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Comment by vosper | Hacker News Reader

I get Airbnb and Stripe being up there for entry-level engineers, those companies are almost printing money.

But Lyft, haemorrhaging money, is top of the list, and Oracle - the company no-one in the Bay Area or on HN seems to work for, and everyone seems to hate - is 5th? Are there legions of quietly-well-paid Oracle engineers out there just keeping their heads down and getting on with the job? Why isn't Oracle in the more senior lists - they make complex and expensive databases, isn't that something you need to pay a lot of money to get really smart people to work on?

And Netflix, which I thought famously paid very well, only pops up in one tier?

It's more likely I'm misinformed than this list is wrong, but I find this pretty surprising.

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I know a number of people at Oracle, senior engineers mostly. They are not the online forum aficionados. They do their work, get paid go home to their family, plan vacations just like most other folks out of the tech industry. Very industrious and well deservedly compensated, if I do say so myself. Not just Oracle folks either, there are plenty of companies that are not buzzing or on everybody's lips but treat their employees ridiculously well. Look at SAS for example. Some of the happiest and most well compensated people I know.

Thanks, this makes sense to me. It’s a good reminder of the boundaries of my personal bubble. I’ve always figured there must be a bunch of Oracle engineers out there (there just has to be) and wondered why I’d never met one in the Bay. 99% chance this says more about me and my network / social circle than anything else. I’m happy that Oracle engineers are getting paid well and (hopefully!) getting on with enjoying their lives :)

I went to NC State, which SAS recruits heavily from (for obvious reasons).

The people that work at SAS are not the top tier, at all. They have a surprisingly large number of test engineers too. From what I gather the 35 hour a week thing is a myth, and benefits are mediocre compared to top tech companies.

Yeah, the public perception (mostly created by the company) of SAS is very different from reality. The work is mostly boring, the pay is just ok and the lifestyle balance - while better than the Bay Area - is definitely not 35 hours a week on average. Historically the COL in the RDU area has been a major selling point but even that is changing as property prices continue to rise across the Triangle.

There are much better paying companies in RDU now, including Microsoft which is seems to be growing rapidly.

At some point Oracle Cloud (OCI) started poaching engineers from Amazon by paying ungodly money, so much so that there was a running meme on Blind about this.

Netflix only has one tier for all engineers (equivalent to Senior Engineer III).

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