Tech compensation in 2021
jacobian.org
jacobian.org
I live about 40 miles outside of Boston.
Edit: Looking at levels.fyi for Boston that actually puts me above the median[1]. Why the heck is Boston so low compared to other markets?
Edit 2: Boston, MA and Denver, CO on Levels.fyi are both a median $159k but due to cost of living, that $159k in Denver is the same as $211k in Boston. I.e. adjusted for the cost of living, Denver pays 25% better.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Greater-Bo...
why? i don’t know, it’s definitely not any easier work. but it’s reflected in the comp
If you use the "Robert Half" site[1] from the original article, it says Boston is +34% compared to US baseline (vs SF's +42%, NYC's +40.5%) which roughly lines up.
[0] Google: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi... vs https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
[1] https://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guide/specialization/techn...
But either way, not everyone can work for FAANG, so I think looking at the overall picture is fair.
I'm pretty confident even with 20 years of experience and I can't even get a FAANG interview (let alone pass it), I'm just not their type.
The levels.fyi median seems to be on total comp.
The Robert Half data seems more likely to be accurate.
If you want one, I've never had the impression that getting an interview was the hard part. I participated in Google Code Jam maybe 9 years ago, passed either 0 or 1 rounds (there's a "qualification round" which I definitely passed, and later a "round 1" which I have a feeling I probably didn't pass), and every so often they offer me an interview unprompted because of that.
With that said, I think it is because at the time the Boston office was mostly specialists and I'm a generalist. I'm also not from a top 10 school in a city filled with top-10 schools which didn't help, I'm sure.
But that was years ago. Maybe I'd have better luck these days.
People say this a lot, but Google is pretty explicit that they decide whether to hire you first, and only then consider where they might put you.
I did mediocre on the interviews, they were undecided on whether to hire me or not. They sent in a take home problem. I only spent a few hours on it, but easily could’ve spent weeks perfecting the solution.
Anyways, if I had 1) prepared for the interviews and 2) spent the entire weekend on the take home project, I probably would’ve passed.
And even though I didn’t get the offer, they still ping me about every six months to see if I want to apply again.
Just try applying and see what happens!
there's a comment like this in every single thread like this. and the recommendation is always the same: grind LC for however long you need in order to be comfortable solving hard problems cleanly in 35-45 minutes and then collect your pay bump. the fact that the
1. data
2. complaint
3. recommendation
crop up with 100% perfect regularity means that it's the solution that simply isn't palatable to all of the people that express the complaint. to which i say: what exactly are you expecting to give among these three things?
Just the fact "grind Leet Code" is a recommendation to someone who's most recent job title was CTO and has written two books may be a sign these interviews are broken.
But point taken, I'm sure if I studied specifically for interviews I could get those jobs. But the fact remains, a vast majority of people don't work for FAANG and even the "person unwilling to work for FAANG" example is higher salary than I have ever seen.
My point was actually that the article and ones like this seem well research but don't match the reality. For example, I recently interviewed at a fortune 100 company for a Director position and it was what this article says is "non-FAANG staff engineer" salary.
Isn't it more that they match the reality, but the reality only for a relatively small section of a bimodal (or more) distribution?
Who are we? Which salaries?
Starting salaries for lawyers are one of the most famous examples of a bimodal distribution you can find. Salaries across the country generally are less bimodal than that. But salaries shouldn't be modeled as a normal distribution in any event. They skew high very easily, and they can never skew low.
So assuming Levels.fyi is accurate (their numbers are $20k more than salary.com which is more accurate in my opinion): my point was that I am average, right in the middle. But this article is telling me (and by extension, since I am at the mean, 50% of software engineers) are extremely underpaid.
And maybe on a nation wide scale that includes non-Boston metros, I am. But for Boston... I'm not over or under. I'm right in the middle.
Basically based on my research I think this article is for a very niche group at the top 25% of pay ranges and is not accurate or relevant to 75%+ of software developers (numbers are ballpark).
Leetcode is relevant to getting the money though. It may be the case that inexperienced new hires with Leetcode proficiency make significantly more money than CTOs in the positions you're considering.
But the jobs you'd get with leetcode would pay twice your current expected liquid compensation at least (assuming 0 stock growth) for your experience level. If you don't want those then fine, but then you can't complain about threads like this either.
Google has jobs in Boston, I bet there are many other tech companies paying similar as well. Pay at these varies by location, but not more than around 10% within USA, so it isn't like it is your locations fault, if you worked at these companies you'd be earning very close to the same you'd earn in silicon valley.
Not everyone works for FAANG.
Also, leet code is not relevant because the questions asked at that level are typically not algorithms. I passed the leet code stage in my career 10 years ago. Questions I get asked are typically around architecture, distributed systems, scaling, etc.
So what you are saying is someone who can answer the leet code questions easily (and has been able to for a decade) AND is an expert architect, should get paid less than someone who can only do leet code?
Top companies still ask algorithms at these levels and fail people at these levels if they don't perform at least as well as juniors. If you are L6 at Google you are looking at liquid compensation around $500k a year, and they still require mostly leetcode questions. Of course you wont get considered for those positions without a ton of experience, but to get them you have to do your algorithm homework.
> should get paid less
Not should, will. I didn't make any claims to what things should look like, I am talking about what the market looks like now. Your ability to do algorithms is more important for your compensation than your ability as an architect or as a leader except for extreme cases where you start to get into higher management positions at big companies.
Edit: And if you are great at algorithms as you say, but doesn't leverage that skill to get higher pay then that has the same effect on your compensation as not knowing algorithms. It is simple. So your insistence on only looking for jobs that doesn't test algorithms is probably the reason your salary didn't balloon as you'd expect.
Saying questions asked at that level are not about algorithms was based on my non-FAANG experience. I shouldn't have been so absolute.
But with that said, to back up and restate where I was trying to get. What I was trying to say is that algorithms are table stakes, you should absolutely know them at a senior level but the actually questions you should be being asked should be more advanced than that.
In all SV companies coding interviews are strictly required at interviews at M1/M2 level (up to 60-80 reports) and required at some companies at D1 level (150 reports). CTO at start up with 20-30 reports is M1 and will have to do coding 100% and failing coding interview is automatic no hire.
>>..someone who can answer the leet code questions easily (and has been able to for a decade)...
If you are a CTO chances are you have not been practicing LC. Even if you were able to do LC style questions a decade ago, without practice you are very likely to struggle with them. So don't assume just because you are CTO / architect you can do LC style questions. The questions have been becoming progressively harder each year. It is a sad reality, our industry does not decide compensation based on experience, knowledge and actual skill used on the job. If you want to maximize your compensation you have to do LC style questions. Even non FAANG companies ask LC style questions these days.
Though, with that said, I have been on the interviewer side a lot and need to know some of them well enough to know if the candidate knows their stuff. So I'm not completely rusty. And as CTO I would often read through what other companies are asking in interviews to make sure what I'm asking is in line.
My objection was the implication that not crunching Leet Code problems was the sole reason for the low compensation.
But you are right. I should not assume because at one point I knew all those algorithms that I can still explain them under pressure of an interview.
It's true that at the staff interviews i just did, LC was not required but at the staff interviews i'm about to do they will be.
As an interviewer (granted not at FAANG) I see no value in you just proving you did an algorithm on Leet Code. You could just be passing it through rote learning. I want to make sure you understand it. Otherwise I'm just wasting your time. But that's just my interview style, I know bigger companies may be different.
OK, I agree that's definitely something the candidate should be able to do. I'm just trying to point out to anyone reading that it won't be sufficient to explain an algorithm. You have to actually write code to solve a given problem. That's not the same as regurgitating code you remember from leetcode, so please don't think that. You have to apply techniques that you've learned. It's not easy, and it's not intellectually shallow.
This comment and those further down (particularly doubting the data) suggest that you're experiencing strong cognitive dissonance. There are, I'm sure, hundreds of engineers on HN that can testify to exactly how much FAANG pays and in which metro and how little experience they had (not including LC) before they started.
The claim that hiring is broken has been constantly repeated since ~2010 and yet all of these companies somehow, despite hiring all of the wrong non-CTO people, are still alive and are in fact thriving. Like I said: given how consistently these mantras are chanted I'm just curious what you're expecting to have changed since the last time a post like this was made (you did say "every time I see..." so you've certainly seen many). It's a little like that episode of parks and rec with the reasonabilists where they keep predicting and amending the date of the end of the world.
Don't take this the wrong way, but, having helped several people through the interview loop at FAANG, my experience is that it is frequently the ones that see themselves as above grinding LC, that have the hardest time making it all the way through. And I don't mean wrt wrestling with how tricky some LC problems are (most everyone struggles with eg DP) but with marshalling the discipline and patience to actually do enough to do well during the interview.
It has been said before but my personal experience reflects this: it is of absolutely no surprise to absolutely anyone that those that can grind LC fare much better once on the inside and facing the sheer abyss of complexity of FAANG systems.
My comment was not that I don't need to know algorithms it was that at a senior level the questions should be far more advanced than what leet code has.
I'm a little amazed that so many people in these comments assume I don't know algorithms.
- I graduated college right before the great recession and that effected my career starting rates
- I stayed at a company I knew was under paying me for far too long (because I had a lot of stock options and I valued them too highly)
If either of those two things were different I'd probably be making a lot more. But my point was, regardless, I am making the mean salary for my region and that mean is not what is represented in this article.
Hey just a theory. I am probably wrong.
So yes, actually... in hind sight I should have gotten my Masters degree instead of entering the workforce.
Edit: That job I stayed at too long... only reason I took it in the first place was because the recession left me almost no choices. No one was hiring in Boston. The job boards were empty for someone right out of college.
the article didn't say it was representing the mean salary though, probably the salary they are representing is the average - so there are a few high earning outliers pulling that number way up.
Seniors (>=L5) go through a "pirate" round that's system design/arch in addition to the "ninja" round. But you're a CTO so you should be able to ace that (after handily passing ninja since you know all the algorithms). So what exactly are you waiting for? I mean like do you want a referral? I'd be glad to make a quick 5k for referring you since you're so confident that you're good enough.
I probably will start applying if my new company doesn't make it.
Though a lot of me wonders why I am working for no pay at my own company when it sounds like I can make enough to retire being an individual contributor. I do believe in my idea though and want to see it through.
I have friends at just about every one of the FAANG companies so a refferal's not the issue.
Edit: When I say way too long... I mean 10+ years.
Edit 2 because I just realized how it could have sounded: I didn't start a company then give myself the CTO title. I was CTO at my previous job (the one I was at 10+ years).
You're wrong. A previous team built a simple data processing pipeline for a big customer. The throughput is single digit per second. The customer was furious as they would have wait for days to get their data in. The reason is the team was not aware that their graph building and traversal algorithms are O(n^2), and they didn't understand how to distribute their processing logic. My team came in, fixed the algorithms with merely dozens of lines, and improved the throughput by more than 200 times in a matter of days. If you build large backend for data intensive systems, which pretty much every tech company needs, you will need algorithms and data structures. Probabilistic data structures? Check. Manually optimizing popular machine learning algorithms? Check. Rolling out our own implementation of graphs, trees, vector similarity search algorithms and indices, parallelization algorithms, cache oblivious data structures? Check, check, and check. You don't have to use those techniques, but your value to your projects will increase exponentially if you push the boundary.
I said algorithms are table stakes (a poker term for something you need to know just to play at the table). To continue the analogy, sounds like whoever designed that system didn't have enough to buy into the table.
> If you build large backend for data intensive systems
I have. Many.
Depends on how extensive your processing is of course.
There is little correlation between the quality of your tech stack and profitability.
You could say that means hiring isn’t broken, but only from the perspective of the company.
Hire me inflated ego without any tests, of course. God forbids I have to do anything to get a job that will put me in a bracket of earning more than 99.99% people in this world.
Another thing about these threads is that the hundreds of people making the big bucks are always the ones happy to confirm these numbers, and the (hundreds? thousands? who knows?) making small bucks just silently lurk and think to themselves, "I'm doing something wrong." So you get selection bias. Then one person actually has the gall to post "I'm making less, clearly doing something wrong" and he gets tons of responses like "You're underpaid, brah, go get another job!" It's just not a helpful response.
I say this as one of the lurkers who is tired of pointing out that many of us don't make these so-called average salaries, because the response is always the same: "Dude, it's data--can't argue with that. Leetcode and/or try a different company" (as if we haven't done that already).
I have literally zero idea what are you're trying to express. There's no selection bias if everyone is FAANG is very well payed and everyone outside is not.
But if you really want to see something vaguely like that then go on blind and look for posts like "I'm making 650 as an E6 where should I go from here", the idea of which I'm sure just further confounds you but I'm sorry the data is very accurate (eg inside FB/Google/AMZN there's a group that openly discusses return offers for interns and it's always within a few percent of what is on the public side).
I don't see how there couldn't be sampling bias. Salary is a sensitive topic, and people who are making on the high range (within FAANG or outside of it) are going to be more likely to want to post about it and answer surveys about it than people in the low range. HN and Blind are obviously not random sampling. levels.fyi claims to use self-reported offer letters AND reach out directly to compensation folks at companies, which is better. But are these individual companies sharing unbiased data?
When one encounters average numbers that are a little higher than their reality, it's disappointing but believable. When one encounters average numbers that just look just crazy, one begins to ask "am I really this much of an outlier or should I suspect methodology/bias?"
Well, I'm sorry you have to go through the same ropes that we peasants do, you highness.
If I was hiring for a tech position and had to choose between an engineer with a few years of experience and strong analytical skills proven through coding & system design interviews, and a person who prides themselves on 10 years as a CTO at a company I've never heard of and two book authorships, I'd strongly lean towards the former.
I expect a promotion and ~20% increase next cycle. Interview was no leet code (I’m terrible at it!) - my strategy was to interview at public companies with levels on levels.fyi but not FAANG
I've heard the same about Google and Netflix
I think they're permanently WFH flexible but that's very different from remote (I don't have to move to take a job that's remote)
Which is more difficult to do for people who have a lot of non-work commitments, like say raising a family. So this method of hiring introduces some biases. Not that I have a solution.
With that said I am in those search results (I checked) :-P if anyone wants to go through 63,000 people, be my guest. Everyone needs a hobby :)
But it's not for everyone. Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year? Do you enjoy what you do and the people that you work with? If so, I don't think there should be any shame in staying where you are. Don't feel like you have to chase every last dollar.
I just want to show that not everyone making > 200k switches companies every 2 years trying to minmax.
You left after the 4 year cliff. That’s hardly an argument against keeping the same or higher TC though.
So as far as general advice goes, it makes sense to recommend trying to get those FAANG jobs if you can.
The marginal value of a good software engineer is very high when there is good cash flow. It's difficult to increase cash flow without engaging in some software activity. Organizations tend to find that growing a large software organization is counterproductive to effective development vs. growing a better software organization.
This isn't true. Google allows you to "scale" your work (eg 80% pay for 80% time).
Not sure if your manager is forced to give you that option but it didn't seem to be hard to get at least. I think by default such requests gets accepted and your manager would need to give a good reason why you couldn't work part time.
Well.. sort of. My partner was doing 80% for 80% at goog for many years, which sounds like a good deal. Except the demands were more like 40-50 hours/week, with management always saying that full-timers were working way more than 50 hours, so at 80% salary you better be working 40-50hrs/wk.
In Europe such scaling is generally guaranteed by law, and I don’t think any big company would be stupid enough to be caught cheating. And based solely on anecdata I think at least as many people are “phoning it in” at Google as at any other company regardless of salary.
Hope it worked out for your partner. Being exploited with lots of privilege is still being exploited.
[0]: Google famously used to let workers spend 20% of their time working on anything they wanted (for the company’s benefit) but bad managers, which turned out to be most managers, did not reduce the load of “normal” work, so it became known as 120% time.
[edit] past tense, they may no longer work there
and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k
i'd say money is not a permission for you to do bad things, and it should not make you fell better about bad things you did (and continue to do) just by giving some of the money away.
There's a broader spectrum to donation than just donating to the poor.
In ten years, you will have saved more than Oskar Schindler did during the entire Holocaust.
But of course you have taken one path to the Trolley problem and Schindler (who joined the Nazi party) has taken the other. Now it remains to be seen whether history remembers Oskar Schindler the Nazi Party member or user vincnetas who avoided FAANG as the more ethical.
this is tangential to slavery where slave owners where treating their slaves very well, but fundamentally they still were slavers.
To put an example with Open Source, Amazon is pretty bad considered, while e.g. Red Hat is "one of the best".
But I don't mean those extremes, I mean more mundane companies. Let's compare say Apple (neutral-ish?) and Stripe (neutral-to-slightly positive) (note: about Open Source!!). What do you think would have better impact in the OSS ecosystem, to work at Apple for $300k and donating $125k to open source projects, or to work at Stripe getting paid $175k and not donate anything?
Everyone knows that socially paid things are wrong, and that everything should be private.
No one wants public fire departments, schools, legal systems, police, etc etc. Only socialist countries do this.
Where I live, we have private fire departments because the government one's are not maintained and the ambulances are being used as taxis.
Socialism + corruption (and that the only kind we get) is way worse than you can imagine. Especially for the poor.
Can imagine still don’t see it. Communism + corruption, sure.
Now since I'm not native I think I might have explained myself wrong; see sibling comment (to yours) I made clarifying what I meant.
X harm + Y good > X harm + 0 good
- with fewer people interested in working at Evil Corp, salaries there will trend up and they may not be able to grow as much as a consequence.
- if the most skilled people don't want to work at Evil Corp, that also makes it harder to do evil.
I really hope people aren't using oversimplified analysis to justify working on evil stuff.
That’s not actually how it works. Maybe it’s 90% true, but the 10% matters, even if it is difficult to evaluate.
What is the impact of a position at Evil Corp staying open for 6 months longer than it would have otherwise if GP doesn’t take the job? I don’t know, that is a difficult question. But I know it isn’t zero impact.
Our actions matter.
But then you just have more stress at work, and you just can't quit that easily bc there arent so many jobs that pay as much as this one...
Just to provide the other side of this general advice, that is really everywhere, but rarely delivers in regards to happiness.
This absolutely isn't a given. Lifestyle inflation to the extreme is in one's own hands first and foremost. Which is the most audacious part in this whole topic: yes your CoL is likely to be high if you earn such a giant income, but you are given options the majority of the west, let alone the world, will never have. As long as the percentage of one's income spent is roughly similar across all.
yes, but most people do that lifestyle inflation - by most I'm going to go with 90+ percent
And I've never seen anything close to 5.9% for COL from any company. Most companies don't give that even for top performers. I don't think companies are prepared to give 5.9% COL, most companies are already so short sighted they would rather lose their entire engineering department instead of give raises to keep up with the market rate (even though they would be willing to pay that market rate when hiring a replacement). That kind of short sighted thinking simply does not allow a massive COL increase, no matter how much data is out there.
Some companies, some products, some teams, some (lower) level of stress, some amount of learning you are getting, some work/life flexibility - at some (temporary?) point in your life - might make a lot of sense to be considered together with the $ you get paid. I am all up for maximizing what you get out of your job, but you might want to optimize for multiple factors, not just salary.
Also, this discussion is very centered on yearly comp. It’s good practice to ask yourself how risk prone you are? That early stage startup equity comp might turn into much more than you will ever get paid at a large established company.
So when you are maximizing, ask yourself over what time horizon you want to maximize? One year?Three? Five? Ten years? It’s rare to get truly great things instantly.
Most people can't live comfortably while holding a full-time job, esp. a demanding one. The job just eats too much time and energy.
The exceptions are people with very high energy levels and people for whom the job is their passion (but even for them, it's usually temporary - passions change over the duration of one's life).
I made $55k 10 years ago, and just took a pay cut from $225k to $160k in a much lower cost of living area. I've had jobs with consistent $25-50k yearly cash bonuses, where some folks got as much as $250k of bonus in a year. And then options and RSUs are just the icing on the cake. Big lumbering public company? Starts at 100k a year worth of RSUs. Early stage at a unicorn? Easily $1M a year.
I've mostly worked at pre-IPO startups you've heard of -- forget FAANG.
East coast salaries a decade ago outside of New York were abysmal compared to their west coast counterparts, and still are for the most part, but due to the rapid growth of remote work, things are improving greatly.
Comparison is the thief of joy.
Do your job.
If I were you, strictly from a financial point of view, I'd probably test the market to see what offers I get.
There are a few home grown publicly traded Boston employers such as HubSpot, and to a lesser extent Wayfair which pay competitively. However there are also large presences from Salesforce, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, FB, Spotify and others who pay more competitively.
I’m extremely mobile. Not like permanently move mobile. But I’ll take contracting work that require me to move to NY or London or whatever. Very job bumps my salary up. If I have to switch continents I will.
Home is always my low cost of living place, and in practice I spend the majority of time there.
I know most people aren’t like this. And most people don’t have spouses who tolerate this.
My wife is either very understanding, or maybe she just doesn’t like me that much.
But if I’m like, honey, I have to move to Austin a for six months, she’s like “Ok, just be home for Thanksgiving.”
Of course, it could be worth it! That’s for you to decide.
Congrats on making an income I could have only dreamed of as a college kid.
I've made very little money and FAANG-like money in my career. It has nothing to do with the difficulty of the work, the impact, or the hiring process. It's purely how badly the company wants "top" talent and the extent to which they want to / have to use money as a magnet.
From my experience no company founded in Boston pays top end wages. This job search I only considered big tech side offices in Boston and remote roles for Silicon Valley companies.
My recommendation: find some data points on Levels.fyi that match your experience/level, location, and desired TC. If there’s a bunch of data points, then it’s possible. Interview with every employer listed in these data points, and don’t take a job if it’s less than your desired TC. The market is hot and you are in control.
Boston is a joke. Growing up here my whole life I thought we were right behind SV. Boy was I wrong. Seattle, NYC, and Austin have all eclipsed Boston as a tech hub. It’s embarrassing.
Apply for remote. Now you’re exposed to companies based in SV. This is the time to do it - The Great Resignation has made jobs plentiful with unreal comp.
Also study up. The best positions are the hardest to get into. Give yourself 3 months to study and these opportunities will be yours for the taking. You clearly have the skills, you just need to put yourself out there.
In short, this year i'll probably make around 18k Euros, in total.
I guess that just goes to show how different the situation is depending on where you live and where you're employed.
Do European companies generate that much less revenue? Or are labor unions in Europe just that much less effective at bargaining? Or is productivity that much lower in Europe? (I'm not sold on any of these)
Europe also suffers from a brain drain to the US (and Canada to a smaller proportion). Many of Europe's best and brightest software engineers have already emigrated to the US, leaving behind the less productive ones.
This seems backwards to me. A society with higher taxes typically has better social safety nets, better infrastructure, less corruption, etc. Higher-tax societies incentivize risk-taking, not the other way around, especially for "ambitious individuals". When there is more structure and support around, more people are able to take a leap.
If you are running business, your loses are opportunity costs. Eg. you have already 100k EUR yearly salary and you decide to try running startup. If it fails after 5 years, so you didn't get any money from it (eg. you had to paid debts at the end), you probably lost 500k EUR in opportunity cost.
Progressive taxes incentivize risk taking in lower and lower-middle class, because you are protected from "total failure", but disincentivize risk taking for upper-middle and upper class, because expected rate of return is lower.
At the end of the day, there is no single "right way" to run a state. You have to make tradeoffs, decide what you value more and what you value less.
https://ceoworld.biz/2021/01/03/worlds-most-entrepreneurial-...
If you’re financially independent or wealthy enough to be (independently) doing a startup or taking on a business venture, it’s a rounding error in the books.
And billionaires are much more scarce outside of US (and those who exist have better chances investing in other fields).
That's why SV salaries for developers are so crazy.
Your point still stands though.
Whereas in Europe everything pretty much works as it should, so why rock the boat??
The GDP of Germany and France are both below where they were in 1995 inflation adjusted (and that was true even before Covid hit). Britain's economy is where it was in 1998. Italy is far below where it was 30 years ago ($2.1t today; $1.32t in 1992, which is $2.58t inflation adjusted). Spain is where it was in 1992. Russia's economy hasn't expanded in 13 years; the Netherlands is in the same boat as Russia, no expansion since 2007-2008. Belgium's economy hasn't moved since 1995. Sweden's economy has grown by about 10% in nearly 30 years (not per year, total; $284b in 1992, which is $564b inflation adjusted; their present GDP is $625b). Austria has similarly seen economic stagnation for nearly a generation. Finland was at $141b in 1990 ($303b adjusted), they're at $300b now. And so on.
If Europe weren't disastrously broken, they wouldn't be suffering such intense and widespread economic stagnation. How long can that stagnation continue before something very bad happens (eg the social safety nets start to melt, as costs climb with demographic aging and there's no economic growth to offset it; growth doesn't get easier as the worker demographics erode)?
While Europe has been asleep for 30 years, China went and became a superpower with an economy larger than the whole of the EU, starting from $426b circa 1992.
In US dollars. You can't use USD inflation numbers for other countries, Euro inflated much less than US dollars in these years. The effect you see where Europe has stagnated given USD levels of inflation is just the effect of USD currently being a bubble. If you use their internal inflation numbers then the economies of Europe are growing just fine.
A lot of US economy is not real. A lot of the GDP is based on financial services, real estate, and stocks (including tech), which are pure bubble money. A lot of the economy is also based on health care, which basically doesn't exist is a decent country with public services. The other part is "defense", which means they threat the rest of the world into growing their economy.
Interesting stats nonetheless, I wasn't aware that Europe had stagnated so much. Your stats seem a little off; Most of the stagnation seems to have occurred from the GFC onwards, rather than before (using GDP per capita numbers)
No, they aren't. German real (=inflation adjusted) GDP and real GDP per capita are much higher than in 1995.
(real GDP) https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp (real GDP per capita) https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-per-capita
France looks similar.
I don't know where you got your numbers, or if you did something like take the nominal GDP in USD and then adjust using the US CPI.
Random European engineers have few opportunities to take risks at all. It is not a question about attitude.
Of course not, it is just mind numbing regulation coupled with systematic risk aversion. Many SV startups would never have gained traction starting over from Europe, neither financially nor for large-scale deployment authorisation.
It's also exceptionally difficult and time consuming to rapidly scale through the EU with its many local economies/languages/cultures, versus the giant and quasi homogenous US market. And you get Canada pretty much as a freebie with the US market. That's $24.x trillion in economy in just two markets (nearly 50% larger than the EU). By the time you slog your way through a bunch of the EU markets, you'll find that a US venture capital funded competitor is already several times larger and turning its attention to your home market/s (putting you on the defensive, while they've locked up the lucrative US market and can pummel you endlessly with the financial resevoir that comes with that).
If you're in a smaller nation in the EU, the ideal is to go right after the US market first as a springboard (assuming the product/service is globally useful and will benefit from grabbing the US market). That's especially true if you're early and have an opportunity to lead the US market.
It must be said that large scale, extreme/first-of-a-kind tests are simply not possible over here: not in the energy sector, not with autonomous AI deployment, not using any sort of active biochemicals/pharma, not as hostile moves in the fintech or the information sectors. This simply makes innovation much slower and pretty bureaucratic, but we cannot say there is no innovation at all, it generally being funded in the end under one of the numerous EU grants.
Most of Europe's engineers work in large corporations that were created ages ago, and subsisted on government procurement of infrastructure, defence, or as subcontractors/staffing agencies to industry. And government spending in Europe has also been much tighter than USA.
Most "new" media/tech companies are founded as "spin-offs" from older media companies/publishers/telcos/banks. The engineering in Europe's early web efforts was considered as important as copy-machine technicians. This is changing, but the attitude is still deeply ingrained: people are either decision makers or "technicians".
You need to back this up with something better than anecdotal evidence - FWIW I've worked with plenty of world class American engineers who don't live in the US
That this is happening between Europe and US is beyond clear: European engineers often emigrate to US, but American engineers emigrate much more rarely to Europe.
The implication is unproven.
Furthermore, most FAANGs dodge most taxes and have offices everywhere including in Europe, making your point moot.
> Labor productivity is also lower in Europe.
That has to do with US geopolitical influence. (and army).
> Finally, Europe still has a culture where software engineers, cloud architects/products/managers/etc. are viewed as code monkeys and the people who really matter in a corporation are the finance people and upper level executives.
That depends on the company. Again, there are european companies in US and US companies in EU... and yet the salaries are in no way aligned.
> Europe also suffers from a brain drain to the US (and Canada to a smaller proportion). Many of Europe's best and brightest software engineers have already emigrated to the US, leaving behind the less productive ones.
Analysis on most technical or important FOSS projects prove otherwise, with EU having the brightest.
Such as? All of the prominent Europeans I can think of live in the United States: Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido van Rossum, etc.
You know, i feel like this is probably a bit misleading, at least because of how we measure productivity:
> Labor productivity measures the hourly output of a country's economy. Specifically, it charts the amount of real gross domestic product (GDP) produced by an hour of labor.
(from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/labor-productivity.asp)
Whereas i'd like to see something along the lines of:
> The ratio of hours needed to develop features X, Y and Z, as median values based on the output of all the companies within the industry in said country, categorized by tech stacks, the education/experience of employees etc.
That'd let you have a controlled environment (same features, categorized by stack), as well as get insights based on how the different groups (students, younger developers, more experienced developers) compare in different countries, possibly as a proxy for the quality of education and how much companies invest in skill development.
If we don't do that, our productivity simply describes a hourly measure of GDP, which feels wrong, at least as far as semantics and the language aspects are concerned.
Of course, the above suggestion also isn't realistic, because there have been attempts to formalize estimation (for example, COCOMO 2), but even those didn't work out.
Again, there are plenty of US tech companies in Eastern Europe.
>In order to find out, we looked at each country’s average score across all domains
So it's taking the average of the country, not really looking at the best individual programmers. Considering the US had more entrants than China(which has 3x the population of the US), my guess is that there are many more mediocre devs from the US participating, which brings the average down.
The other difference is that smaller addressable market also means fewer problems to solve and thus fewer companies.
As an example, engineers in China, India and Indonesia are making way more that $18k these days because there are many problems to solve, many more companies competing for the same engineers.
Anecdotally, software companies that pay the best tend to go the opposite direction: they hire people that are good at self directing and self motivating, which can remove entire layers of indirection.
Unrelated: A friend of mine had a well established Vodka factory in Crimea/Ukraine randomly taken over by some goons. Sometimes people worry, for good reason or not.
If you are in EU, the offices are likely going to be in western Europe or Switzerland or UK - larger addressable markets.
Ah yes, the famously powerful US software engineer's union.
In software, sure, but to say there barely are any union jobs in the US currently is wildly inaccurate.
There are estimated to be 4.4 million software developers employed in the U.S.[1] and about 150 million total jobs[2], so about 3% of employed persons in the U.S. are software developers.
About 11% of U.S. workers are union members[3], so there are more than 3 times as many union members as professional developers in the U.S.
[1] https://dqydj.com/number-of-developers-in-america-and-per-st...
1: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/best-union-jobs-in-america...
In EU, traditionally, business people are paid much more than technical personnel. Prominent engineers are valued, but only to some extent. For example, mechanical engineer salaries in top German corporations are not that high, and they are bringing in a lot of value.
Let's not forget most FAANG founders were computer scientists, plus there's a shortage top talent. Electrical engineer salaries at Intel, AMD or ARM are, as far as I know, nothing to call home about.
With that said, we are starting to see some IT positions with really nice compensations. Mostly in CH, NL, DK and UK as far as I can tell.
I'm surviving, but I make way less than a kid flipping burgers in the US. But the good news is I'm alive and well and happy :) And it will get worked out in time.
I'm super happy with my life and it keeps getting better but when I hear first worlders, or even affluent third worlders, talk about money it sounds so crazy :3 Hearing someone say 100k a year is 'enough for a family', when working families where I am now get by decently on 300 MXN a day lol.
Perspective is everything. Just gotta keep working hard! If you ever need a freelancer who's even cheaper than Eastern Europeans I'm here for you <3
Things are similar in some other Eastern European countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(nomi...
(of course, the values vary based on whether you care about the disposable income, or not)
Unions don't want "privileged" engineers to earn much more than average office worker.
1. A business will pay the least they can to hire someone, so salary really depends on the excess availability of potential employees - if there is an excess of developers then wages remain low. The business owners sensibly wish to keep the excess profits (why share?).
2. Businesses have a figure for what a standard developer is worth, and that figure is disconnected from the value of that person to the business. I have repeatedly seen businesses lose extremely profitable employees because the business decision makers wouldn’t pay someone enough more than a “normal” salary for their position.
3. There are a lot of NZ software businesses that are simply not that profitable and they don’t generate the excess profits necessary to pay high wages. Not that many companies earn enough to pay SV wages.
4. I suspect that a lot of super-talented people move to SV, and the wages there are skewed by the excess talent (excess talent is not so common elsewhere?). I have personally seen some extremely talented developers leave my town for overseas for higher wages, because the talented have the best opportunity to do so.
Probably not, from comments I've seen here, it takes an awful lot of work to make a legal business. In the US, it takes minutes to incorporate, and even less time if you don't care to incorporate and just want to file a Doing Business As to use a separate name. Business banking doesn't take a lot to get going either. If you live in California, your employer probably can't stop you from quitting to start a competitor (as long as you don't take IP with you)
It depends on the country and the government there, i'd say, as well as how technologically advanced they are. Here in Latvia, it's actually not too hard - you just need to fill out a couple of forms, take care of the starting capital and payments and then you'll be registered as a company. In addition, there are various types of companies, to support small startups as well: https://www.ur.gov.lv/en/register/
That said, i believe that taxes and such are a tad overcomplicated in most countries, though there probably are a few good arguments against making most of the bureaucracy a bunch of online forms with prepopulated data, with which i may or may not agree.
Of course, for many, other aspects of actually running a company are what cause difficulty - everything from doing sales to marketing, as opposed to just writing code and architecting technical solutions.
No, but not because it's supposedly difficult to incorporate; I did this once and it only took filling a one page form, waiting 10 minutes in queue and paying 20€ with a bank card.
It's because instead of programming then time would be frittered away with customer acquisition and asshole management.
1) Some of the difference is structural. Upper middle class gets a larger share of the wealth in the US than in most European countries. An American professional in any field is paid more relative to the median income than in Europe.
2) International comparisons are often misleading. This is true even if you adjust the numbers for purchasing power and structural differences (such as benefits/taxes paid on top of the nominal salary). For middle class and above, the marginal cost of employment is higher in the US than in Europe, because you are expected to contribute more towards healthcare / education / childcare / retirement / unemployment / parental leave / etc from your personal income. An American employer has to pay a larger fraction of those costs directly to their employees, while an European employer can rely more on other taxpayers.
The second point sets American middle class salaries higher relative to GDP per capita than in Europe, while the first point sets upper middle class salaries higher relative to middle class salaries.
In a truly open market, tech salaries would converge globally, but there are currently far too many legal and cultural obstacles for that.
https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
Upwork itself oftentimes feels like a race to the bottom, but i had some interesting projects as well: everything from web development (though WordPress stuff can be frustrating), to things like stock visualization, programming for video games, some physics simulations etc.
Those were all far more interesting than the CRUDs that the company developed, though thankfully i also picked up things like CI/CD, unit testing, integration testing and test automation in general, as well as many other things related both to development and DevOps.
As far as finances go, working for an European company abroad would probably be the wise thing to do, or looking for a local company that pays better, as many suggest most developers should do every X years.
It really depends on job quality as well.
Considering how frugal you are, you have plenty of time to find a better gig.
Pure local companies are not going to pay much better though (and Latvian state and local government gigs are even less).
So one option is to move to one of the outsourcing companies or even better to a smaller company dealing with western clients.
That's pretty much what most (if not almost all) of ukrainian tech is doing. And coupled with low CoL and widely abused tax loopholes, they are making bank, netting comparable money to 6 figure jobs in the west. So I'm just saying that eastern europe == poorly paid is a misconception.
Definitely, I know in many parts of EU it's common to discuss net (specially when talking about monthly salaries) but in an English article targeted at the international community you'd be way better off sharing the gross, which is the expected way.
I'm from Estonia (immediate neighbor of Latvia with a similar history) and the statistics here [1] paint a healthier picture. The median software developer salary in Estonia for Q2 2021 was 3300€/month (39600€/year), with the average being even higher (3460€/41520€). These are national level statistics, so the numbers are even higher if you work for one of the local unicorns or Microsoft.
You should probably start demanding more money. Not US levels of compensation, but at least figure out the local Latvian median for software developers and aim for that to start with.
--
[1] Search for "Software developer" at https://palgad.stat.ee/en
Ok but aren't the expectations for a Staff+ way higher at FAANG than at non-FAANG? Or we assume Chris already got the offer from FAANG for a Staff+ role and so it's just a personal choice? Those articles and discussions about salary always assume everybody is able to work at FAANG, or that a title at non-FAANG automatically transfers to the same title at FAANG.
The highest technical titles that exist at most of those companies are "Principal Software Engineer" and "Distinguished Engineer". Typically, much less than 5% of technical staff reach that level (I'd estimate 2%, but unsure). However, ~75% (random, plausible number - not actually sure) are "Senior Software Engineer" or below.
It is a bit silly to label those senior, but that is how the industry decided to label things. If your company is more strict then it just make their engineers look worse than they are, it is a great way to make engineers less likely to get poached but it isn't great for those engineers since it will look like people with 20 years of experience and great track record stagnated after 5.
I have a feeling I'm underpaid but I'm also very happy with where I work and the team I work with and I'm not currently willing to sacrifice that for a higher paying but probably much less enjoyable experience somewhere else. I also making about $30k more than I was when I started 3 years ago.
I have enough to pay my bills, raise a family, and still have some hobbies. Happiness should always be a factor when it comes to compensation.
my coworker lives in denver and works remotely for my company in NY. You can easily make 250k+. We have good work-life balance ect ect.
> I'm not currently willing to sacrifice that for a higher paying but probably much less enjoyable experience somewhere else.
lots of good companies with higher pay. higher pay doesn't equate lo 'no family time' ect, it has been the opposite in my expreience.
Every time I read an article like this I go looking for official numbers to validate what is being said. I'm not saying companies compensate poorly in SV. I just find it difficult to differentiate fact from fiction (or gossip) when I go looking into it. Its really not that hard to post your price/ranges directly as a company. I've always posted compensation and benefits when I've posted listings. My wife has always posted compensation and benefits when she's posted them. I'm not sure which of us has interviewed or hired more. I've probably interviewed more as a software engineer and she's probably hired more as a clinical director. (nurses, so many nurses... and then doctors!)
I'd apply for a lot of positions if people would list compensation ranges in their postings. I just need to know we're somewhere on the same page before focusing my energy on it. Nothing is worse than going through interviews only find out we've wasted each other's time. I've been there, done that, far too many times. It usually results in an offer at the top end of what they're approved for and that is either not enough to leave, or its less than I'm making at a position I'm happy with.
When you apply the best thing is to just be clear to the recruiter what you will accept. If you tell them you won't accept less than $200k any good recruiter would tell you whether that's reasonable or not. If they lie to you, please come back to HN and make an angry post about it. You'll get my upvote.
I speculate that one of the things that makes it hard to square with market data is that levels.fyi leads with total compensation which will include stock based comp. afaict people report their stock comp differently, sometimes it's the original offer value and sometimes it's the value at that time (which might be years after the grant was given). Since things are really going up right now... it can lead to some big numbers. These numbers are still real, but not necessarily what you would see in an offer.
The salary numbers, however, are spot on in my experience.
I've asked decision makers about this (or similar enough) before, and the answer was that they considered compensation to be a bit of a competitive advantage. I can see two reasons for this, first it being secret makes it harder for employees to effectively negotiate. Second, it being secret makes it more difficult to accuse the companies of doing something akin to wage fixing, which some of these have done before, so being careful about the appearance of impropriety makes some amount of sense.
Personally though, I don't find either of those particularly compelling. Especially given that they're de-facto public anyhow. There's two reliable ways to get salary information even if you don't trust self reported data:
1. h1b data, which shows only base salary and is hard to tease good data out of, because there isn't differentiation by role usually. Google for example shows "software engineer" or "software engineer manager" salaries that range from like 150K to like 300K (again, base salary), because they can cover like L4, L5, L6, L7, and even L8 (director) and above under essentially that one title. It's not super useful.
2. The careers pages for remote jobs in the US, or jobs in Colorado. Thanks to a law that took effect this year, Colorado requires companies to post their salaries (again, just salaries). Companies in California are also required to give you a salary range if you ask during an interview process. This doesn't give you stock or bonus numbers, but you can use these to verify that the salaries people talk about are legitimate.
Here's some examples, all taken from the careers page for the companies (careers.google.com, https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/, etc.). In each I've included the important part of the role description and what I think it maps to in the internal levelling scheme (see https://www.levels.fyi/ to compare these).
Google:
- Minimum salary of $132,000 (SWE III, L4)
- Minimum salary of $183,000 ("Technical Lead", probably L6+)
- $178,000 (Staff, L6)
- $209,000 (Staff, L6)
- $137,000 (Senior, L5)
- $125,000 (SWE III, L4)
- $120,000 (Senior Staff, L7, technically true but probably a data entry mistake somewhere)
- $183,000 (Senior Staff, L7)
- $252,000 (Something Director+, L8+)
Facebook:
- $111,000 ("Internal Software Engineer", E3?)
- $172,000 ("Software Engineer", E5?)
- $150,000 ("Software Engineer AI", E4?)
- $143,000 ("Software Engineering Manager", ??? this one confuses me)
- $206,000 ("Software Engineer iOS", E6/7?)
- $239,000 ("Director Data Engineering", E8+)
Microsoft:
- $115,700 to USD $153,900 (Software Engineer 2, 61)
- $138,200 to USD $183,933 (Senior SWE, 63)
- $148,068-$169,233 (Senior Mech Engineer, 63?)
- $160,038-$183,933 (Senior Hardware Eng, 63?)
- $147,500 to $224,500 (Principal Software Engineering Lead, 64-66?)
- 153,100 to 200,700 (Principal SWE, 65)
Amazon had one role, a Senior SDM role, with range $122,300-160,000. 160K is the max base salary Amazon pays outside of SF. They don't do bonuses except your first year, but as far as I know by the time you're higher level, their stock awards keep pace with Google and Facebook.
I also checked Lyft and Uber, which didn't appear to have roles that were Remote or in Colorado, and Stripe, Netflix, and Dropbox whose remote roles didn't list salaries. Someone at stripe should probably fix that, I expect they're technically violating the law right now. Salesforce included numbers which were oddly low. Oracle requires that you email them, which I think may also be a violation of the law, but its unclear.
Anyway, bit of a tangent at the end there, but I hope that helps to show that these aren't made up (and are sometimes publicized).
The FAANG I work for makes a PROFIT of $2 mill/year for every employee. So it's easy for them to think, lets pay this lot $300-600k and use em to keep our advantage/keep them away from competition. For all I care they could be paying all of us $1 mill and still be making a good sum of money.
The US President earns millions per year in total compensation. You cannot ignore all the post employment benefits, least of all the $200k+ inflation adjusted per year annuity.
I’m a senior FAANG coder making 350k TC, and it looks like I should be able to net 400-600k at this level if I go to Apple or Google. Hoo boy, looks like it’s leetcode time again…
Mid-stage companies like Convoy are also going very high, but there is an upside with those companies.
Don't know much about early stage, but a few of my acquaintances are moving from FAANG companies to early stage companies to play the lottery.
Last time I was looking for work 8 years ago the gap was nowhere near this large.
I used to buy into the whole risk vs reward of startups, but the numbers are far too biased towards founders and big tech salaries now for any individual contributor actually paying attention to the market to think about a startup job.
Half a million a year for a developer or architect is bonkers.
That's the equivalent of AUD 800K a year. That's more than what the Prime Minister and a cabinet member put together make here!
How can that possibly make sense? For that kind of money you can easily hire 4 senior developers here! Any company "hiring local" at those prices isn't exploring their international staffing options properly...
> the recent 'they need to return to the office'
Which is counterfactual, unless I totally misunderstood the statement.
This is why I'm not responding. I have a feeling their Canadian offers won't look anything like the article suggests.
Google too: they just bought a large new building in NYC, yet they're also growing a lot in markets where they pay much less (e.g. India).
Very curious how this will play out over time.
But at the scale they operate at, it is also relatively easy to justify such salaries. For example, just last month, I saved the company more than a million a year of cloud costs by doing 1 week of cost optimizations for just one of our services. I will create many times that in new revenues/cost savings in the remaining 2 months of the year.
My total comp for year? Barely over half a million. So I'd say they are getting a good value.
I just saved $500K per annum for a customer, after working on the most critical part of a merger between two 10K-user organisations, and I get less then half that.
It's not like it's impossible to get someone that knows how to optimise infrastructure or do complex projects for less than a decent chunk of a million dollars a year! Like other people have commented, they're often making just tens of thousands in Europe, despite having comparable education, experience, and English language skills...
If $$ is what you optimize for, you can probably find the top 1% of compensation for businesses in your field and work there. For a lot of office workers, there are firms that value their skills and firms that do not. Remember that the comp numbers for Bay Area tech salaries are legit the top 1% globally or some very small percentage.
Consider the difference between an comp "analyst" at a local bank and an "analyst" at an extremely profitable hedge fund.
It's just money in the end and if you make enough to be happy, then the rest doesn't matter. If you want to compete for the top < 10% of compensation locally/globally in your field, then things have to change and it comes at some cost.
It is also about what the US President ($400k) and a cabinet secretary ($196.7k) put together make in the US. But far, far, less than the CEO of any public company.
https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-retirement-benefits-3...
Well, here is the operating profit for the US tech giants:
Apple $100 billion | Microsoft $70b | Google $62.6b | Facebook $44.5b | Amazon $29.6b | Intel $22.7b | Oracle $15.7b | Cisco $13.7b | Qualcomm $10.3b | IBM $8b | Texas Instruments $7.7b | Broadcom $7.6b | Nvidia $7.3b | Micron $6.7b | Applied Materials $6.4b | Netflix $6b | Dell $6b | Adobe $5.5b
SAP is one of the primary tech giants in Europe. Their operating profit is $6.2b by comparison (they fit in Microsoft's pocket these days).
Now on top of that, throw in the US banks which are generating enormous profit compared to their European peers, and they also hire tech talent. Throw in Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Square, PayPal, Stripe, etc. Then throw in the US defense contractors. The large pharma & biotech companies. Insurance companies. Huge retailers like Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Target, Lowes, Walgreens, CVS, etc. Big real-estate companies. Various large conglomerates and manufacturing firms. All of these companies - which generate outsized profits as well - have to compete for tech talent too. The point being, all that demand drains availability and pushes up the salaries that tech talent can command (including outside the bay area).
Over $200k per year in take home pay after most expenses.
Rough numbers, my monthly salary is ~$10k/mo (after tax) and I vest ~$50k in stock every 3 months (also after tax)
In Californian coastal city, that is, or in NYC. It’s $305k in New Jersey, and $335k in Washington. And that is if you’re single. If you’re married, with $500k you’re looking at $325k after tax in California/NYC, $338k in NJ, and $366k in WA.
L6 at Amazon, single, no kids:
~$400K TC $33,333 per month gross
About $100K in federal tax, no state income tax in WA. $8333 per month
Healthcare: $34 a month for an HSA plan. $3,650 over the course of the year goes into the HSA, including the employer portion. That ends up being about $205 out of my pocket. This is a bit complicated if you're not American and familiar with the different account types but it's basically money you're saving that's not taxed, but you can only use it for healthcare expenses.
$3000 max out of pocket per year for medical expenses. For all intents and purposes you can assume that's the most I'll ever pay. Out of network stuff makes it more complicated, but my network has essentially everyone. $250 a month, but you can use the HSA funds from above, so net $0.
Rent: In the Seattle area a newish one bedroom that's about 50-60 m^2 will run you say, $2200 a month. You can go cheaper or more expensive, but that will get you something that's plenty nice. Commute is extremely dependent on exact location, but if you're in the city, the majority of it has a commute time of less than an hour.
$33,333 -$8333 -$34 -$205 -$2200 = $22,561 income remaining.
I think you'd be able to survive :)
Obviously doesn't account for internet, a phone, a car, utilities or anything else, but that's maybe another $2K a month on the high end.
My salary is just above $200k. After 6% contribution to retirement (max my employer will match), and $25k a year set aside for employee stock purchase program (max I can set aside - our ESPP is really good), I get just under $10k a month in direct deposit.
My rent is $3k a month. My discretionary spending is also around $3k a month. So I save $4k a month (in cash).
I also get around $350k in stock compensation. A bunch get sold off to cover taxes, but I don't sell anymore, as I believe in the company, and it has done well in the last 2 years.
Altogether, I save above $250,000 a year - in vested stock, and cash.
Yeah that is playing on easy. Now try with a big suburban home, private schools, and wife who needs a lot of healthcare.
Add two kids, each 2k/mo/child in daycare.
That's 7k/month extra.
Still leaves you a nice chunk though.
That’s if you’re buying $1.3M house. There are plenty of good houses to be had in Seattle for $900k.
Maybe you are right, then the math changes, but only slightly?
Note I didn't even get into IRAs, 401k, Megabackdoor Roths, etc.
For one healthcare is usually not an issue because you have a good health plan with an out of pocket maximum. Your employer pays the premiums. Out of pocket you’re looking at about $10k/yr on the higher end, barring big medical problems or issues with your insurer (sadly, always a possibility). Let’s call that $1k/month.
Rent also depends a lot on how many bedrooms you need and how fancy you want to go. Let’s say it’s $2.5k/month (including utilities).
At $300k/yr in California you’re taking home about $180k/yr. So that’s about $15k/month after tax and $11.5k/month after rent and healthcare (you really aren’t likely to spend that much on healthcare. More on rent if you have kids). Not including of course things like 401k which can both lower your taxable income and get extra money from your employer
Google did not bother to match at the same level. I guess Google is not drowning in money anymore (in comparison).
An E4/L4 (the level right below senior) easily makes 400k right now depending on which company they joined. Their typical offer was 160k base and let's day 82k RSU (325k over 4y).
With the usual (~15% of base) bonus, that's 160 * 1.15+82=266.
But now let's assume they joined 2 years ago, so they got refresher of stocks that are roughly 20k per year extra (80k vesting over 4y), 266+20+20=306k.
Here's the catch though, the 82k/y from the in-hire grant are now worth 160k/y: it's {stock price today} * 1/4 * 325k / {stock price at join date} , and look at FB, GOOG, AMZN etc trajectories.
Same for the refresher, the oldest one is probably worth around 40k/y, and most recent one probably worth 30k/y,
So this year exact TC could be (bumping base with 2 usual raises to 170): 170 * 1.15+160+40+30 = 425k.
That's ignoring extra (~10% of base) for on-call compensation.
That E4 doesn't need promo to E5. The math can be repeated for E3 or E5, the higher the stock number was, the higher the effect.
That's the effect of stock compensation and alignment of employee compensation with company performance. Of course if those share prices go down, so does the TC. There's a company in FAANG known for their frugality famous for not offering refresh "because the stock price is doing so well", but even without the refresher, someone's initial stock award from 2-3 years ago is worth a lot more today.
Some companies are starting bad trend these days due to them offering only 1 year vesting stock awards, instead of typical 4 years (smaller on-hire awards but bigger refresh), where an employee cannot benefit from the compounding effect of stock growth anymore. The employee can "hodl" their vested shares, but the vested shares are usually less, since ~1/3 is removed to pay for the tax the vesting represented.
> That's ignoring extra (~10% of base) for on-call compensation.
What FAANG companies do this? I haven't heard of it.
> There's a company in FAANG known for their frugality famous for not offering refresh "because the stock price is doing so well",
To be clear: Amazon does this. They also value their stock packages to the expectation their stock will grow 15% YoY. It means their offers are inflated relative to the same nominal figure from other employers.
I hate studying leetcode just for these interviews, but with these numbers it seems foolish to not put myself through hell...
Are all these good-paying software jobs behind the "leetcode firewall", even for non-FAANG? I guess my willingness to practice on leetcode would be partly driven by potential TC reward, but I really would like to be judged on the merits of the development I've already done for previous companies instead of having to memorize solutions to esoteric problems I'm never going to have to solve on the job.
After a certain level, leetcode is 30% of your interviews. Your level is decided by system design and behavioral, which IMO you’ll do naturally better at with experience
Money.
What will you do with all that money?
Retire comfortably.
When is it enough?
When I can retire. Why not change jobs to earn 30% more for the same amount of work? You're essentially speeding up your retirement every time you increase your total compensation.
Real drought of senior talent in that area
And people wonder why we don't make things in the U.S. anymore...
I wish I made $120k/year.... :(
Sure, there’s probably gonna be big financial hit in some form, but I don’t see a good reasons to stay in software development anymore if I’m not someone who can command the massive salaries.
I'll add a data point. I live in a 90 COL index city(I don't live in a 90 area though) and will clear >300k this year total cash comp at a non-FAANG company working remote. Earlier this year I had a 200k base salary offer for a staff full stack eng role at a startup(that just raised a bunch of money). The money is out there.
I have some general advice and that is perception is reality. Starting with the resume and focusing on outcomes and value add actions taken, to talking the talk in interviews for the next position. Adopt patio's mindset. I'm not a "programmer". Programming is one tool I use to create value for the business. I have other tools and perhaps the most valuable of which is my mind; decision making.
Anecdote; I am leaving my company for smaller pastures but I turned down that staff pos I mentioned. I'm starting at a new place but was a bit lazy during the interview process with selling myself(was only talking to a couple places and was going to take time off if I didn't find a place I was interested in). Got low balled, maybe under leveled, and took the job anyway haha. I'm a staff full stack at one company worth 200k base, but perhaps not here. Perception is reality.
P.S. I'm also just really lucky in many regards. I got really early(just after high school) resume and business thinking advice from a good friend who is an MBA, for one.
11 years of experience in roles where I applied software engineering to problems.
I'm getting old enough to worry about ageism myself (mid-40s) and my total comp is just a bit over 200K this year. That's not bad for Portland, but when I see the numbers tossed about on HN it makes me want to take Facebook up on their interview requests. Probably amount to nothing, but I'm thinking I really ought to open up and start renewing my interview experience before it gets any harder.
Just a few observations from my job search.
1) I was targeting remote roles, but almost every recruiter that reached out was local, at least to the state I was in. This probably greatly affected the numbers available to me. Again, Amazon was the exception.
2) Basically all of the jobs I applied to directly either screened me out or never got any response. This makes sense, as I very much find myself stuck in the “enterprise” world, and even worse the legacy section of it, and the only companies that are interested in me are those. I attempted to put some non-work projects on my resume, but people are uninterested in those even in interviews.
I ended up settling once more (I really didn’t want to settle again, but it would take too long to even figure out my way out of this issue) for $121k with even that being a significant increase over my current comp (non-tech too 100 F500 company local to the area)
Not trying to value that is a mistake.
You should judge these deals based on expected value.
Which is what all the comments you are replying to are saying. However the expected value isn't automatically $0 as the article suggests. You can apply a fair bit of your own judgement.
The same was true for Snapchat, Asana, Roblox, etc.
The same will be true for Stripe, Robinhood, and others.
A subset of those people go on to become angel investors themselves.
FAANG pays a lot and there are outliers, but most FAANG employees are not clearing >2M. People at Snap made >20M.
I’m just suggesting people value it seriously and don’t reflexivity value it at zero - that’s all. I think pretending it’s zero is a mistake and stating this repeatedly on HN is a disservice.
Lets say you could choose between 1% chance of getting $20 million and 100% chance of getting $1 million, what would you choose? You'd pick the $1 million every time, since it is really easy to transform $1 million into a bunch of risky investments if you prefer the low probability big pay-out, while the 1% of $20 million isn't worth that much.
That's why in my other replies in this thread I recommend only joining later stage startups that are backed by top VCs and have clear product market fit. At that point things are derisked and compensation is pretty competitive with larger tech companies.
When I was graduating I had an option to work at Google or be the first employee at a very promising startup. I chose the startup and worked my ass off, the company raised a ton of money and got too big to be an acquisition target but not successful enough to IPO. My friends who went to work at Google made 2-3x more than me in salary and their RSUs 10xed during that time, all of them have millions in the bank. I bounced around incubators and in the startup ecosystem and have not met many people who did better than an average engineer at FAANG, in most cases the ones that did were founders.
The only people consistently getting rich off of startups are VCs.
EDIT: I do have to admit that I enjoyed startup life and got to work on and learn things that I'd never get to at a large company.
EDIT: Also if you're set on startups I'd recommend working at FAANG for a few years first, saving up and then bootstrapping your own company for a year or two before you think about investors. Being a founder is a completely different experience than an employee, you hold a lot more equity and have much more control over things.
The right thing to do is to use your own judgment to estimate the value of the stock. A small stake in a promising early-stage company really is worth something. There just isn't a clean formula for how much it's worth.
When you really think hard about it, this will push you toward working for companies that are more likely to succeed. If you treat all stock offers like they are worth zero, that will push you toward working for companies that don't offer their employees stock, and that are not likely to succeed. Over time, those companies just don't attract the best coworkers. So you're really hurting your career if you decide that you don't care about the stock, even besides the direct financial hit.
Thanks partially to SPACs and direct listing we've had a boom in IPOs the past two years. (https://www.wraltechwire.com/2021/10/01/biggest-ipo-boom-in-...)
Before 2018-2019 the common wisdom was to stay private as long as possible because Softbank and other late stage firms were willing to throw a lot of money around in private rounds. Now VCs are trying to throw their companies over the fence as soon as possible.
Right now it only kinda makes sense when you join as a co-founder (at most seed round; definitely not post-series-A), or pre-IPO.
I got you all beat.
I have 15+ experience. I am a really good coder. I can be very not humble because this is a throwaway, but everyone who has ever worked with me or gone to school with me or worked on open source with me would agree, I am very good at designing and writing and maintaining software, including understanding what software should be written, let's just accept that for the sake of discussion.
I only make around $90K.
Now, I work in the non-profit/academic sector, and have my whole career. That's what I wanted to do, and I make more than most people in my social circles even at $90K, but the work is getting old, it's not actually that "meaningful" in the end, and especially when people keep saying that I could be making literally 4-5x what I'm making.
I also these days mostly only know ruby and Rails (but that's not un-marketable right? And I certainly can learn other things, I have before. And I know ruby really well).
People here are like "Sure, but don't you want good work/life balance, maybe $175K is just fine for that." Yes, and $175K would be a fortune to me!
I literally don't understand how I get into that market. Because I have worked in academic/non-profit industry my whole career. (which I don't know if that leaves me out now. And I'm in my mid-40s, does that doom me?). I know how to get more jobs in the industries I'm in at about what I'm already getting paid, and have several times...
But I don't understand even the first step to this world where $175K is considered low-paying. I believe I have the engineering skills of anyone at that level. I don't know how to get into it. Help me out?
Go to levels.fyi and apply to those companies’ job listings.
When I go there.... I see a lot of data points with ~10 years of experience paying ~$140K.
Which is more like I expected honestly -- it's just that OP was blowing my mind suggesting $175K-$225k and up... saying they are using levels.fyi as data too... or discussions here on this post with someone making $175K being considered very underpaid... every time I see salaries discussed on HN I end up confused.
I think I will try to get back in when I am ready to retire, maybe a nice IT management position for a few years.
That was for my first tech job. Once I had that one advertised on LinkedIn (and some open source participation, and some talks at conferences - not sure what generated interest), I started getting a steady stream of unsolicited emails from recruiters. Next time I was ready to switch jobs I just responded to the ones from FAANG companies and went back to practicing leetcode.
You can probably also just reach out directly to recruiters at big companies, or ask someone you know who works at a big company to put you in touch with a recruiter or recommend you.
When i read these things, I'm never sure if it's reality or what.
Go look for salaries on a site like levels.fyi, find companies that pay well, apply to companies or find recruiters on linkedin and reach out to them.
Its not about diagrams and SQL, its about a bunch of things, that can be broadly related to "making everyone more effective at the work they do", "lead huge company changing projects" and "create enough value to have a budget to hire a large team and build a thing to achieve a business goal"
enterprise architect (me) domain architect (something like "communications domain") solution architect (like Azure architect)
My job isn't to sit down and write code, most of the time. What I do is take a business requirement, go back and forth with a ton of business people to nail down exactly what they need or want to do, and then go on a series of requirements gathering sessions after figuring out the impacted or required systems. So let's say someone wants to digitize a specific set of communications. It makes more sense to build internal and scalable capabilities to be able to digitize any communication - so working out the technologies required to do that, the integration points, the patterns for how to do it. It involves learning a lot and then evaluating what you learned, and eventually diagraming it all out into an architecture that the domain and solution architects use.
The domain architects then would add in more detail and requirements within the systems that are affected and finally the designs get to the solution architects.
The solution architects go through the whole sketch and make sure it makes sense, that the data or whatever required will get to them and that their platform(s) are empowered and capable of performing the work thats being asked. They then design the solution for those technologies and when programming needs to get done then that is sent to the engineering teams to actually build it.
In terms of hierarchy the programmers/engineers tend to be the recipients of requirements rather than really being involved conversationally. I don't necessarily agree with this approach and I try to work directly with programmers where I can. And more often than not I'll work with them doing PoC coding in whatever technology - usually java, of course.
But if you're content, you're content. I wouldn't worry about it too much if that's the case.
I often think about working to level up my actual programming abilities because I feel that, surely the folks who are pulling those kinds of salaries are working on really interesting problems. Part of my dissatisfaction with my job is that while I do work on difficult problems a lot of the difficulty comes from process or legacy systems. The really hard problems that my org faces arent the same league of hard problems that someone at a FAANG company (or similar) is working on.
You'd be surprised. What I work on is relatively mundane. I worked at multiple FAANG companies in the past and the work there is mostly mundane too.
For the most part the difference is in the order of magnitude of users that you have, so you get to look at edge cases more often, need to be more careful about having a stable codebase etc, but writing a Web service that gets X in input and spits out Y in output is not rocket science.
I think the carpenter/woodworker analogy for software engineering works pretty well. The very expensive carpenters do the same work as the inexpensive ones, the difference is in the details.
By being in the bay area you meet a lot of software engineers and provide value to companies you work at by referring good software engineers. This ends up being worth a lot of money to companies (more than they pay in bonuses).
By being an engineer in the bay area it's also harder to be retained. Engineers here are pretty transparent about compensation and working conditions. If someone I know is working 50 hours a week or being underpaid, I make sure they have referrals to good companies as soon as they want them and they get a good job.
Speaking to engineers who've moved here from other markets, that kind of culture and network just doesn't exist in most other areas.
Note: the 300k to 600k jump can happen shockingly easy (without promo) if RSU grants appreciate well and refreshers are generous. Doing it the “hard way” (assuming RSUs stay flat) is hard. You need to design, convince others to build, and help build truly impactful systems AND make sure you get a big chunk of the credit.
I know people making 300k that are writing hundreds of lines of high-quality code in important systems every single day for years in a row and also doing code reviews, system design, etc. Very productive engineers doing traditional tasks.
I also know people at that level who spend their days watching YouTube videos and hoping nobody notices. On many teams, nobody ever does. It's easier to hire one extra person at these big companies than to fire one.
All these two people have in common is that they can pass an interview and they know how to write an email.
(Aside: the latter category makes me pretty angry because I know so many good programmers in India, Eastern Europe, etc who could change their whole families' lives with that kind of money but can't get it from a lazy American)
I make, let’s say somewhere between 100-200k. But because of where I live, this is enough to fill two college funds, pay off a mortgage, let my wife follow her dream of being a full-time mom, and retire by 50.
Absolutely need more remote work in this world. There’s so many wonderful places to live that aren’t ridiculously priced.
When I switched to remote I thought “I’d take about a 25% pay cut to be full remote.”
Having done it for almost four years I’d probably take a 50% pay cut to stay remote.
It’s just completely life altering. Especially given I have two young kids I want to be deeply involved with raising.
I think that's worth bringing up because it's a huge factor at the end of the day. For example, getting 400k TC but you routinely put in 60-80 hours a week is much different than 40 hours a week.
Personally I would much prefer working 30-40 hours a week for X vs 60-80 hours a week for X * 2. The amount of taxes you pay in the X * 2 range are so massive you end up not getting anywhere near a true 2x amount in your bank account but you put in a true 2x amount of hours. Working 70 hours a week as a typical employee role isn't sustainable in my opinion.
200k (fresh grad)
352k
452k
507k
412k
All had the format:
-Hiring manager phone screen
-Technical phone screen
-(virtual) On Site
3/5 had leetcodes, 2/5 had no leetcode. No leetcode was harder than medium.
All had behavioral interviews
All but the fresh grad had design interviews
For the non leetcode, coding questions two main forms:
1. General line of business code e.g. take some JSON, derive statistics, turn it into new JSON, etc.
2. Bug squash in a new codebase (find the bug, write regression tests)
Generally, people at big companies work less than at small companies. Most software engineers I know making more than 400k work ~30 hours a week.
Things get different at the super senior levels making several million, usually a lot more meetings, hard to speak to their specific hours. But on the other hand, they get to retire after two years if they want so...
Right, everything changes at that point of income. Putting in ~70 hours a week for a few years to make 3-5 million seems like a no brainer.
But grinding 60-70 hours a week for 300k-400k, I don't know. That's a much harder sell. You'll probably burn out before you could retire. I don't know what taxes would look like in CA but it would probably be like an effective 9.5% in state taxes and then another effective 30% in federal. I know there's maxing out a 401k for deferring taxes and other deductions but quick napkin math probably puts you at like 180k take home on 300k income. Not sure on the total cost of living in SF but maybe 40k to live in a studio with no family while living reasonably well? So you have 140k to save and invest every year. That's a lot of years of 60+ hours / week to retire comfortably.
Not to be rude but did you read the entirety of my post? This doesn't happen that much, the people putting in those hours are generally making 250k or less at mid level or above. Those making 300-400k generally either don't have to work many hours or are capable of passing interviews that will allow them to work significantly less.
> 180k take home on 300k income
Without going into too much detail, often by the time your stock is paid out to you it's worth much more than what you signed at so that you had an effective pay raise of sometimes 50% or more. You're also leaving out bonuses, which at some companies can be substantial.
Suffice to say, plenty of people retire in a decade.
What percentage of programmers would still be programmers if competitive salary was not a concern in life, and people were free to simply pursue their passions?
Americans care about money a lot. American SWE care about money even more.
Wanna know what the truly passionate programmer does? Ship things that make money.
If they don’t they are a hobbyist not a professional because it isn’t a profession for them.
Earning money or not does not recognise the difference between hobby and profession. Ironically a lot of hobbyists make money and very few professionals work for free.
Now there are good ways to do that and bad ways and we should take pride in our work but lets not pretend when we say “programming is an art” that we mean like a real art. Laying tile and drywall is also an “art” but people don’t care unless its part of a building.
I don't think you're replying to anything I said at this point.
Similarly, a lot of the original FLOSS culture has been overshadowed by the "github-is-my-showroom" model. Optimizing for github stars and so on.
You realize you're the weirdo, and after years of everyone else being blatant about really not caring, it starts to wear on you.
“How do we ship things that make us rich” vs “how do I scratch this nerd itch/play with new shiny thing/assert my passion purity”
Now why did I _stay_ at a FAANG company doing mostly boring low-stakes work? For the money. I say that with no shame and I encourage others to consider doing it for the money.
It's life-changing money and the job is still pretty good! I still get to write code and talk about code for a living. I also have to go to some really stupid meetings and deal with bureaucracy and use strange tools but ... so what? It's still a good deal. Who knows when this market for our talents will disappear.
10 years ago my last non-contractor gig as a Grade 8 Intel Senior Staff Microprocessor Engineer (or 9? just below principal. I forget.) in Santa Clara pulled $200k including bonus and options, 170k if it was a shit year for bonuses. And that included a 4 year stretch with 0% raises for everyone in the early 2000's. That's with -15- years experience.
I guess in 2010 that was pretty good? I dunno, they routinely fucked everyone except the principals and above, who have very strange compensation systems, but no one had the guts to leave: this was during the no-hire collusion for which I got a settlement check of $10k, which was peanuts compared to the impact.
Is that really a good rule of thumb? FAANG pays double non-FAANG?
> and those are likely to be the kind of complex instruments that I treat as a gamble, not guaranteed salary
Idk, opinions vary, but the majority of my early startup total comp in my career has been equity payout. Maybe I just got super lucky, but I think this is too firm a stance and tips the scales against non-FAANG too heavily.
It is very easy to run into ruinous tax problems with privately traded companies. If you exercise options you have to pay taxes on the difference between the strike price and the current fair market value, and in exchange you've gotten something which is very difficult to sell. You can avoid ever having any tax problems by just never exercising your options until a liquidity event, but that often means letting them expire unexercised.
> If you exercise options you have to pay taxes on the difference between the strike price and the current fair market value, and in exchange you've gotten something which is very difficult to sell.
I am suggesting that you can choose to never exercise your options until there is a liquidity event and you can same-day-sell for raw income. This does require you to stay at the company until the liquidity event though.
We no longer live in a FAANG only world. FAANG companies are now trying exceptionally hard to hire talent. A lot of the FAANG perks were in-office, as the world continues to accept the remote first worker, they are only going to have a harder time.
As I work from home, I've come to appreciate different aspects of my work, than what I enjoyed in-office.
I wouldn't want any engineer to ever consider a job which doesn't pay them a fair market wage.
I've worked for companies who are FAANG+ and I would say I can't see any logic in being against FAANG+ companies that doesn't require individual examination of each. Saying you don't want to work for FAANG+ would probably mean you don't want to work for any for-profit corporation or any corporation in the tech industry.
What's certainly true is that stock is a significant piece of the total comp at a FAANG and a startup is unlikely to make up much (if any) of that difference in base salary. For instance base salary for me as an L8 at Google is roughly 1/3 of my total comp.
For non-tech companies the compensation landscape is more complex and diverse but I know of several cases where software engineers are on top FAANG-like compensation, sometimes straight salary, in unexpected companies and geographies. There is a much larger appetite across industries and geographies to selectively pay top wages for key engineers than there used to be. The median wage may still be lower than FAANG in these companies, they aren’t nearly as profitable, but they are finding significant value in making point investments in engineering talent to lift the level of the organization rather than spraying money at everyone with a money hose. If you can be one of those key engineers, you can ask for the same kinds of money as FAANG and sometimes more (on the basis that working for a non-tech company is less attractive).
The off-the-charts FAANG money has been rapidly spreading across the US and also starting to very slowly globalize. It has been crazy to watch.
Post-IPO you have a liquid stock grant that on FAANG is usually a second salary, bit less bit more depending on the company, role, tenure and performance. Some startups will give you a stock grant that's equally as fat or fatter after IPO, but you have to sit and wait on them to IPO.
Non-FAANG public companies in my experience helping friends with offers give slimmer stock grants, like 30% to 50% of your base.
I think there are multiple tiers as far as salary. He is really describing the top two tiers. But the majority of jobs are not quite in those top two tiers.
Additionally, our country is much more focused on financial services. You can make 2-3x the average engineer salary there. The rest of the market seem content paying far below, and also content having an eternal manpower shortage as a result it seems. The vast majority of engineers I graduated with have ended up in sales engineer roles to be honest, where they can earn commission more in line with the salary they deserve at the cost of doing something they don't necessarily enjoy.
It baffles me that companies are quite content to pay a half decent tech recruiter 70-80k, but continue to offer jobs to the engineers they are trying to hire at nearly half that.
[edit] forgot to mention contract (cloud) architects and project managers. They can make a lot, too.
And also nobody hears about them outside M25. Outside M25 and it looks like salaries in Poland or Estonia seem to be identical. Never really understood it..
There are also a couple of local non-FAANG companies that pay similar salaries.
Who, if you don’t mind?
You can find good salary data in levels.fyi. In my experience, that is very accurate.
Earning a modest, but reasonable living and having some stability is not an entirely bad way to go.
The OP's point of view on equity compensation is quite common and - I believe - in principle a great way to think about an investment that one does not fully understand.
However, especially for somewhat later stage startups, a substantial amount of your wealth can be locked up in your equity or option grants! Valuing them at 0 might not be accurate and actually quite risky: you take the full risk of the startup succeeding or not!
Secfi offers a financing product for your equity that is non-recourse. It basically works like this: Secfi pays for the exercise of your options and transfers a - sometimes very substantial - part of the value of your equity to you to use as you see fit. For example, you can use the money as a down payment on a house or get that crazy Lamborghini your crypto-millionaire neighbour recently bought, too. :)
In exchange, you pay Secfi a small percentage of interest on the amount and a small equity fee if, and only if, the startup succeeds (read: has a successful exit). If the startup fails - and this is crucial - you get to keep all the money and Secfi takes the loss!
So, in this scenario, your equity has a much, much greater value than 0!
Secfi's website has a lot of information and tools to help visualise and understand the value of startup equity and might be a good way to start learning how it all works. (https://www.secfi.com/academy)
That’s not how the adjustments play out. Taking $400K in a 142% market is a $282K unadjusted figure, adjusted down 11% for Akron yields a $251K figure. So call the equivalent Akron range (if there is a such a thing) $250K-$375K which is 25% higher than TFA’s calculation.
As for the other person, Staff+ does not necessarily translate between companies, and especially does not translate from companies in very different cultures to the big tech space. It's not impossible, but just because someone got the title of Staff engineer in one market does not mean they will be able to get that title in another market.
Last salary stream issue: https://email.levels.fyi/t/v/93ecf861-3d0c-47e9-84af-757bcc9...
RSUs have a volatility component (so discount the value for that, depending on the value of the grant vs your net worth), but also RSUs generally appreciate over the vest (it's not too common for a stock to be down over a 4-year period) which is a plus.
For example, Amazon stock used to go up 30-40% a year reliably. Compensation model was "conservative" and estimated 15% a year.
So if you stayed at Amazon for a while, you could be paid very very well, thanks to stock appreciation.
For the risk adverse, a strategy is to sell the stocks as they vest, effectively treating it as cash. Companies will also issue additional RSU, if stock tanks too badly, as they'd be losing people otherwise.
Personally, I worked for Amazon and Microsoft for a number of years, and have kept all my RSU. It has worked out great for me (at least on paper).
I think I need to move.
Looking at job listings, most places seem to say that experience with C# is required. Do I just need to keep looking, or are these companies possibly more open minded regarding previous experience than they appear?
Apply at jobs even if you don't have experience in the specific language, most of the time your fundamentals should carry you. If there's a specific role you really want, then make a side project on GitHub in the language you want to have experience in, and that can help get past any HR person that's just looking for a keyword on your CV.
A few weeks ago I talked to a recruiter who confirmed that I'm being underpaid. Since then I've struggled to stay motivated, but I also really hate job hunting/interviewing etc. I'm technically self employed, working for a single client, so I'm considering telling him that I'm going to take Fridays off. If he doesn't like that idea I'll start job hunting for real.
If you aren't in the USA your salary expectations should be significantly different.
The future is going to belong to companies that can master processes and technologies to coordinate teams across time zones, languages and countries. Warehousing employees in Mountain View, Cupertino, South Lake Union, Manhattan, Frankfurt, etc. seems ridiculous once you begin to understand how to co-ordinate dispersed teams. There is value in having teams work together and I like working in person with other people. The whole company town aspect of Apple/Facebook/Google/Oracle/etc. campus' seems so bizarre to me however. I just can't understand the benefit given the toll on the lives of the workers.
I wonder whether it's mostly risk aversion rather than an intentional "feature". The execs of FAANG _know_ that if they spend more money and put more people to work on adding features, acquiring users and expanding to under developed markets, they'll more-or-less reliably rake in billions for themselves and the company.
Most companies are experiencing double digit growth, so the upsides of decentralizing the offices is limited (even if say you reduce 50% of staffing costs, it's still not that great of a deal compared with potential lost growth and lost profits), and since nobody else has done it on a large scale before, the risks are (perceived to be) high and nobody wants to risk killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
What on earth can relatively small private tech shops that can't dangle heaps of RSUs possibly do to compete?
Quality of life improvements may be some of the only levers they have available to pull.
Generous time off (for NA standards at least), beyond four weeks could lure people.
Permanent, flexible WFH and remote work options will be a new one that they can use to differentiate from big public companies that want seats in desks.
Lastly potentially 4 day, 32 hour work weeks could be an effective tool. We've seen stories of Eidos Montreal implementing this recently.
I would gladly accept a lower overall-career comp at a smaller tech company to work on something I personally had a ton of interest in.
Those places are few and far between and don't want to hire me anymore than FAANG does. In fact, FAANG would probably be easier.
I'm an architect now but I don't code as much and I suspect I could add more value if I did more self-directed coding.
I've dedicated my entire life to this industry and working for startups has left me with nothing to show for it except for drowning in mental health issues from the abuse suffered at the hands of terrible clients and bosses and my lack of any kind of support network, something I struggle build at my level of anxiety and don't get from family. At what point do I throw in the towel and just take some shitty minimum wage job?
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Show-off-your-TC-Timeline-qqi...
5 years of (mostly) engineering work at a startup and you’re saying this is on par with an L5 at Google or L4 at Apple? I find it hard to take anything else in the article seriously after that
> something like an L4-L5 at Google, ICT3-ICT4 at Apple
I don't follow the stock grants math at all. AFAIK what is usually given is a mix of low priced and ultra-low priced options vesting over 5 years. One might end up getting 300K a year of profit in vesting options by year 5 but is anyone getting $300k in pure stocks given to them in year one?
OTOH there could be a lot of people out of the job market right now which could start looking for work in the new year. And the market could crash.
Is this ironic?
No.
I've been asking people how much they'd take a pay cut to go for full-remote and most people say 10% is a no-brainer.
but I still oddly don't want to work for them, half the pay is still decently middle class and I'm very happy overall
there's also the internal argument I've had in that most of them don't really do anything interesting (usually things that were good ideas years ago)and even if they did odds that I'd be near what was are slim
Rich is relative, right? How rich is rich enough? Spending seems to find a way to consume the income of a lot of people. There is always a nicer BMW/Audi/Tesla/Mercedes to buy. You can spend $300 on a pair of jeans. Spend a few hours at Neiman Marcus in Palo Alto and look at the prices. You can buy better and better seats at the ballet, symphony, baseball game. Business and first class plane tickets become mandatory. Look at the watches people wear. This is what happens as your income increases. There is always a way to spend and consume more and you will find a way to justify it. Believe me, I know.
Here is my story, which may or may not shed some light on working in high tech in Silicon Valley. I was part of a couple of successful startups in Portland, OR and was convinced by a venture capitalist to join a software company as VP of Engineering in 1997. I was paid $225,000, given a bonus schedule and a percentage of the proceeds of the sale should one occur. For a while I flew from Portland to SFO and took a cab to Foster City every week. I eventually moved, trading my unique, top floor apartment with a view of a park for a generic stucco box apartment in Burlingame that cost three times as much. The work was brutal and involved lots of lay-offs, restructuring, working with vendors to avoid defaults and the usual joy of dealing with a company in crisis. It was soul crushing, but the company finally sold and I took my bonus and started another software company in Burlingame.
I did various startups, some good, some bad and ended up at Apple at what was called Engineer/Scientist (some number here). I can't remember what the number meant. I was making $145,000 and received 27,000 options priced at $9.00 a share. I bought a really boring townhouse off of Lawrence Expressway for $300,000 that cost $57,000 in 1967. It is jammed into an already dense neighborhood totally devoid of any personality. The very same townhouse just sold for 1.1 million because you can walk to Apple Parc from it.
Living in Silicon Valley, especially as a young engineer making $185,000 means living either in San Francisco and commuting, or living in one the fairly identical communities all along 101 in a fairly identical apartment building or renting a house. Maybe you can find a situation that is more unique, or boost your commute time and live in the periphery. The commute is no fun, because you and everybody else is arriving at your various mega-campus' around 9:00 and leaving around 18:00.
I often felt like I was going insane. I felt like people were piled on top of me. I would go on two-hour bike rides at lunch everyday into the hills to escape. I was making good money but the "nice" houses in Palo Alto or Woodside were extremely expensive. The cost of living was quite high, so even though one might make a lot, you can expend a lot. When I went out to dinner, everyone around me was talking about their startup, IPO, options, explaining how they were going to tell their early investors to "go pound sand", etc.
This is my experience and of course your mileage may vary. You may love the "hustle" the energy and all that entails. I don't know how people manage to raise kids or have a peaceful life there. I am sure it can be done. When I personally think of having to go back to living in Mountain View/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara and commute to the GooglePlex/Apple Parc/Facebook Hacker Way I am overcome by a deep sense of anxiety, dread and nausea.
Once again, this is my experience and I understand and value people who love this environment. Please don't be blinded by these high dollar compensation plans. I promise you there is more to life than making this amount to work in Silicon Valley. Please factor in all of the environmental values when you decide to move to Gilroy with your family to work at Facebook. There is definitely a cost.
My career later took me to Los Angeles in 2009 and then to Seattle in 2018. Both my wife and I gave a lot to our careers. My wife also worked at Apple, but had a huge change of heart and went back to school to get a masters in social work. She was also an Army Reservist and was deployed to Iraq a couple of times and various other spots in the world. Regardless of ones opinion of America's foreign adventures, she felt that she was making a difference in the lives of people (she was in Civil Affairs) when she deployed.
After a few years in Seattle at Amazon, we both decided to step back from the fast pace of life. We moved to Tucson, AZ, she worked with veterans and I did some consulting and taught programming to adults wanting a career change for Startup Tucson. Life finally seemed pretty good!
Sadly, my wife passed from cancer a few weeks ago, so I often reflect on our thirty years together. How much time was consumed with the frenzy of startups and Apple, etc? If I could go back in time and spend every possible moment with her rock climbing, camping, skiing, holding hands, working with the homeless, enjoying a slow Sunday reading by the fire, etc. I would do that in an instant.
She was 51 and I am 53. We both thought we had a lot of time left! As for me, I am entirely unexceptional. I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time for a lot of things. My advice to anyone who may be in a similar position to what I was in a few years ago is to take a pause, zoom out and look at the big picture. We love to talk about IPOs, exits, deal sheets, cap tables and more. This is all fleeting. We only really have each other and the most important capital is human capital, especially when provided by the ones you love and who love you.
A good friend shared Brian Dyson's 1991 commencement speech recently, of which I will quote this section: Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them — work, family, health, friends and spirit — and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls ~ family. health, friends and spirit — are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked. nicked. damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.
We should also keep in mind how privileged we are to be in the right place (US) at the right time.
A lot of my high school friends (in Queens NY) are turning 30 and still living with their parents, unable to move out because they have to help with rent and bouncing from one dead end job to another.
I visit my friends at Google, who spend half their time doing yoga, and come across contracted security and cafeteria workers who remind me of my old classmates.
My significant other, who spent 3 years getting a graduate degree to work in healthcare is now deep in debt and trapped in a job that has her waking up at 4 am for 12 hour shifts that usually end up tuning into 14 hours, under constant stress taking care of patients on the verge of dying.
> According to Robert Half, Bay Area salaries are 42% above the national average, so that range translates to $110k-$205k unadjusted.
can someone explain the math here? wouldn't this imply an unadjusted range of $134k ($190k/1.42) to $246k ($350k/1.42)?
Work at a hedge fund.
I know some folks more senior than me at top hedgefunds making less than I am.
Where is the money in hedge funds? I look at salaries on glass door i nuthatch industry and even the highest are pretty disappointing.