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Comment by well_negotiator | Hacker News Reader

Really sad to know he didn't get a good offer in Airbnb and you both think it's a good offer. But this looks totally like a new grad offer.

I have my friends who just got offers in Airbnb who are getting paid 180k in salary and ~600K in stocks which is basically $330k/year.

My other friend who is senior engineer with 5 year experience is compensated around 500k/year.

I have similar experience and i recently did a job switch with around 11 competing offers and negotiated well more than the previous number. I negotiated with every offer except snapchat whom didn't move their needle but their offer was good not the best.

If you're really good, you can easily negotiate up to 400k/year real money(cash + stocks).

- Googler/Fb employee with 4 year work experience here.

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O.o These numbers are surprisingly high, to the point of almost being unbelievable.

And I go around telling my friends that software engineers can make 120k right out of college, and I'M getting laughed at by my friends at how apparently unbelievable ridiculously high this is.

I've got 3 years experience and I'm making not much more than that working at a midsized startup (I went to a top tech school and everything!).

And then I go on Hacker News and learn that the fair salary for people working at big companies, with around my experience is 330k!?! Man what am I doing wrong.

Is this what it is like being the mythical, 10x developer unicorn that I hear so much about?

> O.o These numbers are surprisingly high, to the point of almost being unbelievable.

Bingo! He's joking.

Sorry, but this is real. It's very normal for a new grad googler to make $185k total comp in first year.

Offers i had got, Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, Google, Robinhood, Netflix, Salesforce, Affirm, An investment bank in NYC, Two stealth startup in SF.

In Facebook, it's very common for one high perfoming engineer getting discretionary equity of 1M+ if you do re-defines or create a meaningful impact.

I'm sorry i'm not going for any startup soon as it's hard for employees to make money now. People join startups thinking they are going to do 10X. But investors give equity to startup engineers at 4X inflated valuation. So outcome is probably 2.5x with very high risk.

You do exceptional performance at google/facebook/uber and get noticed by your director and he throws 1M worth RSUS on you in next review cycle. Do it twice and there goes `rest and vest`.

The worst part is if you think this is the best offer for the years of experience, then you're totally mistaken :D

He's not joking. This is the talking style of all those people from IIT and IIM bragging about their "pay packets" to "freshers" about to be ragged. I wonder if he is going to copy/paste that directly into his matrimonial.

Sorry, but your comment is not constructive in anyway. Please read guidelines :)

yeah it was, you just got offended

Thank you, anonymous person on the internet. You are talking about outlier people at outlier companies. The majority of software engineers not in top roles inside top companies are not making even close to that.

Every compensation discussion on HN invariably brings out of the woodwork That One Guy Who Knows That One Guy Who Makes $400K at Google. The take-away from reading these threads should NOT be that this is an ordinary compensation.

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...

Yes. I'm not in average but i won't call myself an outlier. Outliers never come out and talk about their compensation to be frank.

Not posting this to brag. I'd like to increase awareness among engineers to negotiate.

I can show you my W-2 at the end of this year.

I don't need to see your W-2. I'm not replying to you to accuse you of lying--you're probably not. I'm replying for the benefit of other readers who read comments like yours and start believing that $300K, $400K, $500K etc. are normal salaries for software engineers, only to be confused and frustrated at what they actually see out there in the real world. All of those salaries are likely at least 3 standard deviations from the mean. I don't know what your definition of "outlier" is, but those are extreme outlier salaries. Congratulations on being so fortunate!

Your aim to "increase awareness" does nothing for a normal or even above average software engineer negotiating their offer at a non-outlier company. How does this help them? "I think $200K is reasonable because somebody on the Internet told me that some people at Google make $400K?" Is that really going to fly, basically anywhere?

EDIT: Another source:

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151132.htm

> Outliers never come out and talk about their compensation to be frank.

My experience is that only outliers ever come out and talk about their compensation, leaving the audience with the impression that most everyone is either a $400k/year Googlecorn or a $40k/year code slave.

Well thanks for the info then!

God do I need to get out of the startup world and start working for one of the unicorns....

Thanks for sharing an above average scenario and congrats. Genuinely curious, where did the offers initially start out (I'm assuming based on your previous comp) and how much were you able to negotiate up? And were the offers from startups like Robinhood/Affirm and the I-bank competitive with the big tech cos?

I had negotiated 2-2.5X with most of the companies on stocks. Shocked? Well, if you ask for 10% more and accepted the offer, it's a party in next recruiting meetings in the company. Always flinch, start with 3X and make the recruiters feel bad. They should do atleast 5-10 calls just in negotiating the numbers. Imagine as a software engineer, how many tasks you had to complete for a project and how many times you have to meet/dial-in the customer/other teams during/after the project. You are the project for the recruiter for this month. Let him/her work for you this month.

> And then I go on Hacker News and learn that the fair salary for people working at big companies, with around my experience is 330k!?! Man what am I doing wrong.

Why not go interview at a big company, then?

I've job hopped a little too much already, and I do like my job. But things like this make it awfully tempting....

Skepticism is the best policy with things like this. It's easy for an anonymous person on the internet to make claims like this.

I am a master donut artist at Dunkin Donuts. I make $5.3 million a year. See how this works?

>My other friend who is senior engineer with 5 year experience is compensated around 500k/year.

>If you're really good, you can easily negotiate up to 400k/year real money(cash + stocks).

It's funny how early stage startups talk of hiring "the best" and most can't even come close to affording that level of compensation.

Early stage startups are making a joke out of engineers by pitching the bro-culture and talking about freedom and 10X- 100X.

And yeah, with a big hype from VCs and investors tweeting about startupX, Y, Z, engineers get fooled and join a startup and work for 4 years and later figure out it was a bad idea.

It's a very bad idea to join a startup for money unless you know the founders really well who have a track record of selling themselves to Google/Facebook/Oracle/MSFT.

Since when does 5 years of experience warrant "senior" and half a million dollars in comp?

This whole thing is a joke.

It's a not a joke. You work in consultancy which is a service company where margins are not high as goog/fb/msft.

I work in product company with high profits in billions. It's common for new grad engineers who join as L3 and become L5 in 3-5 years in all the above companies.

> you both think it's a good offer

That's not what I said, but thanks for your contribution all the same.

Airbnb offered him less to start. So I'm curious if someone in similar shoes (say, similar level of experience) used his expanded offer as a point of negotiation.

Did you miss the part where the guy had been coding for less than 1 year? 250k might not be the pinnacle of software engineer compensation, but it's as good as it gets for his level of (in)experience.

Care to share some of the offers you got?

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