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Comment by swimorsinka | Hacker News Reader

+1 to this. 10 years ago you couldn't make 400K at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Now you can.

Startups made a lot more sense when your opportunity cost was 50-150K per year.

Basically, startups started taking more funding, and VCs realized there was more money to be made, so they're squeezing the little guy with terms.

A small startup taking less (or no) funding can 'afford' to give more equity to employees, who are effectively providing the capital (in the form of labor) to the business. Today's startups taking huge amounts of funding AND cheap labor are trying to have it both ways.

Yup, they just realized "hey, why should we pay random engineers millions of dollars on successful exists?".

They never stopped promising them, they just stopped putting any terms in the equity plans that would lead to them.

Honest question since I'm not familiar with the area - who is making 400k at Microsoft or Facebook? Not the typical mid-level software engineer, I'd assume. Are these product leads or head engineers making the 400k?

These numbers are realistic for any senior engineer working there for over 3-4 years.

Are these engineers at Facebook/Google/etc. working the typical 40 hour work week or more like 60-80?

Depends whether you count the half of their workday that is spent on a bus.

That's optional, for folks who WANT to commute (eg, either want a big house in BFE, or want to live the city life, or whatever). If you want a short commute, it's yours -- if you live in the city, work for one of the many tech companies up there. If you want to work at FB, come be my neighbor and walk to work, I live in a great walkable neighborhood <2mi from FBHQ.

Obviously a throwaway account, but I work at Facebook, on an infrastructure team. I average ~45 hours/week, except for the week I'm oncall, which is about every three months. I probably work 60 hours that week. I get in early (7:30am) and leave early (3 or 3:30), and sometimes I'll review diffs at night, but normally my laptop stays in my trunk when I'm at home.

I work hard when I'm at work, and really focus. I don't do a lot of the extra-curricular stuff that you can easily spend your time on. I'm an L6 and last year earned just north $450K with decent performance reviews. I have damn near a million dollars in unvested $FB RSUs, too, so there's almost no chance I'm going to leave for anywhere that won't match that with equally liquid public shares.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Would you mind sharing how long you've been working there and your level of seniority? Would be super interesting to know for at least my reference.

My guess 6 to 10 years

Thanks for the response. Sometimes I get the impression that engineers are killing themselves doing nothing but work with occasional sleep, so it's good to hear you're around 45 hours.

400k is reasonable for total comp after a few years of experience. Note that total comp includes a bunch of stuff that's technically discretionary, like your annual bonus, and a bunch of stuff that's paid out but not really cashable, like meals and health insurance. Your pre-tax cash, sans benefits, is probably closer to $200k.

People don't usually include health insurance and free meals when they think about their total comp.

If it goes on my taxes, it's part of comp.

Nobody counts free meals as part of their total comp.

There's some data about this on Blind for Google that seems pretty solid: https://www.teamblind.com/article/google-engineer---total-co...

For Google, it looks like 90% of L6 engineers and a single-digit percentage of L5 engineers are at this number. So yes, not your typical mid-level engineer (many/most engineers plateau at L5).

I wonder how sustainable this is.

Its 400k while their stock price is crazy high. But If we really are in a tech bubble, that money is back to the typically 80-120k of most tech jobs.

But the startups will suffer in the same way.

If there is a bubble + a burst, I'd rather be at a big company flush with cash. (Note: I'm currently at a startup!)

Disagree. You get 400k at FAANG when your base is 150k plus 20% bonus. Sure that bonus will go down to 10% but the rest of the 100k+ stock grant per year is not going to become 0. You would still end up with 225k which is still more than startups.

A burst bubble will kill pretty much every startup that can't get to profit with what they have in the bank right now. Raising will be next to impossible. You do not want to be at a startup if that happens.

I'm old enough to have seen the dot-com bubble and it's aftermath, and it wasn't pretty.

Facebook and Google and others make their money globally. They don't actually make a lot of money from Silicon Valley that's just where their workers are. I can't think of a more diversified, protected stream of income than one of the FANGs right now, even if the US has a recession, there are still countries around the world that will be doing better.

>I can't think of a more diversified, protected stream of income than one of the FANGs

Arent they 100% tech and nearly 0 physical products?

That is not what I learned 'diversification' is.

Your definition of diversification is flawed.

Their customers are diversified not only across product sectors, but across the globe. Unless internet traffic or engagement drops, which it hasn't yet and probably won't until a new technology replaces it, they don't need physical products to make the billions upon billions that they do.

It seems to me these high compensations started appearing right after Apple, Google et al got their hands slapped for colluding to hold down engineer salaries.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...

You can make that much. You can also win the lottery. Your opportunity cost should not be measured against your best case alternative, it should be measured against a most likely case.

I agree with this too. There is a tier of engineers that are good, but for whatever reason, can't get into the big 5. They're bad at white-boarding or maybe they don't live in an area where the big 5 have offices.

In those cases, maybe a startup makes more sense.

Often I find a number of great engineers that the big 5 disqualify for two main reasons: Location or Education. The big 5 tend to not allow remote work and if you don't have a college degree it's often hella hard to get an interview.

But the Big5 have tons of locations. Amazon in particular has tech centers in places like Phoenix and Detroit, while Google is in Chicago. Microsoft is even in Fargo!

Unless you want to be a digital nomad I guess. Then it’s probably not ideal, but I do know some fully remote positions exist at the L6 level at Amazon.

> But the Big5 have tons of locations

Name one Big5 job in the entire U.S. south. Or at least one that pays as well as them.

There aren’t any.

Facebook is in Austin; Amazon is in Dallas

Ok, so Texas is technically in the South... you got me.

I suppose I should have clarified: major southeastern cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, D.C., Nashville, Miami)

AWS has several thousand engineers in the Virginia suburbs of DC, with a bunch of local VP-level management

(and that's not including anyone who works on the us-east-1 region)

Apple and Amazon could end up choosing Raleigh for their HQ2. So maybe that'll soon change.

I've only ever lived in Raleigh and I'm very skeptical they'll pick Raleigh for HQ2.

I'll be very excited if Apple ends up deciding on Raleigh though, it could easily push up salaries significantly.

Austin isn’t the south.

Raleigh / Durham probably is the best tech scene in the south. No mega companies but a good number of second tier, ie. Redhat, Sas, Epic, and so on

Last I checked, Austin is south of the Mason-Dixie line and has plenty of small towns around it that will be glad to remind you that you’re in the South.

RDU definitely has an enterprise tech scene. So does DFW!

Google's Skia team* is in Chapel Hill, Microsoft has a team in Raleigh working on VSTS. I know a few folks that have interned there.

Then don't live in the south. You'll get paid more, the weather will be nicer, and you'll meet less numbskulls with confederate flags painted on the hood of their trucks. Win/win/win.

Google has an office in Chicago, but from what I hear it's almost entirely sales jobs.

I live in Chicago and periodically have Google recruiters contacting me, and it's never been for a position in Chicago, it's only ever been for Mountain View.

That is not true anymore. They have engineers now, and they're rapidly expanding.

They do have a low base though, $98.5k vs. like $110k or something in MTV (and of course most people negotiate that way, way up).

I'm pretty sure they all pay less outside of their HQ location. At least in London, salaries are significantly less for the equivalent role.

In America, they generally don't. It's a mild adjustment at worst. Chicago is the biggest I've seen - $98.5k base vs. $110k base for L3 SWE - but FB doesn't change their comp, Amazon and Microsoft only increase it in the SFBA and NYC (IIRC).

In fact, for new grads Amazon pays the exact same TC in Seattle and in Detroit.

Oh cool, didn't realize that. Hopefully London will catch up.

Historically, the money in London has always been in the finance sector. Both large banks and hedge funds.

I think even in finance you'll be unlikely to touch 400USD (~300 GBP) for a similar level. Sure there are outliers, but of the senior people I know in this area total comp is around 200GBP after many years. It's much easier to just contract (if you don't mind the mercenary role), you'll make similar due to the tax savings.

That seems about right. 100-200k GBP in London, 200k-400k USD in the USA. Standard packages for people with a few years of experience.

Yeah, I doubt I'll even bother to apply to the big 5, maybe even the big 20. I'm coming out of a yearlong software intensive in October with a liberal art major from a marketing background. I know a few people at those companies but there is also the question of leetcode. I think my chances are much higher with other types of companies, startups included.

As someone without a degree, getting an interview at the Big 5 was quite easy. Passing those interviews is another thing entirely but having the right experiences in your resume has been more important in my case.

That's the thing, right now, I don't really have the "right experiences" that's why startups do seem appealing.

I have the skills people are looking for but not the resume validation with internships, the right degree, or school. I got an internship at the start of my intensive where I got to work on some fun problems and used my marketing skills too.

I think the only other track would be through open source contributions. If we circled back in December or January, I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up at a non-tech SMB, small consultancy, or startup because of my prior experiences in marketing paired with my new SWE skills.

Something I was wondering, in your experience or anyone reading, do I have to always focus all the technology stacks for each role and project or can I focus more on the problem I solved?

For example, in my internship, for one problem that made a big difference was setting up all their email automation and tieing it into their website. That project wasn't a ton of programming but my work; but by the end got them about $150k in revenue with my other work on their Black Friday sale, as an intern. Most of the SWE projects I got started but wasn't able to finish in the 3 months (priorities kept changing) like a tool that converted audio from videos into searchable indexes for their youtube videos (granular text searchable video basically). I'm hoping to redo that project on my own. I did get their website to speed up though (an older WordPress website).

Absolutely focus on the problems you've solved, and also the problems you failed to solve after getting deeply involved in them.

They know that you'll have to learn their proprietary technology stacks, which are always both ahead and behind the public stacks they inspired. At some companies they won't ask anything about your resume keywords after the phone screens.

Most Big 5 companies use what's called "Behavioral Interviewing" or "S.T.A.R." to formally assess how you get stuff done, and the technical questions can be answered in almost any language you like. Hell I've given successful answers to Big 5 "tell me about a time when you had to…" questions based on experiences in bicycle manufacturing and nonprofit administration, but it really has to involve ownership if you're straying from the norms.

I'm good at "S.T.A.R.", most of my effort in the past is using CAR and PAR but it's not a hard shift. I'm glad to hear they don't limit it to just technology problems.

>"the problems you failed to solve after getting deeply involved in them". I have done it before in interviews when asked about weaknesses or failures; I've never done it on a resume though. How would you go about representing that on a resume?

You don't put the failures on the resume as failures :)

I think this might be true if your lucky I was up for a FANG position in London but I have an atypical education I I suspect my lack of a degree counted against me.

With the best will in the world some low level recruiter working out of Spain is not going to be able to read between the lines and work out that actually working for a world leading RnD org on campus at one of the elite UK universities might actually mean I was a good candidate.

I'm like you, I've got some really niche experiences. I went to a #1 program at an arguably #1 school for undergrad for the industry I was planning on going into. I also have a unique personal background (extensive life-long travel) which has been helpful in more than one way but it's hard to see that on my resume.

For what it is worth, we LOVE people with your background for both technical and non-technical roles. If you're ever interested in at least exploring a startup in the marketing technology space, feel free to reach out!

Thanks! What’s a way I can contact you? I’d love to learn about what’s out there. If you don’t want to post here then you can email me at “lassitergregg” at gmail.

In the bio :)

I checked there initially but it was empty and still is: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g8uodwa450lw0lh/Screen%20Shot%2020...

In those cases the big 20 make sense.

Stsrtups are great but you are always held hostage waiting to cashin

If you want to look the average comp at FAANG or any well-paying public company it's "only" 250k. That versus the average case at a startup being closer to 150k (average options are worth 0).

> 10 years ago you couldn't make 400K at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Now you can.

> when your opportunity cost was 50-150K per year.

That's why Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc are not attractive at all in Europe.

Can you elaborate? My impression was that they still pay very well, while the startup scene is much less hot than in Silicon Valley.

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