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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

$200k? Do you live in a place where this is considered a bad salary?

It's normally considered a bad salary in comparison to what you could be making. I won't speak for the poster but I left a ~$1m / year TC job ($300k base the rest RSUs) to join a startup. I have a good salary compared to the population at large but it's a fraction of what I could be making on the hope that my equity turns into something meaningful that makes up for it.

I wish I knew how to get to $200k. Not even mentioning 1m/year, that seems absolutely insane to me.

The easiest way is to move to the SF area. However, you'll end up spending most of the after-tax pay on housing, food, etc. For example, rent on a 1 bedroom apartment in the suburbs is going to be $30-60K per year:

https://www.zillow.com/santa-clara-ca/apartments/1-bedrooms/

The cost of pretty much everything around here reflects that cost of living. Businesses have to pay workers enough to allow them to live in the area.

you don't have to. I lived in south bay with $30-40k in total annual expenses for years. that said, i was single and made sacrifices to save.

If you live in the US and work as a software engineer at a top tech company it’s very straightforward to make more than 200k. Otherwise, it’s much harder.

Where do you live, what kind of company do you work for? Look at levels.fyi for data on what companies in the bay are paying.

It's not just a matter of place, but what you can have if you work for Google instead. I can make $200k as a freelancer in France, but much more as a Google employee.

$200k is extremely high for France. Even half of that is high. I wish I could do that.

It's very influenced by what you do.

Today I'm giving a training to 3 people, each paying 2600 for this training. It means this week they get billed 7800 in total. If you do that for 30 weeks (not even a full year), you get to 234000.

15 years ago, my team leader was already doing $15K month as salary, and it was a startup in Sophia, not Google, and a long time ago.

So it's all possible, but indeed, not the average situation. The median dev is underpaid in France:

https://www.bitecode.dev/p/french-competitiveness-in-it

Levels.fyi has no Paris salaries @ Google >$292k (for a 12y tenure) https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

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