Paychecks Exposed: Google, Apple, Facebook and More
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
More interestingly, Facebook is one of only two companies (among 10) where the company rating is higher than the compensation rating.
Google gets 3.9 for company rating and also 3.9 for compensation rating (both are good). Facebook gets 4.3 for compensation rating. It gets an even higher score 4.6 for company rating (and that makes it the only company where Glassdoor describes the employees as "very satisfied")
It will be interesting to find out what Facebook is doing right and why other companies aren't able to match it.
It's keeping them that way over the long haul that's the trick (particularly after the 'sexiness' has worn off).
At the risk of sounding presumptuous, it appears to me, Facebook has this "do it" thing much more than Google and well much beyond Yahoo.
Now, that is very telling. Google should be awesome at building new products with the developer talent and general resources they have to throw at any idea with potential. And yet, they have basically released (and subsequently canned) one failure after another for a long time.
Even the advertising systems and related tools (Google Analytics and the like) are pretty poor in terms of usability/APIs; people use these tools because of Google's place in the market and because they give a lot of goodies away for free, not because the tools themselves are particularly good.
And even web search, the heart of Google's operation, isn't what it used to be: they seem to have become victims of their own success, with so many people out to game the system that a lot of their results pages aren't worth the time to type in a search term any more.
It's not clear how much of this is down to culture or management factors, and how much is just the unavoidable consequence of being the biggest kid on the playground. But either way, a lot of people at Google must have worked on projects like, say, Wave, and it's tough as a developer to put your heart into a job only to see it canned because it wasn't promoted effectively or the timing just wasn't right for the market.
Meanwhile, for all the extra features and so on, Facebook basically only has one product, and it's one of the most successful on the planet.
Other things being equal, which culture is going to be more fun to work in? It's not a tough decision, is it?
At one small start-up company I worked at us developers/hackers eventually found an "encrypted" XLS document which contained all the salaries (this was when Excel "encryption" wasn't up to much). So we read everyone's salaries, from the management down. The interesting part was that certain people in management were taking home huge salaries, for not doing very much visible work. The company ripped off a lot of investors and was eventually sold for a tiny fraction (~1%) of the money which was put in. Which surprised no one on the inside.
I think the ethics of IT is an interesting and important subject, and I was surprised to see someone unabashedly admitting to using his position to read confidential material.
I don't think our industry has a good enough set of accepted ethical guidelines, and I'd like to see that change.
Anyway, how does it matter whether or not I'm in charge? The question is, I think it's a good idea, why don't you?
I think everyone needs to work out their own deal with their own boss; sharing your pay is your choice; looking at others without their permission is taking that choice away from them.
1.) Everything you do automatically has an audience. People care about the software you write and use it in their daily lives.
2.) You get social cachet from working there. Say "I work for Google", and a bunch of people will say, "Oh, that must be nice. I wish I was smart enough to get in there." Outside of a few nerds who are too cool for FaceBook, saying "I work for FaceBook" gets the same reaction.
3.) Being in a younger, game-changing company gives you the chance to work on cooler, game-changing technologies. Many tech workers are attracted by hard problems; young, fast-growing companies tend to have lots of hard problems.
4.) When companies are younger, they've accumulated less legacy code and fewer bureaucratic procedures. If you ask a bunch of Googlers what they hate most about working for Google, I bet a large portion will say "legacy code". This is a maintenance tax that isn't fun at all, yet has to be dealt with whenever you build something on top of it. Being younger and smaller, FaceBook has less of this.
#4 is a property of most young companies regardless of their popularity.
I know this doesn't exactly explain why facebook does better in the surveys than google, but I think part of the reason facebookers feel more satisfied, is because they know they get paid more than googlers.
1) High impact. Most team sizes are 5 people or less. Those 5 people are handling big systems like photos or memcache. You know you're doing important things.
2) Move fast. Example: Facebook Groups went from concept to release in 3 months. In other companies, it would take 3 months just to get through release engineering.
3) Hackathon! People here love to code, and the environment encourages you. A lot of managers have switched back to SWEs, reinforcing that it's not demeaning to stay technical.
4) Still growing. It's true, new hotness normally trumps old & established. However, where Google started doubling every 6-9 months; Facebook tries to maintain top quality at the occasional expense of slower growth. This is helping the company retain most of its original culture.
Also, every bullshit funded startup in NYC pays what Facebook is paying, or better. (just a pro tip in case anyone else here is too old for facebook but needs to make some dough after spending too much time in the 80-90k zone, like I did)
I'm about to be a recent college grad and I want to know what subpar is so I can spend my time now making sure that I am not that.
It's really frustrating to me when people say things like "Let's just say I know enough Googlers who are currently fed up with the influx of subpar nooglers." And I have no idea what they mean.
Google's a big company, so I'm sure that some pockets err on one side, some on the other.
That's actually fairly common in the Silicon Valley. It's 10 to 20 people on the market, not 10 to 20 programmers selected at random: some are specialists in fields other than the ones you're looking for (or their resume is misread by the recruiter e.g., someone who has experience with enterprise search but is being interviewed for a web search position), others lack certain specific knowledge you do want, yet others are looking for a place where they can be "promoted to their level of incompetence".
A rate of 1/10 or 1/20 (5-10%) is actually very good and indicates an ability to recruit and screen well.
It's a balancing act. Reject too many in phone screens, and you miss out on talent. Reject them at the interview stage, and you waste interviewer time. Accept them and put them on teams, and you drag down the level of the team and cause morale problems. Google's been accused of all of them, but in my experience, hiring sucks wherever you are, and they do the best they can given the data available.
One of their recruiters once contacted me (because I went to a 'top university') but decided it would be a 'waste of time' because I hadn't done any Java or C++ recently. It used to be that Google was interviewing for knowledge of the fundamentals unlike most other 'business-oriented' companies that want specific recent skills.
Nowadays it seems that they've got the 'worst' of both worlds - I heard they interview for very hard-core graph programming algorithms, and at the same time they want recent experience with Java or C++. So basically if you've recently only done Lisp/Smalltalk/etc or even Python, you don't qualify. Where is the logic in that?
On top of that, my impression was that the salary levels of their employees were fairly astronomical, on par with the ones paid by banks/hedge funds, but that definitely doesn't seem to be the case.
The first candidate who I interviewed and was hired coded in Lisp during the interview.
I recently interviewed a candidate who did a lot of iphone development and was obviously very bright, but didn't code very well in straight C get hired.
Candidates coding in Python during the interview is pretty common and I certainly don't count it against them.
I am not sure what recruiters are looking for and filtering upon, but if you are good with C++ or Java, even if you haven't used in the last few years, that is more than certainly enough. If you aren't good with C++ or Java, but you are really good anyway, you can still make it through the interviews, but it will be harder.
Is this some kind of official policy? Because ...
I honestly don't understand why anyone would work for someone else for peanuts.
It's higher than the median household income.
There's a very real premium to working on cool stuff.
Although I believe the Bay Area's[1] "high cost of living" is frequently exaggerated, I also believe, however, that it can't be dismissed. If I had to put a number on it, it would be $10-$30k annually.
[1] The location of all employees at each company may be applying a selection bias, since I don't believe Facebook has more than a tiny fraction of its employees outside of the Bay Area, whereas the same cannot be said of Google.
Only 6.5% of US workers make 100K or more, according to this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24100K+income
It's either just colourful language, or indicates that the writer is out of touch with reality.
I find the denominator of the entire US[1] to be somewhat misleading, as I said. More importantly, however, I found the emphasis to be on the working for someone else, not the magnitude of the salary.
Perhaps even more importantly, the high annual salary may translate to a low hourly rate, especially with a long commute and on-call duty. For some, this may be such a substantial reduction in quality of life, that the salary is low enough to resemble a legume.
[1]Do all US workers in the above denominator include self-employed contractors?
For example, the range of reported salaries for "Software Engineer" at Google is 70k to 133k. Titles like "Senior Software Engineer" and other variants are reported in different groups.
Of course, I work in the energy industry, so that is probably the critical difference. This industry has cash.
I also don't have a sense for the range of experience levels represented by these figures. That's not insignificant.
Glassdoor's gimmick is "tell us your salary and we'll tell you what everyone told us." They'll keep bugging you as you use the site until you finally relent (or play cookie / session reset games).
I'm guessing that means most people who sign up are somewhat insecure about their salary level and want more information. The truly satisfied or highly paid folks either don't use the site much or only need to look at one page and leave satisfied that they are doing just fine.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-com-Salaries-E6036.ht...
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Microsoft-Salaries-E1651.htm
Many of my friends make $100+/hr, it's not out of the ordinary.
I'm sure there are really highly paid developers there as well, but it just feels good to know that you don't need to work for one of the huge companies to make good money.
Also, there are a large number of paper millionaire FB employees, from the stock options. It's a hell of a bonus that I'm pretty sure isn't included in these numbers.
There's a huge variance to what salary good developers are happy with. For every one who says "I wouldn't work for less than X", there are some who would, and moreover would not be unhappy at that salary level.