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Comment by jonmb | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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).

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