Comment by tylerl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tylerl | Hacker News Reader

>> Rank and file programmers at the top tier tech companies now make $300 to $400 thousand per year.

That is absurdly false.

To be generous, let's pretend he's only talking about FAANG programmers, rather than startups. According to Glassdoor, average compensation for "Software Engineer" positions:

Facebook: 121K Base + 15K Addl = 136K

Apple: 122K Base + 10K Addl = 132K

Amazon: 103K Base + 20K Addl = 123K

Netflix: 121K Base + 20K Addl = 141K

Google: 124K Base + 20K Addl = 144K

These numbers are slightly inflated (by 1k to 20K/yr) because I counted base and additional pay independently, while Glassdoor calculates an average total combined comp, which is always lower; I'm taking the larger numbers to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

Since Google is the highest, let's drill down on them a bit: With 1yr of experience you're looking at 121K+16K (or 125K total claimed, not doing my independent math thing), with 15+ years experience you're looking at 140K+24K (or 161K total claimed).

Again according to Glassdoor, to break 300K at Google on the average you need to be a Senior Staff Software Engineer or higher, which is exceptionally rare -- bit o' Googling suggests they're around 1% of the workforce, give or take.

In other words, the author is literally calling "The 1%" the Rank and File of programmers. Which is an exaggeration, I think.

NB: What Glassdoor doesn't account for is past stock performance; since SV traditionally pays a large chunk of its compensation in restricted stock units, and since the stock in each of these companies has increased by 50% to 150% in the past 4 years, by the time those stocks vest your "additional" compensation may have grown quite a bit due to market performance. But that's not a compensation bubble, it's just the stock market.

Personal experience from GOOG 3 years ago: Staff SWE, 220K base, ~200K stock grant per year (if you ship something really impressive, numbers go way up from there). This is with "exceeds" perf reviews which is a baseline to stay in good graces. That is, in short, why startups have trouble hiring Staff SWEs from Google. From what I heard from my FB peers, comp is better there by about 15-20%, but work is more boring, and there's more politics. Why did I leave, you might ask? From a realization that you can't make all the money in the world, and intense desire to get off the treadmill. And make no mistake, Google puts you on a serious treadmill when you join.

Glassdoor is incredibly outdated and inaccurate. Levels.fyi has much more accurate data. It is still true that only experienced engineers at a handful of top companies and decacorns tend to earn these high levels of compensation, but Glassdoor makes it seem rarer than it is.

The Netflix data for example is just flat out wrong. It only hires experienced engineers, and pays all cash salaries in excess of 300k to all of them.

You want it to be one way... but it's the other way.

-Marlo, from The Wire

As other commenter's have pointed out, the data you're citing is completely wrong and/or woefully out of date. There's always 4 parts of compensation that you need to look at:

-Base

-Target bonus (depending on your level could be 15%-20%+)

-Initial stock grant

-Refresher stock grant (offered each year to protect you from a cliff)

An incoming SWE with 1yr experience at Google would scoff at a total compensation of $125k (this would normally be the bare minimum base salary). Same goes for Facebook. And while Netflix isn't known to hire junior engineers, it is well known in the bay area that they usually pay top of market rates fully in cash; this routinely exceeds $300k and much more so for seasoned engineers.

You are absurdly ignorant. Glassdoor salaries are weighted down by old data which makes them useless. I started out of college 3 years ago at 120k total comp and just switched to a 210k total comp job with a measly 2.5 years of experience and that offer was not even from one of the big 5 tech companies.

Edit: I'll add that all the senior engineers (lifetime position for most people) that I have worked with are indeed making 300,000+ a year.

As others said, those numbers are outdated and low. As a 2018 grad from a non top 10 CS school who had a dozen or so offers (BigCo + startups), I’ve personally seen that the numbers reported on teamblind.com and levels.fyi are very, very accurate.

Crowd sourcing personal data + those from friends, median total comp (base+stock+bonus+refreshers) for a CS undergrad degree was ~160k in high cost of living areas. Competitive students (a few internships at FAANG or similar) get offers in the 180-200k range.

I think those Glassdoor numbers are way off based on all the anonymous surveys and salary sharing threads I've seen. For example, 5+ years of experience will get you 200k+ total comp per year at all of those companies, with many offers in the 3-400 range.

The 1% considers themselves to be rank and file, and everyone else needs to get bootstraps. Just like they did.

It's a pretty common conception within industries with high levels of pay disparity.

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