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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Don’t sweat these. Every HN salary thread, people come out of the woodwork to note that their sister’s roommate’s brother works at Facebook and makes $300k, therefore all tech workers everywhere in Silicon Valley make that much on average. For some reason, people here love to take outlier employees at outlier companies and hold them up as averages.

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Every HN salary thread, you come out of the woodwork with the same rhetoric. See: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/986693536534982659?lang=en

For the lazy: "Median comp package at FB is $240k/yr (this number is skewed low since it's over all employees, not just engineers). Google, Amazon, etc. pay similarly. Combined, these companies employ > 100k programmers in the U.S out of maybe 3M-ish programmers." Directly followed by a screenshot of one of ryandrake's older comments.

FWIW, I don't make $300k, or even $240k (yet) nor work at FAANGM. I also don't live anywhere near the bay area, but that matters less these days (at least if you're in the US). Neither of the numbers are unreasonable targets.

I’m addressing OP’s anxiety. These threads can leave the average tech employee thinking his average salary is hopelessly low, where, in reality they are reading top examples from people at outlier companies. It’s like comparing yourself to the highlight-reel best moments of your social media friends.

EDIT: For what it’s worth, I’d like to point out you’re attacking me personally in your message, and not even addressing what I said, which is that people tend to take a bunch of exaggeration and extrapolate.

It's fine advice to not compare yourself to unreachable heights. My issue with your comment is that you characterize $300k/yr as an "outlier at outliers" number and it just isn't true. The salary numbers at Facebook (which you brought up as an explicit example) suggest it's very close to the median there, which knocks off "outlier at" easily. $300k/yr is entirely reachable without living in the bay area, without being a mythical unicorn who people only report sightings of based on 4th-hand accounts, and without driving a Porsche and having a supermodel SO.

To reiterate: $300k/yr is not an exaggeration. If you continue making the same sort of message in future threads relating to dev salary, I'd encourage you to up the number considerably or change your location frame to somewhere not in the US. You're right I was overly aggressive in my opening remark, I'm sorry for that.

Yeah, this is something I always wonder. Every time salaries come up here the anecdotal numbers batted around as "standard" in Silicon Valley get higher, and every time I neurotically search around the net for corroborating information and find little to none. I don't doubt these high salary figures are real, but I have doubts they represent the median.

Those numbers are probably TC (total compensation) which includes stocks and sometimes bonuses. If you go on Blind you can see people are receiving offers in that ballpark from Facebook and Google, who seem to be in a bidding war of sorts for talent.

All of the valley is in a bidding war for talent right now. I don't think there has ever been a better time to be a software engineer.

There was a while when startups were more attractive for compensation than FAANGs, but the big companies really stepped up their game.

Nowadays you can work at a startup and hope to make a few million dollars in the unlikely event that it IPOs and you got in early enough to have a lot of shares, or you can work at a FAANG and be guaranteed to make a million dollars every 4-5 years, or even more frequently, and you'll have better benefits too.

^^^^^ This x1000000000

a lot of FAANG-a-likes structure compensation in parts. base salary alone is not the whole picture. RSUs are anywhere from 50% to 100% of salary and vest quarterly or monthly. yearly bonuses are 15% to 25%.

at the low end a person making 130k in base is pushing 200k total comp.

It’s almost like trolling.

“The average penis is 8 inch”

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