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Comment by joesmo | Hacker News Reader

From my experience, I'd say the cap is around $150k in the bay area or so for standard senior positions regardless of degree. The degree is absolutely irrelevant and in many cases if you have an advanced degree, (Masters, PHD) it can work against you (if you don't actually know how to build things).

For reference, with the cost of living being where it is, I'd say anything < $200k in the bay area is not enough to live on and save comfortably, but that's just my opinion. As far as I know, there aren't any startups offering $200k or above (or even close) for engineering jobs in the bay area.

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The guy in the article linked an article, whose author (Dan Luu) seems to think that $250k (total compensation) is pretty much a given for anyone with 5 years of experience working for a big company (i.e. Google or Facebook or Microsoft), and claims that anyone who thinks you can't make that much talk to the tens of thousands of engineers that do. Is it really that common?

When I was interviewing in San Francisco and Seattle at big companies (Zynga and Disney) a couple of years ago, they were wanting to pay me around $130k for a senior position, which didn't seem worth the move.

I also interviewed at Google and while I didn't get as far as salary negotiations, I was lead to believe by the recruiter, I think, that it would start around $110k-ish, although it also wasn't for a senior role.

I don't see how Dan Luu is thinking $200k+ salary is on the low end out there. If I could expect to get that I might actually consider moving to the west coast.

Take a look at Glassdoor. What you're saying is accurate, but where Google, Facebook, etc really take off is in equity compensation.

In my case at Goog, I started off with a small equity grant, vesting over 4 years. So after the first year, I had equity vesting every quarter.

Assuming you do ok/well, you'll get refresher grants every single year after that.

Fast forward 3 or 4 years, and you have 4 separate grants vesting every single quarter.

This quickly adds up to 50+K a year, and that's where these numbers come from, even if they're not reflected in your base pay.

$250k is certainly not a given. I think that includes equity compensation like the other post mentions. My experience is that Google and Microsoft pay around $170-200k to start base compensation for a Sr. Engineer so it's generally a little higher than the $150-160k you'd expect at a regular bay area company or the $130k or so you can reasonably expect in Seattle. The higher end of that I'd expect in the bay area and the lower end in Seattle.

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