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Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

You can't just say "etc" after having listed pretty much every company which would compensate at that level. The only other one I can think of is Salesforce.

The vast vast majority of tech firms in SF do not compensate at that level; Yelp, Uber, Square, Twitter, etc, that list goes on. They're all right around that $125k + $5-$20k signing/moving + a fraction of equity for entry level, then scaling up ~5-10% for each position above that.

These Engineer 3/Senior Engineers at a place like Facebook making $400k total comp are, for the most, true stories. But it's not even close to representative of the bay area as a whole.

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Well then, maybe the real reason “why you’re having trouble hiring” is simply that “you’re not paying market rate”!

If an engineer can get a job at one of these companies, and work on exciting & fulfilling work, what’s the incentive to work elsewhere if you get paid a fraction of what you’re worth?

When did the definition of "market rate" become "what the top 20% of engineers make"? The "if" in your second statement is a big one, because the majority of engineers can't just get a job at one of those companies.

We may be talking past one another / misunderstanding. My apologies for my post’s vagueness: I was specifically talking about these “top-20% engineers”.

Because — A lot of the time when you see a company complaining about how difficult it is to hire “good engineers”, when you look closer, what you’ll really see is manager(s) (in denial) who really want to hire top-20% engineers at bargain rates.

That I can agree with. They are also frequently companies who don't need top-20% engineers, either.

> what’s the incentive to work elsewhere if you get paid a fraction of what you’re worth?

Because you’re spouse wants to be close to family and there’s no tech where family is located?

I agree with the sibling comment about how it's ridiculous to consider "market rate" to just be the very high salaries offered at the handful of large tech companies. (Tech companies, who btw have the capacity to establish satellite offices at secondary hubs, and also sometimes do already.)

But also "work on exciting & fulfilling work"? Hasn't it already been established in previous discussions that the average engineer at Google or wherever may not be doing the most fulfilling of work, becoming a cog in a larger machine, as opposed at a startup? There's only so many roles that gives both high big tech pay and meaningful individual contribution.

> I agree with the sibling comment about how it's ridiculous to consider "market rate" to just be the very high salaries offered at the handful of large tech companies. (Tech companies, who btw have the capacity to establish satellite offices at secondary hubs, and also sometimes do already.)

With absolutely no offense intended, I've never been offered one of those FAANG-grade packages, so if you were, hypothetically, to try to hire me away from a present position, I would have to insist: fuck you, pay me, I won't leave things I already like to get the same middling compensation.

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