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Comment by chipotle_coyote | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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