers (some exorbitantly so).

There are actually multiple sheets. Here's one: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-CqO6Px-0yA2421OOtJo...

There is an incentive to overstate one's salary and no down side. In fact everyone should just double their salary when self-reporting that information to anyone that won't keep it in confidence.

What's "Blind"?

https://www.teamblind.com. An anonymous cross industry social network with per company discussion boards. People share interview advice, salary information, (TC or GTFO is a blind meme...), "dissenting" political thoughts and bad dating advice mostly. It can be good and terrible like most anonymous platforms. It's pretty shallow compared to HN (almost no technical discussion, business discussion, shallow poltical discussion).

It's just like the old app "Secret" -- except huge tech companies are on it, meaning its only slightly less toxic than /pol.

My company is allegedly aligned with Google’s levels here, and people routinely make Senior within 4 years. Spending more than 2 years at Eng I or Eng II is considered a cause for serious concern.

So T4 after 16 years is very surprising. Something is off.

It is not especially unusual for industry hires (even those with plenty of experience) to come in at T4 for Google. Being productive and effective within Google is an additional skill which is not identical to the outside, so it's a risk avoidance measure on both sides.

Assuming your experience translates well, people frequently go for promo within a year or two.

> Being productive and effective within Google is an additional skill which is not identical to the outside

I don't buy that. I get that Google has a whole lot of proprietary stuff they have built their business on, but being in that situation is not unique to Google.

> Assuming your experience translates well, people frequently go for promo within a year or two.

If that's the case, I'm not going to feel bad rejecting this offer.

If you don't work at one of a small list of companies (I've said elsewhere that "Facebook" would be a decent approximation, but Amazon or MS could count in some cases), you'll be downleveled when joining Google.

>Spending more than 2 years at Eng I or Eng II is considered a cause for serious concern.

Is this just for within Google or also from Google's perspective of hires from elsewhere? Because I have to admit I have not been past mid-level (which I guess is the Eng II equivalent) for over five years.

I have 10 years experience in my career and never held a senior position, officially. Do I miss out a lot in seniority by just being a permatemp and contractor for small shops?

I thought it happens quite regularly. I mean, I have about 16 years of experience and am still a Level 3 (but not a FAANG)

Are you accounting for annual refreshes? It's likely that the data posted represents employees that not only have had their grant value increase, but have had reasonable annual refreshes. The initial offer would naturally be much lower by comparison.

Please keep in mind, the compensation numbers are from employees that have typically worked for a couple years, have stock grants that have appreciated significantly, and that is a significant portion of their total compensation.

If you want to compare your offer, look at GOOG, AAPL, FB and what their stock value was in 2016. Use that share price to figure out what the employees that were hired in 2016 were offered in terms of stock, and compare your offer.

There is no magic to it. HR is just taking what they think they need to offer to be competitive, assuming a 10-20% annual increase in stock value, and making the offer. The primary reason why you see such high total compensation numbers is that tech stocks have done extremely well recently, which has put employees above their target compensation.

surprised google made you an offer at all. 16 years experience and only slotting in at T4 is a rejection.

This uhh isn't normally the case at Google. There are almost no cases where a new grad will make more in base salary than an existing employee. And relatively few where a new grad will make more in tc than an existing employee, although that does happen.

New hire != new grad

While that's true, experienced offers are influenced by tons of factors (and arent, as a rule, better than current employee offers ). There's not really enough data to draw any conclusion.

That's true, but it's also counterbalanced by strong equity growth over the past few years. A $100k/yr GOOG grant from 2014 is now almost $200k/yr (even ignoring refresh and raises).

Agreed that market rates have gone up significantly in the past 2 years

Reply on news.ycombinator.com