20 years experience, two books under my belt, and lead architect (with a CTO title) on several good sized projects and most I have ever gotten in $175k... every time I see an article like this, I think I am doing something "very wrong"
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.
It seems like a lot of HN readers are continually playing the "maximize salary" game and use like articles like this one to figure out how well they're doing. If you want to play that game, then good luck, have fun. I understand the desire.
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'm also not into trying to maximize every dollar and care a lot about other factors like WLB. But these days I'm feeling a lot of pressure due to inflation. Everything is going up and I feel like I need to switch jobs and increase salary just to keep up. Yesterday, I read a news article that Social Security benefits are increasing by 5.9% next year due to inflation. And that's from Social Security which historically was under-adjusting for inflation (usually like 1.5% per year). So if the stingy SS program is going 5.9%, what does that say about the actual inflation?
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.
Inflation is not a universal metric, it's individual. Every person, every household has their own inflation rate depending on spending profile. I would not use government figures to make decisions about my financial affairs.
Everything else being the same, it's better to make 300k than 175k/year. And not everything is the same, normally in those better paid jobs you have better Engineers, a lot of challenging problems, many nice perks, etc. What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week. Also you don't get highly ethical companies, just average ones at that (and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k).
So as far as general advice goes, it makes sense to recommend trying to get those FAANG jobs if you can.
i had to read this twice to make sure i was reading it correctly:
and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k
this really triggered me. you basically say its ok to do shady things as long as you give something to the poor. sounds so much like "indulgence" in Christian churches where you could pay off your sins. sad.
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.
Oh sorry I didn't mean it at all like that; not condoning doing shady things at all! Slightly more ethical !== the other one doing shady/bad things. What I wanted to point out is that, people normally overestimate the impact they can have in a social cause and underestimate the impact some $ well situated can have.
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?
It sounds pretty much on par for American approach to everything. It's ok to have shitty healthcare for the poor and pay less taxes, as long as you donate from time to time. Student loans? Medical loans? Shitty care for vets? No worries, Americans are the highest donating people on Earth by capita - so it's all fine. That last argument I keep hearing all the time - Americans are such good donators that they don't need a robust social net, after all if you are really in need then someone would have donated to you already /s.
Way off base, we (I?) are not talking about paying taxes vs donations. In fact as an European myself now living in Japan yeah, tax the shit out of everyone, and stop bombing/gunning everyone and instead pay for healthcare+university with that money :)
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.
I agree with you, but consider the possibility of donating the difference to a political organisation whose aim it is to eliminate shady behaviour by companies.
There's a broader spectrum to donation than just donating to the poor.
You could argue any profit-seeking endeavor is unethical. I look at every FAANG company, and they all do pretty nefarious things. One might be in the news now for particular reasons, but the others are equally bad for other reasons. Imagine factories overseas pushing people to suicide, warehouse workers without bathroom breaks to collect extra billions for the boss, or equivalent advertising businesses morphing the minds of the masses, as examples.
of course :) breaking system from within. I'm being sarcastic here. sure there are more charities than for the poor, but what triggered me is the reasoning that i can buy my self peace of mind for things i have done. and this is on paper. i suspect that when money are in hand, the question comes, "after all why should i not keep it" or "i already donated last year, this should be enough"
This is a very specific situation. Someone WILL fill that position at Evil Corp. and they will also get the 300k. The amount of evil done stays the same regardless of whether you take the position or not. But, if you take it and donate 100k to charity each year (especially one that works to undo harm done by your employer), more good is being done as well.
> Someone WILL fill that position at Evil Corp. and they will also get the 300k.
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.
The difference between the two options is saving 125 lives / year at GiveWell’s current estimate.
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.
i doubt that Schindler was weighting his options of joining nazi to be saving jews. it was after he joined he saw whats happening and acted in good faith. so he was saving lives not because he joined nazi, but because he mostly could not be not saving them.
this is tangential to slavery where slave owners where treating their slaves very well, but fundamentally they still were slavers.
Ultimately you don’t want to save the 125 kids a year. That’s fine. But that’s the active choice you’re making by choosing no FAANG over FAANG plus donate.
You might have better engineers in FAAnG but it’s not given that you love your work. Many of my colleagues in those places are bored out of their minds because of how silly or numbing the work is. Part of the reason why I’ve not tried the transition yet.
> This isn't true. Google allows you to "scale" your work (eg 80% pay for 80% 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.
That reminds me of the old “120% time” problem at Google[0]. Sounds like your partner had a bad manager. Much easier to change managers than companies if your partner is/was otherwise happy with Google. Or, given the CV mojo of a Google job, to go to a different FAANG.
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.
Do you have a source for this? I know a lot of people at Google and have never heard of this. In fact, a few years ago I explicitly asked a Google recruiter about this, and they said it wasn't an option. Is it a more recent thing perhaps?
It was absolutely an option 5 years ago when I worked there. I knew lots of engineers who worked 80% and took every Friday off.
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.
I think it depends on the team and your role in it. I worked at one of the Google X moonshots and never heard of this. There were a couple engineers from other teams that were donating one day a week to helping us, which is a similar 80/20 split. These 20% were somewhat common at Google, I believe, but it was never to take time off work.
Okay in Google it's a official perk, bad example; my point still stands that you have more negotiation power with specific personal perks in smaller companies than in larger ones.
But everything else is _never_ the same. Once you're paid more, you move into a bigger house, have more needs, and without knowing it you're just as tight on money as you were before.
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.
>Once you're paid more, you move into a bigger house, have more needs, and without knowing it you're just as tight on money as you were before
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.
I've 4x my salary in the last 4 years and barely spend more than in the beginning, that's definitely up to every and each one of us (and TBF you would spend more at least to match the inflation even with no life changes, but in Japan there's almost none).
It's worth highlighting that this was the opposite device a decade ago when the large caps were IBM/MSFT/CISCO etc.
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.
> Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year?
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 believe it’s good practice to think about your compensation not only as “what you get for what you do”, but also as “what you get for not doing what you would rather be doing”.
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.
That's both currently the amount I am getting per year towards my bank account and the amount I'm being granted per year * 4 + cash (I got promoted ~a year ago, meaning my new grants though missing the time value have a higher dollar value at grant time)
Actually I'm still there :-) Nothing against people trying to move and make more, but I just want to let people know that you don't _have_ to do that to be successful (plus refute people that might claim that it's the only way to do so in tech)
If you have a family that loves you, manageable stress levels and a purpose in life, I think you are doing a lot of things right. I am sure you are worth more! There are probably ways to increase your compensation and maintain your quality of life, but is it really worth it?
I taught my friend to code in a year and he did one of the intensive bootcamps. First job ever. A healthcare company in NYC is paying him 155 + 20% bonus. You're getting hosed
At the same time, I see mostly listings for director of data science or vp analytics at a ton of small businesses or startups that require a PhD and 5 extra years experience offering a cap of $80k.
I'm also based in Boston, senior dev (FAANG generalist, ~10 years of experience). I make about $200k plus ~$100k RSU/year on average. Previous FAANG paid ~$140k + ~100k RSU/year. I believe my peers make more, and the info I have on CTO salaries at various startups would put $175k on the low end of the CTO pay scale.
If I were you, strictly from a financial point of view, I'd probably test the market to see what offers I get.
Fellow Bostonian here, You need to look at large cap publicly traded tech companies.
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 live in Boston, 6 years of experience. I just went through the big tech thing for the first time. I got an offer from two of them and ended up almost doubling my total income (salary about the same but adding a ton of RSU and cash bonus). I did not grind leetcode, but I do know my data structures and I practiced enough to code basic algorithms without googling for method names or syntax. I spent more time practicing anecdotes, which is the part of the big tech interview where they ask questions like “describe a time you identified a customer issue and went outside your role to resolve it”
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.
You are doing something very wrong. Look at that median and ask yourself: Why would you compare yourself to median income if you have 20 yoe and two books? That is far more than the median SWE has accomplished. You are paying a lot in opportunity cost for whatever you are doing now.
Of course, it could be worth it! That’s for you to decide.
The best thing I did for my career was leave Boston for an entry level FANG job on the West Coast 10 years ago. I currently make more than 10x what I was making in Boston. But it has been a grind no doubt. And probably some luck.
Sorry, 10x seems like a crazy difference when talking about salary. Could you be more specific? I’m trying to figure out numbers that make sense. Like you were getting $30,000 a year in 2011 and now getting $300,000+ in 2021? In the same field? Either the Boston salary was crazy low or fang salary is crazy high.
It's not actually that crazy, and less so if you look at total comp.
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.
Mostly the same. I left Austin for SFO and FAANG 10 years ago. I made so much more, that when my previous company sold and some of my friends got 1m+ in stock, i had made more simply in salary moving.
I did the opposite of you and question if I made a mistake. I’m not sad about it. Just thinking through the “what ifs” after being gone so long. It’s natural. But if you’re happy today, why change?
How many of your employers have the cash flow that FAANG companies have. The idea that non-FAANG companies should be able to match FAANG salaries regardless of what non-FAANG companies have to spend on staff seems a rather distorted concept. As the article mentions, FAANG could actually be paying their employees much more. They can afford it, easily.
Ok I have but a fraction of your experience and make more. And live in a much lower cost if living area.
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.”
I just landed a staff+ faang role over 700k and I’m 20 mi outside Boston.
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.
The levels.fyi number you're looking at is across companies, so it's skewed by the type of companies hiring SWE's in Boston vs the Bay Area, which have different pay scales. Large Bay Area tech companies (e.g. FAANG) pay Boston SWE's pretty close[0] to what they pay SF SWE's.
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.
> even with 20 years of experience and I can't even get a FAANG interview (let alone pass it)
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.
Landing a FAANG interview is easy (I graduated from a low-tier state school and have only done startup & government jobs). Just don’t say anything crazy during the recruiter phone screen and they’ll let you in.
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.
I have been told I have an excellent resume by Google recruiters and gotten a recommendation from a manager I worked with in the past there and still not gotten an interview.
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.
I applied about 6 years ago to work at HQ. I went to community college and a bottom-tier state school and got an interview. Sounds like you just may not have been a match with the available jobs.
Yes & no. Maybe as a generalist SWE this is true. But if you’re applying for a more specialized position you might encounter limits in terms of how many of that role is needed.
This topic certainly does bring out the shittiest commentary on this site, both in tone and content.
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.
The money is out there and $175K/yr is nowhere near the top of the market for your experience in the Boston area. That’s not to say you’re doing something wrong if you’re optimizing for the many things other than money that are worthwhile.
Not near the top, no, but according to the numbers it is median. I'm sure there are larger salaries out there but this article makes it sound like it is normal. Which in a roundabout way was my point.
Boston has a lot of robotics which seems to pay less for some reason (less profitable? Can't scale as cheaply?) and biotech which pays less. That could be one cause.
It's harder to transfer on robotics and biotech as ramping up a projects takes a long time and there's a lot of bespoke tooling. In my experience the jobs that pay the most are where engineers can switch and quickly be productive, as the main force actually driving salaries up are people quitting for a higher pay. The company hiring you for more than average needs you to be productive quickly.
Would you work on increasing ad click rate by 0.01% or on playing with cool tech toys and solving hard robotics problem? This is the same as SpaceX being able to pay under market - what you do matter and people are ready to take paycut to work on intersting problems.
In order to negotiate high compensation, you must be selling something in high demand and selling to someone with lots of cash (or cash equivalent like FAANG RSU). I suspect robotics companies’ cash flow does not look like the FAANG company’s.
Go to any little league practice in MetroWest, look over at the dads. Not the guy in the fleece vest - he works for a consulting firm or something. The two guys next to him, though? Both of them are ex CTOs. Only one of them wrote two books though.
I mostly just like to be able to comment as a nobody and not in any of my official capacities. I'm not a troll account, nothing in my comments here would hurt my career, so really... go ahead. Not sure why anyone would want to, though. shrug
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 :)
>every time I see an article like this, I think I am doing something "very wrong"
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?
It was data. The "I must be doing something wrong" was tongue in cheek. The specific data point was that I am not seeing any salaries anywhere near that. And Salary.com actually backs me up.
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.
Fortune 100 companies don't necessarily pay well for software engineers. The bigger a company is, the more that resources concentrate to the top of the company. Besides, a non-tech company will consider their tech departments cost center, which means the pay will not be good. Tech companies pay much better, both in cash and in equity. Note a company does not have to be technical in your eyes, but needs to be technical in its management's perspective.
> We always show salary as a normal distribution but maybe it is bimodal.
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.
> 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.
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 mean “tech position” is extremely vague here if you’re going to make them code because what you actually need is an engineer then yeah I would prefer the leetcoder too but if you’re going to build a team and put processes in place then I’d go for the CTO. I think it all depends on the position specifics. Generally speaking tho the CTO interview is VERY different than a typical engineer or senior engineer.
The leet code thing is overstated. I’ve rarely seen “hard” questions asked and when they are asked, often the maximally efficient solution is not required to do well in the interview.
I'm a bit confused about what you're saying. levels.fyi is accurate and there are plenty of remote jobs available. So the 300k+ salaries are certainly available from Boston. If you're not willing to prove that you can pass system design, coding, and leadership interviews then that's a different matter. FWIW I recently interviewed for staff at a bay area big tech company and there was no leetcode-style coding interview: system design, leadership, presenting previous work, and a simple non-algorithmic coding discussion.
The comment I'm replying to specifically mentions Leet Code (I am assuming that is what LC stood for) which is the only reason I brought it up. Your point is exactly my point, leet code is not relevant to the type of position I'd be looking for.
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).
> leet code is not relevant to the type of position I'd be looking for
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.
> Your point is exactly my point, leet code is not relevant to the type of position I'd be looking for.
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.
I'm not complaining, if you read my posts am saying the article is not representative of a majority of software engineers' experience. Using my career as an example. I even explicitly say that in the very comment you are replying to.
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?
> leet code is not relevant because the questions asked at that level are typically not algorithms
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.
I've never gone through a FAANG interview but I have gone through some fortune 100s and never once been asked an algorithm questions. But I have no reason not to believe you about FAANG.
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.
Big difference between FAANG and other fortune companies is that FAANG expect their managers up to very senior level to be technical and be able to code even if they do not code day to day. Other Fortune 100 companies are happy to have non-technical managers to manage engineers with mixed results.
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.
I am not the GP and I mean no disrespect to you. Your below phrasing seems presumptuous to me -
>>..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.
I actually agree with you. You have a point. I would probably practice Leet Code or similar before I went back into the interview world just to freshen up.
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.
Maybe you didn't mean to use that word but it's not about "explaining" them: you have to be able to write the code to solve a given problem, on the spot. The problem might require a familiar technique such as breadth-first search but it will need to be adapted; the problem is likely to be slightly different from anything you've seen before.
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.
I meant explain. I see explain as a superset of implement. I have met lots of people who can implement but not explain. I didn't mean a simple explanation, I mean actually going into depth about things like algorithmic complexity, memory usage, etc.
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.
> I mean actually going into depth about things like algorithmic complexity, memory usage
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.
>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.
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.
Read what I said again. My point was not that algorithms are irrelevant but they are table stakes. I have known all the algorithms on Leet Code for years.
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.
>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.
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.
Mostly because I stayed at my last job way too long and when I was finally ready to leave I started my own company vs job hunting.
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).
If you are great at algorithms, have 20 years of experience with a great track record and live near a great tech university so plenty of tech companies, then you are doing something really wrong if you just earn $175k a year. Or you intentionally choose to have a low salary and prioritize other things, but if you did that then you'd know about it instead of asking this question.
You're being downvoted (not by me) but you have a point. I did two things wrong that I know of:
- 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.
I feel like those 2 points are just excuses(no offense but plenty of people would kill for a chance to even go to college)...if you were to go back would you hold off graduating college until after the recession? It sounds like you are extremely proficient in the technical space, are you good at negotiating and/or identifying where the value is? There is really no reason for someone to stay on a linear pay progression when moving from one job to the next, or even one title to the next.
A lot of research has been done on how the recession stunted career growth for anyone who graduated into it. Effectively anyone who graduated during it got passed over for the people who did graduated right after it. Leaving the people who graduated during it in underemployment and unable to move on because companies were more willing to hire people who were fresh graduates than people who were underemployed.
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.
Yes, I mean hindsight is 20/20 and no one could have really predicted the fallout from and during the great recession. It generally sounds like you are doing fairly well now, and that is a fantastic accomplishment. Realistically speaking there are few times in our lives where we have 'almost no choice'. The truth is that you didn't see a choice that was appealing to you, but that's just my 2c, and with inflation nowadays the 2c is worth even less hahaha.
>I am making the mean salary for my region and that mean is not what is represented in this article.
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.
Or maybe, the more you are experienced and able to solve problems. Any problems. And produce quality software that performs. Then maybe the more unique that makes you. Which is not what FAANGs are looking for. They want a smart enough human, that is replaceable enough. And they will pay a lot for people that accept to play by the rules.
> My point was not that algorithms are irrelevant but they are table stakes
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
> 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.
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).
At the risk of being trite, the response to FAANG employees being underpaid is also more or less 'you're underpaid, brah, go get another job!'. The bar for hiring and compensation is much higher, but management still wants to minimizing costs. This means systematically limiting internal salary growth, and hiring external rockstars at higher salaries to replace the internal rockstars that leave. Overall, it seems to be more effective to spend a couple months preparing/interviewing for the role you want than navigating the internal bureaucracy for an indefinite amount of time on the order of years.
>I'd love to hear a practical, actionable response to "I'm a senior FAANG who makes 75% of the "average" on levels.fyi. All other job offers I've seen are ± 2% of that. What next?"
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).
Yea, I removed the example scenario because it's kind of pointless, in order to zero in on bias.
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?"
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
> grind LC for however long you need in order to be comfortable solving hard problems cleanly in 35-45 minutes
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.
•Boston area
•7 yoe
•Staff level
•Full remote
•Co is SF-based
•$250 total comp
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
7 yoe at FAANG is double that and they're all permanent remote now (except Apple). Diminishing returns n all regarding TC but you didn't hack the system or anything with that strategy.
But how is an alternative? It's half the money. Reminds of a Russian joke: daughter asks mom for milk. Mom says sure there's a pale of water underneath the bed
The person you’re replying to has nearly 3x the yoe and significantly lower TC, pretty simple. And like you say, there are always people in these threads saying “good TC doesn’t exist where I am.” Finally, you’re assuming everyone wants to work for FAANG.
You should have negotiated for equity. That's where all the real money is. RSUs/ISOs/NSOs whatever. If you were CTO of a revenue generating project and didn't get a % of the business, that is what you did wrong.
As someone who works in an Eastern European country, i also did a writeup on how much i've made over the years and how that figure has changed, while working for a local company: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
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.
You are grossly underpaid, even for eastern europe. Guys just across the border (or two) from you make 2x+ more, while paying next to nothing in taxes (5% I've heard, as faux contractors) and enjoying some of lowest CoL in europe - https://jobs.dou.ua/salaries/dynamics/
> 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.
Yep, that could definitely be: especially since i started work as a student, before getting either my Bachelor's or Master's. I guess i can only say that the wisdom of needing to job hop every X years is certainly based in reality, at least when it comes to the majority of companies and earning potential.
Why are these numbers so massively different across the world?
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)
My point is: it seems to me that it is possible that labor unions in Europe are less effective at bargaining than individuals in the US, but I'd like to see research. I didn't intend to imply the US software industry is unionized; the US barely has any union jobs in 2021.
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.
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.
Mostly public sector (around 1/3 unionized). Private is around 6%[1]. And after the public sector it's transport, utilities, telecoms, construction, manufacturing. Basically a laundry list of underperformance in the US -- important sectors (govt especially) choked to death by rent-seeking and complacency.
there are, to my knowledge, no labor unions for software developers in Europe. Some people have union contracts through industries that are fully unionized and happen to need software developers, but that doesn't translate to really high salaries that you see in IT.
What country? Serbia's GDP per capita is about 1/10 of the United States. Software developers make less money there because everyone makes less money there.
Man, some Eastern Europeans offered to write an app for me for $2000, and I assumed it was a scam since it'd be 50+ hours of work. Maybe I should hit those guys up again, if someone posting to HackerNews is making less as a programmer there than you'd make flipping burgers in California
I'm a refugee from Nicaragua living in Mexico. I have legal status (thank god) but my paperwork is still a mess. So I freelance on Upwork.
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
Unions make sure everyone gets paid fairly equally. That doesn't work in a top heavy profession like software engineering where the top are 5x better and paid 5x more than the bottom.
I would add two reasons in addition to those already discussed:
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.
The addressable customer market is one big difference. American companies sell to the world. Eastern EU companies are largely stuck with eastern Europe or EU at large.
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.
VCs and senior executives are largely hesitant to randomly go hire from any random country, eastern European or not. Unless there is an established city, like say, Bucharest. Most managers don't want to deal with 1 person in each random city. Having an official office in a big EU city is no brainer. It is being done as well.
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.
Some can. But hiring people in another country adds another layer or two of indirection.
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.
In some cases, they can. A friend of mine is a project manager for CC Bill, a payment processor for porn sites. They hire almost exclusively from eastern Europe for software development. But if you want to do business with the US government or financial or healthcare industries, i.e. where most of the money is if you're not an ad tech giant, you're largely restricted to hiring US persons. That doesn't mean they need to be citizens, but they need to live in the US, and live here legally, which largely means they can command US wages.
American companies can but the pool is not large enough to open offices there. And if they are opening international offices, it's likely going to be in Asia where there is more money to be made.
If you are in EU, the offices are likely going to be in western Europe or Switzerland or UK - larger addressable markets.
Looking at New Zealand, there are a few drivers to lower pay:
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.
If you're a European developer and underpaid, are you going to start your own company to do the same work but sell it yourself and take all the margin?
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)
> If you're a European developer and underpaid, are you going to start your own company to do the same work but sell it yourself and take all the margin?
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.
> are you going to start your own company to do the same work but sell it yourself and take all the margin?
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.
It's all of that. European tech companies are smaller than US tech companies, have lower gross revenue per employee, make less profit per employee. Taxes are higher in Europe, which disincentivizes risk taking and ambitious individuals. Labor productivity is also lower in Europe. 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.
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.
> 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.
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
You need only look at the makeup of every MBA, MEng, MS, and STEM PhD program. 50% European and 50% Asian, all foreigners (i.e. immigrated on a student visa). If there was no brain drain then you'd expect mostly US permanent residents/citizens.
Brain drain doesn’t mean that all top talent is gone, but rather that there is less of it than there would have been otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 is just mind numbing regulation coupled with systematic risk aversion.
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.
Yes, thank you very much, that’s the most sensible tip from a business / commercial perspective I also share locally when asked for advice: plan for the anglosphere natively. Not that there are no success stories from Europe as well, they are just much rarer and too much too often much smaller and deeply fatigued by years spent fighting fragmentation.
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.
Aside from games, European companies founded by tech entrepreneurs are extremely rare, and are only really appearing in the last decade.
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".
Much longer history, higher fragmentation and the constant need to avoid wars after the fall of the Roman empire made humanities/politics/commerce prevail dramatically upon science/tech/innovation. Edit: you can see a living example of this at work again with the increasing feud between the EU and the UK after the Brexit (even before that but, you know, it was aptly defused from within).
> Taxes are higher in Europe, which disincentivizes risk taking and ambitious individuals.
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.
>So based on these tests, which country has the programmers that score the highest?
>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.
> Taxes are higher in Europe, which disincentivizes risk taking and ambitious individuals.
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.
Safety nets provided by European countries are intended mainly for not ending homeless.
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.
Only for lower income earners. A great health plan is $1k-1.5k/mo, which is crushing if your savings or excess capital are in the 5 digits or less.
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.
You can raise capital so easily with any traction (seriously, if you have any credible paying customers at all YC will take you and that unlocks funding from everyone else). The cost of health insurance is negligible compared to the astronomical salaries of software developers.
It seems to me that risk taking is probably deeply cultural, and is also likely effected by both policy and economic status (collective and individual status). It's probably hard to know how to quantify all of these different effects, but I hope some people are trying to research this!
Culture is not that hard to change when there is money involved. The difference in SV is that there is so much venture capital willing to create new companies. Given that amount of capital, there will always be someone willing to do it.
Doesn't it seem a bit old fashioned that venture capital should be geographically localized, as if it were a physical pile of gold? Is that not on its way out?
There’s probably a big difference in the kind of risk taken. The safety net might lead to starting a coffee roastery vs a VC-backed tech company that will create a thousand jobs and massive advertising revenue.
If things are working so well in Europe, why hasn't most of Europe seen any economic growth in two or three decades? That sure sounds like it's severely broken to me.
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.
> The GDP of Germany and France are both below where they were in 1995 inflation adjusted
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.
USD is supposed to be a bubble, because that's how it was designed (at least after Breton Woods). I realized this when trying to figure out when the GDP of China would be higher than the US, and seeing that this depends less on real Chinese production and more on the crazy valuation of USD.
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.
In fairness, China has twice the population of the entirety of Europe put together. It's easy to expand an economy from a small base, less so when you're already starting from a decent level.
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)
What you said may be true for an individual, but not necessarily a small company. Because of socialist regulations and taxes a small company may have higher startup costs and it may be difficult to lay off employees, which makes hiring someone more risky, along with expanding the business.
You're probably being underpaid even for Latvia. The first thing you should change in your analysis is that you should compare your salary to other software developers, not the general national average for all people. I would hope that the Central Statistic Bureau of Latvia provides this data, but you'd have to search for it yourself.
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.
Salaries in Lithuania are about the same as Estonia, however I've heard of contractors getting nearly €10k/mo (before tax). Even working as a shop assistant you can get up to €1500/mo, so yes I would say OP is very much underpaid.
> i probably should mention that these are the net salaries
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 actually used Upwork before finding the current company, which provided stable income while i was in University.
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.
> Chris can expect to make $300k at a non-FAANG company, but nearly double that if they’re willing to compromise on that “no-FAANG” stance
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.
Exactly. Someone saying they are Staff+ because of their current role at an Akron startup and actually getting an offer for Staff+ from Google or Facebook are very different situations.
At many of the large tech companies, most technical employees will reach a title along the lines of "Senior Software Engineer" or "Senior Member of Technical Staff" and struggle to get promoted past that. At those companies, that title is considered an acceptable "terminal" career level, meaning they wouldn't be considered as stalled or be pushed out. They'll still be plenty productive and generally considered as senior developers. However, to get promoted from there requires a slightly expanded set of skills and experience. That next level is often "Staff Software Engineer".
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 measure of skill. Senior is when you are good enough to lead a team with your technical skills, staff is when you can lead a team of seniors. Typical people reach senior level after 5 years and never reach staff level, so a typical engineer would still be senior even after 20 years.
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.
Spot on, maybe just an explanation of what "skill" means here: it's not just technical skills, beyond the "lowest terminal level" political skills matter more and more.
I'm a Staff engineer are a small company with about 15 years of experience in Denver. As a full time employee I've never made over $160K base. As a contractor I've made over $250k (but with about $40k of that going to taxes and benefits virtually paid by an employer.)
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.
Happiness should always be a factor, but I will argue that sanity permitting you should always test out new waters. Perhaps you might be satisfied at retirement with what you’ve got, but if you can forge new paths without sacrificing the clearly important parts of your life (sanity and family) then I believe that you owe it to yourself to do so. Not every half a mill job is fun but there are fun ones from what I hear.
That’s the whole problem with this kind of analysis. You can’t just ignore that there is market segmentation (I hate the term “tiers” but that’s really what it is).
The expectations might be higher, but you have access to a very high caliber infrastructure and mentors that increases your productivity. So onboarding might be a big leap during the transition period. But I think that explains more of the difference than a skill gap. Lots of great Staff+ SE decide to work at non-FAANG.
The point they're making is that someone who is "staff" at a random company might not get hired as "staff" at Google. Anecdotally, I know people who have been "principal" or similar at other places and come to Google as L4 or 5 with a raise and interesting work.
If you're offering fabulous compensation packages that exceed the President of the United States for common software engineers with a little experience... wouldn't you want to use that to your advantage in your job postings?
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.
Just looking at the raw numbers they all seem outrageous. But if you take a look at some of these companies it makes a lot more sense.
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.
Right, it is a bit dumb that company compensation is so opaque. But these salaries are correct, I read about them online, saw enough people verify they are correct to trust, did the work to get in and got these high numbers. They aren't fake.
> If you're offering fabulous compensation packages that exceed the President of the United States for common software engineers with a little experience... wouldn't you want to use that to your advantage in your job postings?
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.
www.levels.fyi will get you a salary range for most companies. Based on my own compensation and that of trusted friends the real numbers are actually a bit higher than what's on levels.fyi right now. (Seattle)
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.
This. levels.fyi is quite accurate both in first-hand data and when discussing salaries with folks that are coming from companies represented on the site.
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+)
Notably these are lower than salaries in SF or Seattle. Unfortunately, all the VP level jobs were in office and not in Colorado. Note again that this is before bonus (which starts at 15%+~5% based on performance, but for the higher level roles can reach like 30%+10% based on performance), and stock which starts at maybe 30-50% of your salary, but by Senior or Staff can be larger than your salary. I think some of these are also on the low side, 137,000 is below the bottom of the band for L5, my hunch here is some combination of data entry mistakes and willingness to accept L-1 for a role ("we'd prefer Staff but will take a Senior with some additional experience") so the salary requirements reflect that.
MS has a bonus structure that's a bit worse than Google and FB, and pays a lot less stock.
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).
Man, every time I think I’ve finally caught up to the market rate, I find out I’m behind again
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…
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...
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...
There are also people who do the thing you do who likely make much more. Just as there are folks who did what GP did and make much less.
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 sort of sounds like you're resentful of the american engineer making $500k that you're replying to. But maybe the resent should be directed towards the executives and finance people in europe who make huge salaries just because that's the tradition.
Yeah except the PM and cabinet minister's will pull in 20x later on some board or w/ lobbyists they've been friendly with. That's their stock I suppose.
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).
They definitely ARE all-in on arbitrage. The FAANG megacorps are all pulling in upwards of $2M in revenue per year per coder on average. So what if some of them cost $600k/year?
How does that work with the recent 'they need to return to the office' + anyone remotely working for Facebook outside the US will never make hundreds of thousands as a developer.
That's exactly my point: a dev working for Facebook in Hungary will probably make decent money but it will still be a fraction of what he could be making in the US..
The rough estimates I’ve seen are: $100k USD in MPK becomes about 85k CAD. But also I think they just don’t fill as senior roles in Canada so the upper limit is lower. If you want to make more money, I think it’s worth a shot -- if the offer is bad, you don’t have to take it.
> 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!
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.
The US president’s compensation is far more than $400k per year including all the post employment benefits. Just the $200k+ per year annuity (inflation adjusted to boot) for the rest of their life is worth millions if they live more than ~6 years, and it only takes 4 years to earn it. Due to his young age, Obama easily got a few extra millions per year just in the value of the annuity.
Check the discussions on Blind. Total compensation discussions are completely bonkers and I believe they are true based on some interviews I had for remote roles in US.
I'm a founder taking a significant pay cut and worked at early stage startups before that. Had a few hot new ML startups try to recruit me and their offers are nowhere near what my friends at FAANG are making.
Last time I was looking for work 8 years ago the gap was nowhere near this large.
Not sure about founders, but if you're looking to hire top talent you need to pay them, give them the promise of meaningful equity. Software engineering is one of those professions where you don't work a 9 - 5 job. I'm constantly thinking about problems at work, while i do mundane tasks like cleaning my apartment, or doing the dishes.
Yes but unfortunately most startups can't afford to compete with monopolies. As the OP mentions I'd recommend anyone considering startups to value equity at $0 unless it's a late stage company with a lot of traction and top VCs backing them.
Stripe being founded 12 years ago with 7 billion in revenue I don't call a startup. Might as well call facebook a startup at this point. Databricks is 8 years old. They are just private.
Yeah that's not a "competitive" difference any more, that's approaching levels of annual compensation nearly a full seed round for a whole startup.
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.
I see these mind boggling sums in the Valley, $300.000, $600.000, can you please translate: how much does that net you per month, after taxes, reasonable healthcare and rent, ideally no further than 1 hour commute and free of black mold?
I'm in Seattle so the situation is a bit better than the valley. But here's a breakdown:
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.
I just put the extra money into regular investment account. My investments account tend to perform better than the rather boring results that 401k accounts give me. Would be different story, if I was allowed to contribute to Roth IRA. I actually didn't know about the backdoor conversion until this year, but that loophole seems to be on its way out.
If you want to purchase a home, you probably need to replace 2k with 4k-5k/month for a mortgage on a home (30 year loan) + ~1k/month in property taxes.
I own a 1500 sq ft townhouse that I bought in 2017 for $480K with $80k down (all from RSUs, which if I had kept in AMZN would be worth... a lot more). My mortgage (refi'd in 2019) + HOA + taxes are $2500 a month.
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
> Assuming $500k in a big coastal city: $285k after taxes
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.
Is your TC number including the stock appreciation from the time of award to the time it vested? Because if it doesn't (and I think that's how we should talk about TC), it looks to be pretty good to me.
> looks like it’s leetcode time
Haven't searched for a job in a few years, but would consider based on TC.
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.
Interview problems that are stripped down versions of real problems faced on the job are gaining popularity. All of Stripe, Coinbase, and Google gave me interview questions that were recognizably related to their business when I interviewed with them last year. I've always tried to give interviews distilled from my actual job when I interview candidates at Google, but it's hard in a 45-minute block. Some companies are moving toward fewer longer interviews for that reason.
Leetcode will only cover the easiest part (IMO) of the interview. For senior roles, expect to spend half or more of the interview on “system design” and “behavioral” interviewing.
This ^. I’m surprised most people don’t realize this.
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
Your level is mostly determined by years of experience and level of previous positions. Your level might get down adjusted if you perform badly on these interviews, but it wont get adjusted up if you perform well. And passing these interviews is trivial if you actually did your job and didn't waste your years of experience, so the limiting factor is still mostly leetcode and years of experience. (Although experience at better companies is valued higher)
350k TC sounds not bad to me if you're E5 at Facebook or L6 at Amazon. It goes up another 150-200k at the next level (E6/L6 at Facebook/Google, L7 at Amazon, or ICT5 at Apple).
One reason discussing those numbers is hard is the variable compensation section: RSUs.
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.
Sure. A somewhat good TC maximization strategy for a desirable IC is to join a company, wait a year to see how the stock does; if it went up a lot, ride out the four-year grant. If it's down, switch employers.
> 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.
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.
In other news, if you aren't in the valley or working for one of the big tech companies, you're probably making 100-150K as a mid/senior developer. There's a pretty sizable leap.
Yeah I just wrapped up a job search m after hearing how hot the market was. 5YOE, in a relatively large state with a shockingly weak martlet. The highest number I heard was around 140k. I did have some Amazon recruiter reach out, which potentially would have been higher, but I cannot relocated atm, and they would not offer a high enough relocation bonus.
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)
Probably but not necessarily. Don't aspire to be most software engineers if you don't want to get paid like most software engineers haha.
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.
Agreed, there are plenty of people, clearly, that are doing significantly better. My data comes from my own experience, and it may vary. I have been in management, and with that I had access to comp information for a variety of engineers in our organization located at offices across the U.S. I also have a network of former coworkers and friends throughout the Pacific Northwest and we share (roughly, not specifics) how we're doing for comp.
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.
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.
At my first job in financial software, one of my coworkers was an MIT-grad aeronautical engineer with ~5 years experience in aerospace, ~6 months software. He took a pay cut (though not much of one - I think he went from about $90K -> $75K) to get into finance, because aeronautical engineering doesn't really pay you enough money to have a decent life in the Boston area. Within 2 years he'd jumped ship to a hedge fund and was making about double his aerospace salary.
And people wonder why we don't make things in the U.S. anymore...
Makes me wonder if it’s worth it to just say fuck it and leave software development for some other mediocre paying field I have interest in.
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'm not surprised. I'm guessing the aerospace industry is relatively stable in size (we don't suddenly need a lot more planes, spacecraft, or weapon systems than in the past), so employers in that industry don't need to offer big compensation packages to lure away scarce employees from competitors in order to enable that growth.
from talking to friends I think its more that there are really only 2-3 viable employers in the US, so there is little option to jump ship for higher salary. This keeps salaries artificially low. For example a friend of mine worked at raytheon, jumped to lockheed for a raise, back to raytheon for another raise, and then back to lockheed. You can only do that so many times before companies stop hiring you. Whereas in my field (IT consulting) there are an almost infinite amount of small companies to work for
There is a lot more to aerospace than just the primes (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics). There are thousands of smaller companies that produce the parts and services that are used for the big projects.
A lot of the fpga talent is going towards Finance and ML companies nowadays from what I have seen, that's probably causing the salaries to bump up in non finance world.
There's a huge difference between early stage and mid-late stage private companies. For the latter, you are almost always getting RSUs rather than options, so you don't have to pay taxes out of pocket to exercise them. It's also wrong to automatically consider all stock grants to be worth $0 just because you can't immediately sell them. If Stripe or Databricks offers you a million dollars worth of shares today it'll be foolish to say no.
Yes! This advice to value shares of private companies at zero is buried deep in the article, but I think it renders the article quite misleading.
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.
Important tip for people considering startups: only join ones that recently raised an A or B round from one of the top VC firms. VCs get to see all of the numbers and won't invest unless there's some sign of upside.
Yeah but after each "validation round", the stock option grant for new hires becomes 0.1x before the validation. Kinda sucks to join right after Series A, get a tiny % (say less than 0.1%) of the company even after 4 years of grinding away, and even then the company doesn't go public so your options are still worth a tiny % of... zero.
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.
All of the rounds have shifted a bunch lately and companies are going public sooner than they used to. What I really meant was that you should join companies that are on a clear path to have a major exit within the next 2-3 years.
What companies are exiting within 2-3 years of raising a Series A, B, or even C? Strongly disagree that companies are going public sooner, if you compare when eg msft / goog went public vs airbnb / uber the market cap is radically larger and the companies are much older.
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.
Yeah, and once it starts to boom, the dilution of shares is crazy because the investors start to pile into their pool (which is also your pool if you're an employee). Founders shares are really the only good ones, because that pool doesn't dilute the more money they raise. I'm not sure if this is always true but when I started contracting for startups I hear a lot about this.
Even the ones that don't fail usually don't work out that well for employees because of liquidation preferences. It only takes one down round or mildly successful acquihire to wipe out employees.
> 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.
It's close enough to 0 to be a rounding error. Even some of the recent unicorn IPOs didn't return enough for employees to offset what they could have made working at FAANG.
Before Facebook was the F in FAANG it was a private company (as were the others obviously). The IPO was only in 2012 - a large number of people became millionaires.
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.
Things are getting a bit wild since the pandemic but prior to 2020 we only had a handful of tech IPOs per year, for every Uber there were thousands of promising failed startups.
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.
They are a big lottery ticket. Lottery tickets doesn't have 0 value but you can't count on them having more than 0 value.
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.
So there are all these people in these threads who are like "I only make $175K/200K/150K, I feel like I'm grossly underpaid when I read these things."
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?
Stupid question but have you actually ever tried? Your tech stack seems modern enough that I'd be surprised if you couldn't get some offers from startups. New grad level at a startup generally pays 90k+ in my market so you shouldn't have a problem at least matching your current comp but I think 150-200k is probably reasonable but you might need to work remote for a company in a major city.
It is low given your level of experience and self-proclaimed proficiency, but the point is that it should be relatively straight forward to get one of these positions and double your salary.
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.
I left tech at the university as soon as it started feeling like things were "getting old." And at that point I realized I should have left maybe 4 years earlier to get on with my career.
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.
I don't know if it's right for everyone, but the way I did it was to practice a bunch of leetcode style questions and send out resumes go for job postings at big companies.
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.
I think there are many straightforward answers.
Try to get the $500k jobs. If that doesn't work and you don't want to grind LC for 6 months, go for $150-200k jobs like startups. If you are as good as you say you are, you could probably study/talk your way into a job or at least figure out what you need after applying to 100 startups.
Faangs always seem to be hiring, not sure but having a LinkedIn seems to get inbound Faang recruiters, at least for me as a US dev. And startups, YC who's hiring has worked for friends, I'm sure grinding applications on aggregators like indeed, stackoverflow, angelist etc has some chance of working.
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.
These articles always undershoot the top end comp. I’m staff+ with ~15 years exp at a FANG like big tech company. I currently make low seven figures. I don’t think I’m unique among my peer group. When you add in refreshers and stock appreciation it gets even higher. Currently remote.
It's because they are estimating new offers given out today. It's understood that people with a few years' tenure could be making a lot more due to stock appreciation, but if you are in the job market today that data point is useless and only messes up the expectations.
Are you certain? I imagine if you get an offer, and they really want somebody at your level, they'd have to beat or at least match the TC unless it is Fuchsia or some other hot rod project.
I’m wondering if I’m just not worth as much money or if I’m not paid as much because I don’t work in California or both, lol. I work for an enormous company. I’ve got about 8 or so years experience. As of right now I’m a sr architect and I work on enterprise-level systems - either designing or enhancing existing processes and platforms. I don’t really code much these days, though I do write a lot of sql, build lots of diagrams, and build a lot of sample requests for various groups when they aren’t quite getting something from the docs. I make 180 TC and live in the north east though not NYC or Boston. That said, I also have a two floor plus fully finished basement home with three bedrooms, four bathrooms, a nice yard, garage, and a nice deck that I can work on when the weather is nice. So, I’m not complaining, I feel like I live comfortably. But man if I had an extra 200k to just throw into savings and investing? Whooo boy…
Writing SQL and drawing diagrams for enterprise systems inside of a huge company is not what the highly-compensated senior engineers tend to be doing. If you want to make more money, move out of being an “architect” and into being a principal engineer at a tech company (one whose business is making software; not a company that just happens to employ software developers).
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"
What the heck, principle engineer is considered higher than architect? What about principle architect? I might need a flowchart somewhere that describes all the tech levels above "senior software engineer".
From what I've seen architects are alongside engineers, not above. Also depends on what kind of architect - solution architecture tends to be a completely separate track, etc.
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.
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.
> surely the folks who are pulling those kinds of salaries are working on really interesting problems
> ...
> 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.
If you don’t mind my asking, what would you say you spend most of your time doing in a week? For me it’s a lot of requirements gathering and sketching things out then developers go off and build it. For example next week I’ll be working with a few other architects on some identity resolution projects. But we’ll just design the system, the engineers will take our specs and go off and build it.
I luckily still get to write code (not that common at my level), mostly gnarly undocumented bugs where you need to read the linux source code because the behavior is not documented anywhere else. But most of my time is usually split halfway between coaching and helping our junior and mid level engineers, pair programming, telling them that yes, they need all those tests, stuff like that and coordinating with other senior-er engineers on big projects, making sure we don't step on each other toes and lately optimizing the overall architecture of the product which has a lot of overhead right now (we build a big monolithic piece of software, not the easiest ship to steer).
COL is part of this, but I think the things to consider are that software engineers are worth more based on the scale of our work, and network effects can drive up our market price. I believe the scale argument is self-evident, so I'll expand on the network effects:
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.
For someone who is way out of this loop, what does a typical day look like for someone who make $300k at a "tech" job? $600k? Is it actually programming intensive? Like the guy who wrote the default calculator app on the iphone was making that kind of a salary? Or are you managing teams of programmers? Architecing? Is it something like 16 hour days are the norm?
Honestly it is not too different than working at a small product shop or consultancy. Except:
- typically less stress and fewer hours since everyone you work with is much more competent on average (def still have some dumb dumbs or the occasional psycho though)
- You have a deeper “bench” so if you are an elite performer (which you tend to be if you go small tech co to bug tech co) then there are more like you and you are not single threaded on everything. (Downside: you are much more replaceable and being “the guy” is much harder, very noticeable at the Sr/staff/+ levels)
- You code way less. Much fewer “at bats” a lot more reading, researching, working across teams, figuring out the best solution, having it reviewed and then a relatively quick implementation.
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 worked at Google. $300k is a few years out of college if you do ok and get promoted once. You write code and maybe onboard a junior now and then. 8 hour workdays, but nobody checks so you can work less if you want. So it is just a regular coding job.
Your mistake is thinking these are substantially different jobs than any other. Don't fall into the Just World fallacy where you try to justify why compensation is so high by assuming there must be some hidden tradeoff. The tech job market just isn't very efficient.
At Google making 300k total comp means you're probably a high-performing L4 or a new L5 (senior). Your day can look like absolutely anything.
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)
He’s taking the tail end of a distribution in one geolocation and translating it to another geolocation, but then associating it with the median of that location. This is a mistake and his estimates are inflated. Of course it’s always easy to sell “you’re underpaid” because everyone likes to hear it. If you’re feeling inadequate, realize this is likely way off the mark.
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.
I've been remote for 5 years. I have been happy to take a 50% reduction in what I could be making. In the past, I would wake up in the morning and find myself willing to pay more money than I would make that day in order to not have to go into work. The economics of that didn't work out. I also work for a mission driven organization that is on a tight budget. I make enough money, but more importantly, I have not had a single day in five years where I didn't want to go to work. That's pretty priceless.
I completely agree. (largely because of covid), I got to see both my children grow up and then go to elementry school. I wouldn't trade that for anything in the world.
Are a lot of these 300k-500k TC positions putting in 40 hour work weeks or more?
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.
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...
> Things get different at the super senior levels making several million
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.
Eh, I helped several people job hunt this year, here are the offers accepted (total comp, not salary, which tends to cap around 200k). None of the people listed have more than 5 years of experience:
None at FAANG (aside from Netflix, none of the other letters pay top dollar for anything below staff anymore anyway). These were mostly companies that had IPO'd more recently, very late stage startups close to IPO.
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)
How many people go into programming now simply for the money? More than 70%?
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?
This is the most depressing/soul-crushing thing you discover if you're passionate about programming your entire life and then finally break into the industry.
You realize you're the weirdo, and after years of everyone else being blatant about really not caring, it starts to wear on you.
Honestly, I prefer to work with people who are in it long term for the money. Much more rational, much more pragmatic, much less bike shedding and holy wars, much higher degree of professionalism.
“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”
My informal poll last year of my friends suggest a 50-60% drop rate. I asked about 30 friends who are still coding for work. Almost 20 of them said they would not code anymore if they can find equivalent salary.
The problem is that they can’t find jobs as IC to make $200-250K a year. Unless they go to management, but that’s another career track they need to learn and move to. I think software engineering is one of the highest paid job as IC other than maybe doctors.
No. Truly passionate programmer doesn't ship at all, they create work for themselves.
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.
I guess if you redefine what programming is you can say that. It is literally just finding efficient and maintainable ways to shuffle 0s and 1s so a computer does something a user wants it to do. Thats it.
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 got into programming because I love computers and messing with them. I took a job as a professional Software Engineer because the job market was excellent and I could get paid for doing what I found fun. The money was good but I'd have done it for less at the time.
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.
If competitive salary wasn't a concern in life, I would make my living casually playing video games. And specifically for the exact amount of hours that I would like to allocate toward it every day (because hours are part of the competitiveness of salary, and 40 hour weeks aren't a permanently fixed standard).
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.
Yeah, all of the above. The market was a lot less hot in 2010 on the back of the 2008 financial crisis; Intel is just kind of a shitty employer all around; and illegal no-hire collusion didn't help.
I think there are many other companies now paying or exceeding FAANG. Some of them are - Stripe, Databricks, Coinbase, Dropbox, Uber, Lyft, Twitter (to some extent), DoorDash, Airbnb, etc
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.
Which is the point I'm trying to make. To think that only FAANG companies pay that much is incorrect. Multiple companies are now competing to hire great talent and the only way forward is that they pay competitively.
I wouldn't want any engineer to ever consider a job which doesn't pay them a fair market wage.
I think within these conversations FAANG is just a term to stand-in for those type of companies and not just the 5 listed ones. Maybe FAANG+ would be more explicit and clearer?
Maybe, but when I say I don't want to work for FAANG, I really mean 3-4 of these 5 companies are definite NO, which biases me against the focusing my skills toward FAANG like interviews.
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.
The reason the poster arrived at this is that they are valuing stock options as $0. Of course there are non-FAANG companies with liquid stock, but this seems not to enter the calculation. If you were to consider those, you'd find that while FAANG pays well, it's not _that_ much of a premium.
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.
It's not a good rule of thumb. There definitely are some tech companies that pay less than half of FAANG (especially among small startups and eng roles in less tech centric companies), but there are also a lot of companies that have similar salaries to FAANG.
Base comp probably... but the OP is discounting equity almost entirely:
> 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.
Ah, I’ve worked with a lot of people who didn’t hit it big with stock options and suffered ruinous tax liabilities in some cases.. Zero is probably too little, but if you’re being paid way under-market in cash and having to dip into that to exercise options and pay taxes, zero might actually be a good middle ground between the best and worst cases
There may be cases I'm missing, but afaik you never *have* to suffer ruinous tax liabilities from stock comp if you're willing to just eat the gains as raw income (making the (often smart) gamble to hit LCTG is what will get you in trouble).
It is very difficult to run into ruinous tax problems with publicly traded companies, but it's possible. There's a delay between the vest date and when you can actually sell your shares. Normally this is just a few days, but if something dire happens your stock can still tank in this window. If $100k of RSUs vest and then drop to $0 in value before you can sell, you have $100k of income to pay taxes on, and can only credit $3k of your capital losses per year towards normal income.
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.
Mmm, I've always had the option to "withhold shares" for tax obligations for vesting RSUs; I don't think I've had a delay.
> 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.
Yikes this sounds like a terrible deal for an employee. How long as these expiry dates? So if I get options in a company at a high valuation and pay taxes on the fair market value at that time and the valuation dips by the time I am able to exercise them, I have effectively lost money? Sorry, just trying to figure this out.
I hope it's not "ruinous", but I think the other "gamble" that can play out badly is when you exercise and incur a large AMT liability for the year you exercise, but the company may still be years from exit.
Kiiiiinda? If you put the unicorns also on the FAANG bag, which I think you should because the type of work you do on those is very similar.
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.
Last time I checked a really good rule of thumb is that FAANG pays double the median salary for software engineers, no matter where in the world you check. There are however companies all over that spectrum so it isn't like there is a cliff between FAANG and the rest, but it is true that most developers would massively increase their salaries by joining a FAANG.
No, it is not a good rule of thumb. Many non-FAANG tech companies pay at least as much as FAANG; I think it is more the case that FAANG pays a small discount to market based on reputation.
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.
You're correct that FAANG salaries are not always incredible, but thanks to the red-hot stock market, total comp can be ludicrous. Many people are earning more from their share program than salaries, and that doesn't even account for capital gains for existing holdings.
I honestly find it hard to believe that there are a lot of jobs available offering those kinds of salaries. Especially when we are talking about working remotely from outside the Bay area and for average size companies.
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.
While I don't have doubts about this being a good way to find rough outlines for compensation, I'm yet to find a reliable source of data for Europe. Has anyone else had better luck?
in the UK, junior is £20-40k, mid-level is around £40-60k, lead can be around £60-100k. Very rough numbers, and adjust upwards slightly for London. The big money is in contracting in the UK, which would be our accessible FAANG-equivalent.
Either contracting, or alternatively, consulting. Companies like Cambridge Consulting and et al (please correct me if I'm wrong, I only know this through word of mouth) earn more in line with our US counterparts supposedly.
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.
I wouldn't say more in line necessarily, unless you work at the big banks in a profit center. Contractors can make anywhere from £300 to about £750 a day unless they land on an extremely profitable niche, which is great money for the UK but not the kind of insane rates SV engineers can get. Of course, cost of living is lower too, especially up north where I am.
typically niches are found or created, rather than listed on job searches. If you're already a contract software engineer, the most accessible 'niche' would be contract/interim CTO positions. Beyond that, specific expertise or contacts in specific industries would be the way forwards; at this point it's not a matter of applying for jobs, but creating opportunities.
[edit] forgot to mention contract (cloud) architects and project managers. They can make a lot, too.
"The rest of the market seem content paying far below, and also content having an eternal manpower shortage as a result it seems"
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..
Very few, actually. They did it recently in my own country- Lithuania, really the best thing ever. It's also in public domain what kind of salaries companies pay( depending on the size,you can get mean, average, etc.)
Norway used to have all the tax return information public through the internet. It's still available publicly to Norwegian taxpayers through a login, but now the person you're looking up knows who viewed their details.
A sibling comment clarified Norway, but I'd like to add a caveat to that. Tax records don't necessarily tell you enough to be able to deduce the compensation package. It only shows the total. You could have switched jobs in june, there's likely no way to tell.
I work as a "tech" guy at a school, and earn WAY less than what anyone in this thread would probably consider a liveable wage, but have good health and retirement benefits.
Earning a modest, but reasonable living and having some stability is not an entirely bad way to go.
I'm in Russia and I make just $5000/year as a full-stack web dev (4+ years).
I threatened to leave, and they found 10 more people who work for even less.
I tried to get hired outside of my country, but no one bothers to respond.
Co-Founder of Levels.fyi here. As Jacob points out, the market is extremely hot right now. It feels like salaries are inching up slightly each month. We're working on improving how numbers are updated and working on weighing recent salaries more heavily. Would really encourage everyone to submit their compensation on the site. We also have some relevant discussions with recruiters from FANG type companies on our team in our community.
What's the consensus on the tech market being really hot right now? Does that imply a potential crash in the future, or simply a "cooling down" or plateau-ing? Can anyone point to some commentary on future expectations, beyond the immediate salary bumps we can get today?
Don't think there is a consensus. We talk to HR / Compensation analysts at companies every week and the consensus is noone knows what's going on / what to do anymore. Companies are scrambling to figure out how much more to pay people so that they can attract the talent they want. Keep in mind the tech industry is supply side constrained (particularly for mid-senior+ talent). As long as that's the case, wages will always go up. The huge immediate increase is due to several macro factors (covid, remote, great resignation, capital flowing into public markets, etc). As those cool, increases may cool down but still trend up likely.
Thank for your work! I’d be really interested to see YoY trend data for the aggregate and for the same level. Also if there is ‘level inflation’ happening over time.
Heya, question: Have you considered including h1b or Colorado job data to help benchmark stuff in addition to self reported data? Its obviously imperfect (referencing my own post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28875365), but given that y'all have the resources to figure out what the locations are (like, how much more companies pay in SF vs. Seattle vs. Colorado), providing the Colorado data scaled based on that would be another neat resource.
Yup have considered it. Like you mentioned they both have flaws like you've already highlighted but we're still thinking of ways we can use it to further augment our dataset.
I haven't been able to get a clear answer for this so hoping you can help – what are companies' appetites for matching existing stock grants for senior hires? Say someone gets a FAANG or "hot startup" offer, but has $800K worth of stock (mainly due to price appreciation) at their current company vesting in the next year, is a direct match out of the question?
Some companies are willing to match stock grants. We've even seen some companies up-level candidates (to meet the higher compensation band) to nudge them out of their current roles where they've experienced a lot of stock growth. That said, there's still probably a cap to it, it'd be really hard even for a Facebook to get someone away from a multi-million dollar vest as an IC. Also keep in mind that all companies won't value options / ISO / private shares as much as public companies.
Hey, thanks for levels.fyi! It makes this kind of accurate compensation math possible in a way that really wasn't before y'all came along. Thanks again!
How long will these last? I'm just in the beginning of my career and am deathly afraid of a dotcom type situation where my earning potential is harmed over the rest of my career.
dotcom was a completely different situation. VC money flowed to companies that had no meaningful revenue. FAANG, on the other hand, are printing billions of dollars per month.
Full disclosure: I work for Secfi (https://www.secfi.com) and we help employees understand and unlock the value of their startup equity.
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)
> Adjusting [$400-600K] to Chris’s current location (Bay Area: +42%; Akron: -11%), they might expect to make about half that ($200k-$300k) staying in Akron.
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.
I don't think 4-5 years experience is Sr level, as used in the Robin example. $100k with 1% of the company seems... OK? The salary is a mid level software engineer is closer to $150k, Chicago should down adjust a bit, so maybe $130k salary in big tech. Realistically, you are looking at $162.5k with bonuses and stock. How much is the startup worth now? She's probably passed on (very roughly) $300k of comp, so if that startup valuation is sitting above $30M she might be close to even and if it provides an exit above $100M she'll have done well. If not, well it was a lottery ticket.
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.
I'm currently working as an architect, equally skilled in coding, design, and communication, making around 225k TC remote, for 4 days a week, which I scored from being here for a while. 25 years experience. Are people in their 40s and 50s able get these higher paying jobs? Is it possible to negotiate working 4 days a week instead of 5?
Cool to see Levels.fyi mentioned here – a lot of people don't know about our verified salary stream newsletter as well, but it's a neat way to keep tabs on the market: https://levels.fyi/verified/ as well as our community (in beta): https://levels.fyi/community/
Thanks for building this product. I used your compensation negotiating service and you helped up my offer by more than 100x what I paid y'all. Keep up the great work!
Say you have $400K of public company stock that vests over 4 years. How much is this worth? (ignoring time value of money for now). $400K? But if the stock tanks then you likely have the option to get another job, so you are less affected by the downside than the upside. How should that factor into your calculation?
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).
It would be hard to find a job that pays $400k cash (yes I'm aware of Netflix) so there isn't much need to put a specific cash value on the RSU component for comparison. You're typically comparing two job offers which both have an RSU component.
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.
It depends how frequently it vests and what percentage vests every period. Amazon is notorious for vesting more of the grant towards the latter part of the vesting period with yearly vesting, while companies like Google are actually frontloading the grant and vesting monthly.
Tech stocks have done really well the last 10 years and will probably continue to do so. People who joined Snapchat a few years ago made over a million a year thanks to the appreciation.
That's pretty low for that long experience even in NZ, what's your role and tech stack at the moment? Maybe I can find a referral for you if you want to stay in NZ. There are also Australian companies hiring remote that pay much better than that (e.g. Atlassian and Zapier,).
Hey I just checked your profile - how did you get experience with both Laravel/PHP and C#/.NET?
I'm currently working with Laravel, and I like it but would prefer to get into C#/.NET.
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.
Ah haha are you me? My situation is exactly the same - your comment makes me feel much better that I'm not the only one!
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.
Are you talking about hiring a remote team and managing them? The answer may very well be yes for organizations that don't know how to properly communicate and utilize tools and methods to manage them. There is an entire middle management class in Silicon Valley that exists to manage engineers in person. Their day consists of many meetings, meetings with their team, cross-functional teams, visiting you and your co-workers in your office/cube and managing your work flow. Their work is not without value. This model has produced most of the software and hardware that we use daily. When you introduce remote teams, you introduce a type of friction that does not work with this model. All of sudden managers are not able to call an in-person meeting. They have to get up early or stay up late to coordinate. There is a perception that the remote team is slow, or not responsive. I have been in meetings at Apple where Steve would excoriate teams in France for not moving as fast as he wanted. This was not the case, but he could not micro-manage them in person.
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.
> 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.
It's honestly remarkable just how much money the FAANG companies can throw around.
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.
The biggest draw is to not evaluate candidate based on Leetcode, that way you don't have to compete with these top companies and can therefore get quality talent for cheap. It is however much harder to evaluate candidate without leetcode, so you need to be really good at that or you'll end up with a mediocre workforce like most other companies that pays mediocre salaries.
Can someone describe what a Staff+ is and how it compares to architect? I think I know but my employer doesn't have that position, or an IC track - it seems that everyone is an engineer, architect, or manager, and a few years ago anyway it seemed like Architect was the senior position to aim for if you didn't want to be a manager.
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.
https://staffeng.com/ is a great resource on this. It describes Architect as one of the possible archetypes[1] of staff engineers, though staff engineers can take on other responsibilities as well. It's possible that the Architect track in your company is just simply their name for this role.
Threads like this kill all hope I have of making a real living if I stay in the tech industry, because I'm stuck in a hole where I need therapy for my social anxiety, ADHD, and depression to maintain the work, but can't afford it due to my wages and can't get my foot in the door anywhere offering the pay and insurance to cover that therapy, which keeps my job prospects dire and leaves me without the ability to afford school. And now that I'm in my mid-30s, that door is about closed forever. Even just 60-75k/yr would be life-changing for me, much less the 300-400k/yr people in this thread are throwing around.
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?
Those really only cover giant tech co's though. Clearly it would be better and more accurate to get real data points, but I think the approach the article describes works well if there isn't a bunch of public data for a company already.
I got a reasonable amount of value out of skimming Blind during a recent switch from big tech to a more niche role. The amount of signal definitely drops (as does the signal-to-noise ratio) but it was still useful to a certain extent.
The outliers are pretty tough to get significant data for. Also my sense is startups tend to pay towards the 50-75th percentile of radford (read: not great) cash comp and balance with equity lotto tickets that the author values at zero. While startup equity is obviously not worth nothing, he is correct in noting it’s quite tricky to negotiate since there’s an inherent information asymmetry there as well.
Why is this being downvoted? Levels.fyi and Blind are great tools. Blind is toxic because posters are obsessive about their TC, but I feel that's a side-affect of not letting people talk about money in their real lives, so they need to be anonymous and vent.
Two things that jumped out at me:
1. It’s 2021. You can get a remote job for a big company that pays 10-15% less in Akron, not 40%. If you don’t want to work remote, you can still use BA remote salaries as leverage for local negotiations.
2. What “ggregoire” said: Engineers vary in quality EVERYWHERE. Many people holding onto CTO-type jobs in Akron or in BA startups can’t always move laterally. The salaries for everyone are rising in 2021, but for the truly strong (or for those who can nail an interview) they are rising even faster.
“I’ve been a software engineer about 5 years. […] I’ve been with a startup about 3.5 years, have taken over Product Management, and I manage other engineers who work on customer-facing projects.
…
At Robin’s level of experience, they’d be mid-career or senior-level at most larger companies – so that would be something like an L4-L5 at Google, ICT3-ICT4 at Apple”
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
I half agree with his math on private stock, though some private stock is like having the same access as the ultra rich to underpriced off market stock..
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?
There are so many jobs right now they wont get filled, so people will have to pay more just to get anyone. Plus people are quitting their jobs to move to new roles and those spaces will need filling.
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.
Usually companies get a new budget/headcount allocation. I doubt it will be relevant to FAANG as much as larger companies that don't have as advanced of a pipeline, but for the non FAANG companies winter is the worst time to find a job.
> Content note: this piece discusses money, quite directly, with specific numbers and examples. Discussions about money can make quite a few people uncomfortable; if that’s you, you might want to skip this post.
Nah! I wouldn't take a pay cut to go remote. In fact, I'd expect the following:
1. Yearly stipend to upgrade my workplace.
2. Quarterly paid trips to meet my teammates either at off-sites or conferences.
it's weird it looks like I make half of what I could as a senior, espcially in a 'hard' algorithm heavy domain
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
Lot's of people can get rich from their salary alone. I know many Silicon Valley workers who chose to live more frugally, invest in properties like duplexes, town homes, etc. and then rent and improve them and increase their net worth that way. When I was at Apple, they would do a 100% 401k match. Is being really rich at 65 good enough for you? That is one way to do it.
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.
These compensation amounts reflect what I am seeing in the market. Whenever I see these amounts, like many others, I am somewhat amazed, but then I stop, look at my own history and reflect on the environment that supports paying a Staff engineer $300k a year.
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.
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.
SV is what happens when you take typical American suburban hell, and then throw literally trillions of dollars on top without changing anything. Yeah, you can afford a Model S. But you're still sitting in traffic on 101 for hours every day. I don't understand how anyone lives there. It's boring as hell. The weather is "nice" but everything is so brown. The only people left are tech people, like you said.
A very good question, thanks for asking! I think about that a lot. This answer is going to get a little bit deep (for me) so please forgive me.
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.
Thanks for sharing and raises a lot of points people miss about work-life balance.
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.
Interestingly, I tried doing a search on a job board for “Hedge Fund Manager”, and there were virtually no results with most not looking like quote what I was looking for. I guess these are not publicly posted positions available to the general public.
I'd also add https://tldroptions.io/ as a quick and dirty potential options valuator. That being said, I agree with the author's default assumption that private options should be valued at zero, especially for financial planning purposes. At the same time, it is this hockey stick that is a strong part of the allure of smaller startups. There's an entirely separate levels.fyi equivalent that needs to be made for the amount of equity employees get at various stages of a company. It should also note that the size size of the exit is inversely proportional to the odds that it'll happen.
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...