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>"senior" is the last level that everyone is expected to hit, and at which you are "allowed" to not seek further promotions.

I was under the impression that Senior is mid-level? I thought the ladder went, Junior/Associate, (Just) Software Engineer, Senior (some places have Senior I/II), then Principal, and finally (Optional for really big companies with R&D like Cisco/Juniper/United Technologies), Fellow or Distinguished Engineer (and Senior Fellow).

>a senior engineer at a large company (and thus earn ~$250k in salary)

I'm under the impression that the $250K salary is total comp, usually $150K in Silicon Valley (which is like $80K in fly-over country) and $100K in stock options/bonuses which varies year to year (e.g., what was the annual bonus of SV programmers in the year of 2002-2005? vested options now worth for employees of TWTR and LivingSocial?); also how secure are these Senior Engineer jobs and people's average tenure at those jobs? What is their hourly wage accounting for how many hours they work?

I propose a better formula for salary range for all job ad's, your cost-of-living adjusted annual salary * (1 - % involuntary attrition per year at your company) * (40 hours / avg hours worked of employees in the team) + (50-percentile bonus) + (employee stock options {if not public 0 else 50-percentile of the cohort of the one year price target of stock analysts}).

Yes, senior is mid-level if you look at a ladder. It's usually SWE I, SWE II, Senior, Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, Distinguished, etc. for large companies.

What I meant was that large companies expect all hires to eventually hit senior, give or take 3 - 6 years. If you don't, they have something of an "up or out" approach, where it counts against you in subsequent reviews. However, not everyone is expected to achieve Staff or higher.

Risk adjustment is definitely appropriate, but I think the author is being conservative even with this in mind.

You're right that "Senior" is still mid-level, but the author is being conservative.

The reality at a healthy, profitable company is something like this: $250k being the "total comp" for someone is a T5 seems right to me, even adjusting for risk. A T5 at Google, Facebook, or Apple is likely earning much more than this as their stock from 4 years ago is vesting at a much higher price than it was granted at.

150k guaranteed comp, 25k bonus, 75k vesting equity is low for the companies w/ equity run-ups in the past several years, in my opinion. Also worth noting -- the bonus is basically guaranteed. It can be much higher if you get very good performance ratings.

The author also didn't include 401k matching (about 8.5k there), free offsites to go skiing or go to Vegas (w/ team trips to Hawaii not unheard of for high profile, long-term projects), generous medical/dental/vision benefits, free food, free gyms, matching charitable donations...

And IDK if it's just my team, I don't see people working extremely long hours.

You're totally right that you're at the mercy of stock prices in some regard -- but it works in two directions. Both FB and GOOG have gone up something like 150% in the past 5 years. So if someone got an initial stock grant of 200k vesting over 4 years, last year that 50k at vest time was more like 100k. Meanwhile they've gotten subsequent equity refresh grants -- the actual equity comp might be more like 200k, not 75k.

> 150k guaranteed comp, 25k bonus, 75k vesting equity is low for the companies w/ equity run-ups in the past several years, in my opinion.

You're right, assuming that everything continues as it has. Nothing is guaranteed; that 150k can vanish in a puff of smoke through no fault of your own, and take all your unvested comp along with it.

> the bonus is basically guaranteed.

No, it is not. Many, many people will tell you of their time spent at BigCo when the economy is not booming, and after the free donuts, the first thing that goes is the bonus. You have to read the bonus plan very carefully to understand how it's computed. It's quite possible that your bonus at Facebook or whatever depends solely on your own rating, but at most companies that's just the final multiplier and all kinds of other things have to happen in order for the bonus pool to exist at all. In even mild headwinds, it's likely that only a part of the expected bonus will be paid, and not unusual for there to be none at all. Furthermore, the bonus plan is usually determined one year at a time, so the fact that whatever needed to happen this year for everyone to be paid at 100% did happen is no guarantee that the criteria in next year's plan will be satisfied.

Do not assume that the future looks exactly like the recent past. It is certainly possible that the near future will be even better than the recent past, but at least some kind of mean reversion is a hell of a lot more likely. I predict that very few people will end up receiving as much total cash for their work over the next 5 years as their simplistic and rosy-eyed calculations of today would indicate.

> I was under the impression that Senior is mid-level?

Yes and no. It's a middle level in that there are levels above it. It's not in the sense that it is where most people will cap out. A senior engineer is expected to be exactly that for most teams, but you will see principles (or whatever) there for the harder/bigger problems.

> It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit senior level and live in a metropolitan area.

If, if, if, if. Just by numbers, most devs don't meet these criteria. And even in the periods of time which I personally have, I still was not making anywhere near this kind of money.

These numbers are inflated and out of reach to the vast majority of developers in the workplace today, full stop.

Yes, there are if's involved. It is not certain that you will achieve senior tier at a large company in a metropolitan area. But you are also not certain to earn anything from your startup equity.

I will reiterate - you are more likely to reach $250k working at a large company than you are to earn it (in salary or lump sum) at a startup.

This has been corroborated by numerous individual's experience in this thread, including my own. I personally interact with companies that pay this on a weekly basis.

You need to quit saying "a metropolitan area" when you mean "Silicon Valley and a few places that have satellite offices for companies based in Silicon Valley," is the thing.

Show me the companies in Columbus, OH that pay that way. Or Milwaukee, WI. Or or or.

New York, Philly and DC exist. They all have tech markets that are not at all dependent on SV.

It is my experience that these figures are well on the high side for Philly though.

So, is hitting the startup jackpot. If a 250k job has 5% odds, and a startup jackpot has 1% odds then it's really worth thinking about.

You're exactly right. And it comes down to simple economic truths. If mass amounts of people could "easily" make 130k out of college on a path to 250k then the hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world would give up their ~$100k jobs and go do that. But they don't. Just look at glassdoor salary averages! It's right there in black and white! The sunny salary numbers he posits are, as you said, out of reach for most.

(It should be noted that I completely agree with the article's conclusion. I've come to feel that the EV of buying a startup lottery ticket is woefully lower than pg, sama or [insert vc/angel here] assert. If you can land a solid and interesting bigco job, that's probably your best bet.)

I think a good number of people just don't know that they're underpaid. I worked 3 years at ~100k, then started interviewing and quickly moved up to the kind of numbers mentioned in the article (note: nyc, so all numbers are somewhat inflated). I also gave up some unvested equity, but there's no way it could be worth anywhere near the salary difference.

Of course most devs don't make it to senior, but even fewer devs cash out significantly from startups. I think that's the point they're trying to make.

i.e Say there are two groups of 100 engineers of equal average ability. One goes into megacorps and the others do startups. Which group will have earned more as a whole after 5 years? 10 years?

> It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit senior level and live in a metropolitan area.

So Dallas doesn't count as a metropolitan area? I can almost guarantee nobody here is making that kind of money after only five years. In fact, I'm willing to bet that this kind of compensation is extremely rare outside SV, NYC, and possibly Seattle.

In fact, based on what I remember of the salary bands at my former company, it was impossible to reach $250k/year in five years, anywhere in the country.

Some cost of living calculators make $150k in Dallas equal about $250 in NYC. It's worth noting that $150k is high for Dallas, but not impossible for people with Principal, Fellow, or Chief in their job titles.

It's worth noting that using a flat cost-of-living adjustment both overestimates and underestimates things.

The kind of place you'd likely rent in Plano or Addison would cost ridiculous amounts in NYC, given comparable neighborhood qualities and commutes. You can easily afford to have three, four, or more kids. In NYC, one kid is doable, two is a challenge, three is crazy. From that metric, $150k in DFW sounds awesome.

Though if your goal is retirement, maxing out your 401k in NYC is much easier. If you plan on moving to a lower cost-of-living area to retire, or are otherwise looking to hit a certain dollar-figure for some reason (paying for kids to go to college), NYC probably has the edge. That is, people usually adjust their total salaries for cost of living but ignore that annual contributions to medium-term and long-term savings generally shouldn't be adjusted.

> It's worth noting that $150k is high for Dallas, but not impossible for people with Principal, Fellow, or Chief in their job titles.

No one is reaching any of those titles 5 years out of college though.

Absolutely not, no.

> Some cost of living calculators make $150k in Dallas equal about $250 in NYC. It's worth noting that $150k is high for Dallas, but not impossible for people with Principal, Fellow, or Chief in their job titles.

I'm not challenging that. There's a reason after all why I have not yet and never will move to California (well, a bunch of reasons, but most are irrelevant to this). As I said to my other respondent, I'm taking issue with the absolute numbers.

Yes. All other things being equal(and they are, for the most part), if you save 10% of your salary a year, you are going to be a lot wealthier upon retirement living in the higher cost of living place. If you want to maximize your retirement fund, you should be looking to move to the place with the highest cost of living possible.

That's as may be but what are your chances of making the equivalent of 5 years at Dallas BigCorp busting your ass to get to a senior X or X Supervisor in 5 year vs busting your ass at start up in Dallas?

That isn't the point I was addressing. I was concerned with the absolute numbers being floated in this conversation. They are thoroughly unrealistic for people outside a certain few areas.

On this specific point I don't have a good opinion. I don't know much about the startup scene here because nobody is doing things I am interested in, but from what I can tell they seem to be saner than what you get in the Valley because nobody has delusions of unicornhood there. Similarly, there are plenty of bust-your-ass BigCo jobs around here. So both camps seem to pay similarity and seem to have the same scattergun of stress levels.

They are also overestimating the likelihood of hitting the jackpot at a startup. The d100 rule of thumb guidance is insanely optimistic; there is not anywhere close to a 5% chance that your lottery ticket will be worth life-changing money; it's probably 1% at best (and later discussion suggests that 0.5% might be about right). Nor is there a 30% chance your ticket will be worth anything; 10% is more realistic (ignoring all the ways that your ticket in particular may end up being worthless), and the "anything" is likely to be so small as to be noise relative to a BigCo base salary. Remember, a general rule of thumb across all industries is that 90% of new ventures fail within 5 years.

Of course, given today's stock market prices, it's likely that any options you get at BigCo will be out of the money when they finally vest, and there's a good chance your RSUs will be worth less than you're valuing them today. But the effects of these things are still much smaller than the vastly overstated likelihood of ending up with a winning lottery ticket.

> This is so doable within five years that at large companies like Google and Microsoft you are expected to hit senior level, and if you don't it begins to reflect badly on your record. More explicitly, "senior" is the last level that everyone is expected to hit

Not at Amazon. They are fine if people cap out at SDE 2. It's a bit of an odd thing IMO, and it's resulted in a comparatively low number of senior and above level SDE.

Probably because Amazon has enough problem with retention as it is, they don't want to encourage even more people to leave.

Pretty much.

The ratcheting hiring bar[1] and the punishing promo process[2] mean that SDE II has to be treated as a career role as a practical matter for the tech orgs to continue to function. As hard as it is to retain good engineers, it'd be even harder to retain good managers if they were expected to manage all their SDE II's up or out.

[1] - Every new hire is expected to be better than 50% of the current employees in a given role and level across the company. This means the "bar" for a given role and level continuously trends higher modulo attrition.

[2] - Senior engineer candidates typically require at least a dozen peers and managers at or above the senior level to each dedicate a couple of hours to write detailed SBI feedback. The promo candidate's manager then has to spend many more hours crafting a lengthy document from this. The doc then gets reviewed (i.e. picked apart) multiple times at every management tier up to the org VP. At any point along the way it may be punted back for rework, or denied. The process gets even more cumbersome going to principal - so much so that it's often said that the easiest path from senior SDE is to leave Amazon for a couple of years and get hired back as a principal.

source: former Amazonian who really liked working at Amazon, but who finally got an offer elsewhere he couldn't refuse.

> punishing promo process

you mean the ridiculous and pretty broken process?

Amazon is different than those companies in that its leveling options are much smaller. SDE II is a very broad range and at a company like MSFT/GOOG it would realistically map to 2-3 different job levels there based on experience and contribution level. Same with SDE III. Principal+ is probably the most aligned.