Cookie-cutter offers?? Unless this is the Bay Area, I don't think there's such a thing as $160k jobs just floating around. The top 10 tech companies barely even offer that as base for a good software engineer (excludes stock & bonus).
> religious micromanaging Agile crap
Definitely agree with you there though
Well, there are and the point of finally getting around to saying this out loud is to push through the brainwash.
Too many people are subservient to their uncompetitive employers just because they feel obligated to "count their blessings".
Turn down six figure job offers for the right gig which typically comes with a better compensation package.
Before you make your rebuttal, lets up the stakes even more: I've done this unemployed with six figure debts, a calculated risk, and now I have no debts. Calculate your risk. If you get it wrong, ruin your family, lose access to credit and also end up homeless, well yeah that happens.
I think people are downvoting out of jealously.
I have a friend who works at Amazon and he was telling me how much he paid for a slightly smaller house. I was amazed. Out of the FAANG companies, Amazon is the one company that I think I would be able to work for.
They are always looking for AWS Architects at Amazon.
At bigger companies, it comes with annual RSU awards or bonuses, worth between maybe another $50k-$150k depending on your particular skill set or seniority. At start-ups, they try to sell you on an equity package that would work out to something close to the same annual dollar value under the assumption of a mildly positive exit or IPO.
This cookie-cutter package has seemingly stagnated since maybe ~2014, at least in lots of interviews since then, I haven’t seen the offers going up much over time.
But for many fields, $150k is not competitive with what the top end employers pay for a base salary, and the equity or bonus part would need to be in the $100k range to be competitive in total compensation. If you believe you’re a top developer and you can prove it during interviews, you absolutely should be targeting closer to $190k and substantial equity/bonus. If you also have 6+ years of experience or a PhD or something, you should be well over $200k on base salary alone, in major US cities.
You should also be negotiating severance packages, sponsored attendance at conferences, customized equipment for your workspace, possibly negotiating improved expiration or acceleration terms in equity documents, a sign-on bonus in addition to relocation (which should be covered entirely by the company, including dealing with most of the arrangement making).
Just say no (unless you’re in dire straits) if a company won’t negotiate all these things. Get good at talking about it, introducing the HR contact or recruiter to the idea that you expect a real, grown-up job offer covering a wide range of compensation and benefits.
Otherwise it contributes to wage stagnation when employers believe they can keep making the same $150k offer and banking on new grads or people desperate to relocate to X or whatever, and not knowing what they are actually worth.
Unrelated to your bigger point, but I'd put Seattle in second place after SF for the high offers. And for tech jobs, Chicago wouldn't feature on my list at all.
I think you're focusing too much on base salary. Past a certain point, companies flatten out their base and only start upping the equity. Amazon actually has strict rules about it - they cap out their max base salary at 170 and there on it's all equity + sign-on bonus. People should look at the total comp - RSUs are reported on the W-2 anyway. And they can be sold immediately upon vesting (usually the vesting periods overlap with trading windows), so it's really no different than a salary.
In Chicago specifically, GrubHub, Teza, Google, Salesforce, DRW, IMC Trading, Akuna Capital, and Citadel are companies I’ve directly spoken with about Chicago-based position salary over the years, and all of them have positions for people around ~3-5 years of experience but above average expertise with base salaries in the range of $180k-$210k. If you naively go into negotiations at these places and openly state low six figure salary numbers or just take a recruiters word for it, then yes, of course they will try to pitch you everything in the $120k-$140k range. You have to do well in interviews and then tell them, no, that kind of below-market nonsense isn’t going to work, and really walk away if they won’t pay more competitively.
> If you also have [...] a PhD or something, you should be well over $200k on base salary alone, in major US cities.
I have a PhD + 1 year exp. and recently accepted a data scientist offer at a F/N/G company for around $200k total. If these companies are really top of market, then I either did poorly at the interview (in which case why would they make an offer at all?) or I just suck at negotiating.
You can make six figures just doing remote Magento developer work these days. Just go scour the job sites, there are a ton of six figure remote jobs these days. $150k is a bit high, however it's not dramatically so.