The averages in this spreadsheet seem to agree roughly with average/median for the Bay Area as reported by Glassdoor[1] and Payscale[2].
1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...
2: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...
Like I would never admit that when I first came to the Bay Area I took an internship at a start-up paying $500 a month. That would just insinuate that I'm a poor engineer.
Yeah I wouldn't say "normal" (how should we quantify that?), but they do exist. Most engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. don't pass the senior level, and that's the last engineering rung everyone is expected to at least achieve.
But if you do know staff or senior staff engineers at Google and Facebook working in NYC or SF, it is disproportionately likely that they are earning in excess of $300k/year between salary, bonus and stock grants. I know people like that directly, and I also know undergrads who are receiving between $120-$150k/year in coastal cities in total compensation offers amortized over four years.
People probably aren't lying on Hacker News, the medium just lends itself to reporting bias. Large forums like this have enough participants that I'm not really surprised when 10 or so people come into a thread and claim to earn something like half a million per year. It looks outlandish but there is a vast swath of engineers who are just not speaking up; for the distribution, it's probably about right. It's not as if people are claiming these salaries as base compensation before bonus and stock.
Which is an incredibly disingenuous way to phrase it. As a new graduate you can't pay rent with stock grants that vest in 48 months.
The value of $1 worth of stock 4 year from now is work a small fraction of $1 in someone's paycheck today, especially when they're just starting out. That $120k "in coastal cities" (just say NYC/SF) is closer to $75-80k in cash compensation, before discretionary bonus, which means in San Francisco you've got a 2-hour one way commute from your studio with 4 roommates.
And what's the average tenure of someone at a tech company these days? A year and half, maybe two? So your 4-year average compensation including stock grants, discretionary bonuses, free beer and catered food, etc is still well above average when you consider many people won't get half of what needs to vest.
Big part of that is due to the fact that if you are staff engineer or above, you've been at google for awhile, and google stock has done very well.
These are jr. dev salaries
That said, last two ski seasons sucked.
Keeping a car in a megacity is usually around $10k a year, from experience with both it's dramatically cheaper in upstate New York.
I'm always amazed at how cheap parking is in LA, $6 for a day in Santa Monica not that far from the ocean. If this was any European country, it would be much much more. Heck, it is cheaper than even Beijing.
I've done the calculations, and everything except rent is fairly comparable to a third tier American city. Heck, food in LA is much cheaper than say Spokane where my sister lives. So in California, you have taxes, and that's about it. If you think $100K in Rochester is like $200K or even $150K in say NYC, that is a heck of a lot of extra taxes and rent.
The reality is that the number of people making over $200k is just not that many. Very senior people and directors of certain departments, sure. And you've got some $250k+ VIPs out there. Some.
For everyone else, even those in the Bay Area, it caps around $180k, or $10k/mo after tax. Stay for long enough and you might get a nice chunk of change you can put towards retirement, assuming that the stock is still flying high at the time you can actually do something with it.
The $250k engineer is a myth. By the time you are making $250k you aren't writing code anymore. In fact, you may have never written code in your life. You're a director, VP or C-level executive of an engineering department.
Large tech companies have ladders for both engineering and management. There's nothing inconceivable about earning well in excess of $250k/year and writing code.
I'm not going to lie and say it's achievable for everyone, but your perspective is a very limiting one. A lot of people (in absolute terms) do the thing you're claiming is a myth at large public and private tech companies every year.
Small consultancies and independent app developers can bring in $250k+, but not necessarily year over year. And they are usually doing a lot more than just engineering.
Maybe I should clarify: The notion of a $250k+ engineering "salary" as normal is a myth. I live in San Francisco an I don't actually know a single person who falls into this bucket. I know a bunch of people at startups who pull that down, but not sustainably. A few people at FB and Google who cleared that much the first year if you include the signing bonus and/or account for all the options they might receive some day in years 1-2.
The only person I know who actually has a $250k+ salary as an engineer works at Amazon in Seattle, but he doesn't even code anymore.
Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft employ over 500,000 people. I'd be surprised if there are more than 500 engineers with a salary over $250k between them.
Maybe what someone should do is poach all 500 and see what they come up with. The burn rate would only be $10 million a month. Maybe they could invent AI.
People on the same rung of the "tech ladder" as those on the rung of the "traditional ladder" are compensated less in total and also frequently in any given dimension (e.g. salary, stock, whatever).
You're conflating things. Nobody says everyone has over $250k salary. They do say that Senior Engineers at Google and Facebook make over $250k total compensation.
As someone who has made over $250k total year comp at a big company in the Bay Area, I will tell you there are far more than 500 engineers doing so.
I'm less than 2 years out of college, and I'm set to make ~$210k at google in 2017. Up from ~$170 when I started. I know a few who are making a more than me because they negotiated their stock units well. To be fair, GOOG doing well the past two years has helped me a lot. It would be $186k at grant price.
I haven't even gotten promoted yet.
These figures are before taxes, of course.
Please stop spreading false information and harming people here. Go get a software engineer job offer from Google or Facebook and then get back to us.