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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience

They want the golden childs. They want 5-10 years experience but still balk at anyone aged over 40. You have to have an "upper level degree" but then again they don't want someone who spent too long in school. You need a breath of multi-disciplinary experience but also know absolutely everything needed to "hit the ground running" in their very narrow field. And of course they must be a good "culture fit". At anyone one moment there are perhaps ten such people on the planet.

I have met some of these people. They do exist. They are essentially walking professional resumes. They look great on the corporate website but rarely accomplish much practical work before they are off to live on a different website at an even higher salary.

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What you're describing are the people making $1M+, you basically need to have had amazing luck of being in the right place at the right time and being involved in projects that turned out to be massively successful and grew quickly. That's how you get those Director or Sr Staff/Principal titles at FAANG.

To make $250k+, honestly you just need to be able to ace a random assortment of Leetcode level Hard problems under pressure. Which is actually a very tangible and unbiased skill. To get in the door of that interview in the first place, now that can be a challenge without the right kind of experience. But it's not impossible to gather that right kind of experience, without an Ivy League education or advanced degree, by gaining experience on the job for several years at a lower tier tech company or startup.

And then for some lucky few, a $200-$300k mid-level engineer salary can grow into a $1M+ salary without any promotions, e.g. every mid-level and above engineer who joined Snapchat two years ago. That's the real holy grail.

I think this was true 5-10 years ago but having worked at FANGISH companies for over a decade I am starting see older devs come into the company, and also diversity in ethnicity and background which is great. I know my current company which has about as difficult an interview as google doesn't really care about your degree, if you can pass the interview and are not a total a*hole you are hired.

Your claims do not match my experience at all. Have you worked at a FAANG?

This is not a surprise. same reasons why the armed forces, west point, and police academies seek younger people: there are many benefits, some of those being:

more malleable

faster learning (studies show working memory falls with age)

not weighed down by family and other obligations

flexible hours due to fewer obligations

no 'baggage'

no old, ingrained habits

Talk to anyone military who has to deal with young cadets/recruits. They all come with baggage. They all have family commitments. I've know of helicopter parents phoning, even appearing at military bases. Beyond the near-normal prescriptions, young people now have health "preferences" to accommodate. Their definition of "flexible hours" is totally one-sided. Tell them to work through a long weekend and they might cry. As for learning, I have read those studies. It may be true but I also see a trend of young people who cannot read and write properly: university graduates who have trouble reading more than a dozen pages without drifting. Any drill sergeant at West Point would rather train a platoon of 40yos than yet anther crop of phone-addicted teenagers.

Maybe at the 600k mark, but the 300k mark is a very wide net. Source: levels.fyi

Anyone have realistic or actual job postings that pay 300-600k vs. something off of levels.fi? I've been in this field for 15 years and have had some good gigs on my resume, not currently looking around but this pay rate is way outside what seems to be the norm.

Unless you're some kind of expert in "big data" / Tensorflow / PyTorch / statistical wizard that is the current hotness, it seems a bit crazy to be making this kind of money for high end cloud / IT work. Or maybe I'm just really underpaid.

I just recently hit the 140k mark after 8 years of experience as a data scientist, and I already feel bafflingly overpaid for what I actually accomplish. I suppose things are different at FAANG companies, but not even my coworkers working out of more expensive locations get paid anywhere near $300k.

That said, the contracting company I work for is getting paid around $330k annualized for me, so maybe when the option to hire me comes up in a few months all I need to do is ask ... aw, who'm I kidding. I don't know what I'd do with $300k a year. Put away half of it and retire early, I guess.

My girlfriend works a lot harder than I do for $45k. There but for the grace of God go I.

I'm sure you already know this, but most consultants take home 30-60% of their bill-out rate (depending on their experience, supervision/regulatory requirements, and overhead expenses).

Business development is almost more important than actually doing the work, and overhead/ancillary costs are higher than many expect.

I am now, but I wasn't before taking this role last month. I was quite surprised to find out that the company doesn't hide the amount from me.

I'm a guy with an undergrad degree, no graduate degrees, and no formal training in big data nor ML (just good old fashioned systems programming) and I'm in/above that range.

The key is to know how to negotiate - and also realizing that half of the negotiation is done before you get to the table. Nobody is going to volunteer paying a SWE $600K, but they can be compelled to do so if you know how.

Happy to share knowledge here - I'm firmly of the opinion that you should be paid the absolute maximum of what your employer will bear. They aren't leaving money on the table in their deals, so neither should you.

Not the guy you replied to but looking for similar advice. What's the best way to get in touch with you?

DM me on Twitter - same handle as my username here.

Seems like about 5 years ago things took off, but if you stick to small job pool areas you will probably see jobs near the same rate as they were back then. I took a SV-based job to get leveraged up, now work remote for same rate, which is like 50% more than I was making 1.5 years ago. Friend of mine just went to another company full remote, I think he 2x'd his total previous income from a job he'd worked at for years (and it was a company that could afford to pay him way more than they did, but advancing without changing jobs is hard).

I think basically any tech company that you've heard of will be willing to pay close to 300k for experience, although remember half of that will generally be stock, and the higher the compensation, the higher percentage will be stock-based.

If you have more than 5 years experience and make less than 200k/year, I suggest you start interviewing.

It seems like a lot of these pay sources use total compensation as their metric, although I'm not 100% certain of that.

If that's the case, though, things start to get real fuzzy talking about salary. If you're at a startup with X stock options, you can start talking about total compensation when the company IPOs. Also, if you work for FAANG, you get RSUs which don't vest until some time, but do count towards total compensation before then.

Take a lot of those numbers in that context and they make more sense.

> Also, if you work for FAANG, you get RSUs which don't vest until some time, but do count towards total compensation before then.

I think the most common vesting cliff is 1 year, which isn't really that long so it's reasonable to count towards total compensation.

It gets fuzzier if the vesting schedule is backloaded (amazon is notorious for this: something like 5% vesting after the first year, and then high turnover as the kicker), but from my understanding you'll often see signing bonuses to make up for this.

Most places I've seen use a 4 year vesting schedule, andd 50% of the RSU's vest in the last two years. So you get maybe 10-15% of your RSU's year one, 20% more the next year, then the rest in the last two years. This forces people to stick with the company likely longer than they would normally would.

Your experience is a complete outlier. The only company that really does that is Amazon. All others in FAANG are 25% per year, paid either monthly or quarterly. Most have even removed the 1 year cliff, meaning you might be vesting stock 30 days in.

As others have pointed out, I don't know any company outside of Amazon that does this. Complete outlier IMO.

This is not common. I’ve only ever heard of Amazon doing this.

Everywhere else I’ve ever worked or had friends work it’s linear.

Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please email hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a repost invite.

I attempted to do this, but Google returned all three (gradually more wordy) messages I attempted to email you.

Yikes—that's extremely weird! On what grounds did they do that?

It looks like there's an email address in your profile now, so I'll try sending a repost invite that way.

I have just over 6 years in the industry and in my current job, my initial total comp was $500+k start. That was 190k salary, 60k signing, $300k stock with a 4-year vesting schedule, 25/25/25/25. My actual take home per year is constantly growing and is well in excess of $300k every year I've been with the company.

So if I understand your point, I agree that the total comp numbers are a bit weird considering how the compensation is structured and a lot of refresh grants do not ever equal your initial grant, but the ability to bring home over $300k, $400k, $500k is not that difficult if you work at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc.

The key to this is to change companies every so often and in doing so, seek higher positions (promote in transition). These 2 things combined easily push your salary up.

That said, I'm at a point in my compensation that I don't really care about extra money (it's nice, don't get me wrong, but outside of spending some additional money on my hobby's, it mostly will just get saved) and this is really empowering because now I am looking for positions that I feel will be rewarding in terms of the project instead of just looking to grow my compensation further.

> I've been in this field for 15 years and have had some good gigs on my resume, not currently looking around but this pay rate is way outside what seems to be the norm.

To be clear, I'm not talking about the norm, I'm talking specifically about FAANG (including bonuses and RSUs, not base pay rate). Also you have to work at the headquarters or maybe NYC to make these comps.

I worked at AWS years ago and we weren't getting paid anywhere near this, total compensation included. AWS is pretty known for being for being "thrifty", but you only got a relatively small amount of RSU's (back even before they were worth thousands of dollars like they are now), and you had to wait most of the 4 years for them to vest, since it was heavily weighted to the back-end of that time period, to entice you to stay with the company.

Agreed on the backloaded RSU schedule, but my understanding is that the signing bonus is supposed to help cover for that.

In any case, I know one person who accepted an offer with an AWS team recently making roughly what levels.fyi suggests (and not a 'golden child' either, someone coming in to learn a new skillset). My understanding is that Amazon is absolutely desperate for engineers right now.

You’re not underpaid but you could make more by switching companies. Some companies simply pay more than others for the same role, level, and responsibilities because they’re engineering driven or better funded or more successful or operate at greater scale/profitability.

Any hot tech startup or FANG company or newish enterprise SaaS (Snowflake) or previous unicorn (AirBnB, Lyft) can pay those numbers total compensation for a SWE with 4+ years experience. Apply to all of them and see what you can get.

L6 at any FAANG or competitive company (Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, etc.) will be approaching 600k.

Job postings never show the pay, don't let that be the holdup keeping you from applying to top companies, that you are in disbelief of levels.fyi. In my experience it's absolutely accurate.

I don't know anything about the ML world, I understand that can go even higher. But a sr software engineer doing backend, full stack, or mobile can indeed make $300-$500k at FAANG.

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