Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level | Hacker News Reader

Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

drive.google.com

792 pointszuhayeer589 comments

As a FAANG engineer going on 9 years now, let me address the usual rebuttals:

- There is a selection bias. Nope, this is pretty much accurate.

- These aren't real. Yes, yes they are.

- Self-reporters are lying. Maybe some do but these numbers are pretty accurate. If anything, I question Lyft and Airbnb as such outliers. I wonder if this factored in Lyft's post-IPO stock performance and makes unrealistic valuations of Airbnb's RSUs/options. But for any listed company, these numbers are accurate.

- You have to work incredibly hard for this compensation. no, you don't. In fact you'll typically find significantly better work-life balance at a FAANG than a startup.

- These numbers are inflated by years of stock growth that is unlikely to continue in the future. This there is some truth to but not as much as people claim. Amazon, of all these companies, builds in expected stock growth into their initial grant valuation (which I think is total BS; if any Amazon recruiters are reading this, please stop). But I know what offers new hires can get pretty accurately so at current stock prices as a new hire these numbers pare pretty accurate.

- Newer offers are likely to be less. False. If anything, initial offers continue just climbing such that anyone who is interested in maximizing their compensation should probably move companies every 3-4 years, especially 4 if you don't get an additional grant after your initial grant has fully vested.

There are some things to be aware of though and these can make it nontrivial to compare competing offers. Some examples:

- Most FAANGs have a 25/25/25/25 vesting schedule. Amazon does not. It's vesting schedule is 5/15/40/40 with a vesting signing bonus in the first 2 years to (partially) compensate for this.

- Amazon, as noted earlier, assumes stock price growth in their offer.

- Amazon (noticing a trend?) has vesting on 401k matches that can take 2-3 years. Most FAANGs do not.

- Anything less than a 50% 401k match is below market.

- Some FAANGs have caps on 401k matches. Some don't.

- I think the most generous 401k match I've seen is Google's at 50% of your contribution with no cap or vesting period or 100% of the first $3,000 at year's end, whichever is higher. The really nice thing is because there's no cap you get it immediately. It's fairly common to get your bonus in January, put it all in your 401k, get your 50% match and you're done for the year.

- Some offer the ability to make contributions into after tax 401k (Google "mega backdoor Roth" if you're interested in this). This is potentially huge beneficial. You can use it to invest money you can withdraw at any time at no penalty but the investment returns are tax free. If you withdraw the returns (not the initial investment) prior to being aged 59.5 you pay taxes plus a 10% penalty, however.

- Vacation days vary but 4 weeks (20 days) should be considered the norm for the US (30 for Europe/Australia).

- Some companies (eg Google) start you on less vacation days but you get more with length of service.

- Unlimited time off is bullshit. Think of this as no time off.

- Health insurance can differ but I imagine pretty much all FAANGs at this point have good health insurance. The gold standard is probably Kaiser for CA residents.

- Some FAANGs have a 1 year cliff. Some do not (eg Google, FB).

- Vesting schedules can vary. Some are monthly, some every 3 months, some annually. Try to avoid anything less frequent than once every 3 months. It can create bad incentives for the company to get rid of you before a big vest date.

- FAANGs will give you performance-based RSU grants annually. The time of year can vary. The eligibility can vary. For example, Google gives you a refresh grant at, after Q2-Q3 calibration (based on your previous two halves). And I believe in recent years it changed that if you joined that calendar year you aren't eligible.

- Because of refresh grants and your initial grant running in tandem, years 2-4 can often be your most lucrative. If you don't get promoted or an additional grant you can get significantly less compensation in year 5. Why these companies let people leave because they won't give them additional equity rather than competing for a new hire is beyond me. But they do.

- Because of the inflation in initial offers, a new hire can often have a significantly better offer than someone who joined 3 years prior. The veteran may only have higher total compensation because of refresh grants and/or stock growth.

- FAANGs tightly control salary within bands for a given level. Going beyond this is unlikely to happen however there is FAR more movement on RSUs in an initial offer and/or signing bonus.

So this is all another reason of why from a financial POV working for a startup is--how should I put this?--suboptimal. Your equity is probably worth nothing (even if you get acquihired, liquidation preferences probably mean all non-founder stock is worth $0). The hours are worse. The benefits are worse. There may be reasons to do this that aren't financial (as a non-founder) but personally I'd suggest people use their most productive years to ensure their financial independence and then chase whatever moonshot tickles your fancy without the pressure of having to pay for food.

> - These numbers are inflated by years of stock growth that is unlikely to continue in the future. This there is some truth to but not as much as people claim. Amazon, of all these companies, builds in expected stock growth into their initial grant valuation (which I think is total BS; if any Amazon recruiters are reading this, please stop).

Yeah Amazon is really deceptive with their offers and raises. Assume you won't get anything more than what's on the offer letter, even if you get promoted. And don't expect much reward for high performance, if you want a proper raise you'll need to job hop instead. Even if you do get a reward, expect it to be heavily deferred and reduced based on a ridiculous 15% stock growth assumption. Amazon uses a 6 month vesting schedule to try and ensure they have ample time to kick you out before a vest (or they get to get away with not giving you the comp if you get angry and leave before a vest). Here is a review of how Amazon comp works:

https://www.teamblind.com/post/How-refreshers%E2%80%9D-work-...

Also, this has Amazon's location listed as "Seattle, CA"

> - Some FAANGs have a 1 year cliff. Some do not (eg Google, FB).

?? I joined Google in 2014 and had a 1 year cliff. Have they removed it now?

Yes. As of -2 years ago.

What you mean with 1year cliff?

It means that your normal vest schedule doesn’t start for one year, so if your initial stock grant vests quarterly, none vests at all for the first year and then 25% vests all at once after year one, then the other 75% of it vests quarterly over the following three years. Essentially it’s a small, localized version of golden handcuffs for the rank-and-fils, since it means if you leave the company within the first year you get no stock.

>- Because of refresh grants and your initial grant running in tandem, years 2-4 can often be your most lucrative. If you don't get promoted or an additional grant you can get significantly less compensation in year 5. Why these companies let people leave because they won't give them additional equity rather than competing for a new hire is beyond me. But they do.

Many large companies operate on an up or out basis. If you're not getting promoted then you're encouraged/expected to leave at some point. This compensation scheme seems like a soft version of that.

Years 1-4 you're being paid both for what you do as well as for your potential. If you haven't been promoted by year 5 then you're just getting paid for what you do.

This seems very locally maximized. Over a X0 year career it's impossible to consistently run-rate at that level of performance. But as an outsider there is no turnover issue at the sample set posted here. Just an observation.

Just to add to your awesome comment, many of these companies have compensation policies that discourage retaining talent. I'll give an example of a certain FAANG.

- Initial offer sets your comp for your first 4 years.

- If stock outperforms the expectations (as it has historically done) you get no refreshers.

- If your comp is at the top of your band, you get no/nominal raise.

- Newly promoted engineers get paid the bottom of the new band. If they are already earn that much or more (via stock growth) they get nothing.

And then the truly key points.

- The company stack ranks employees every year. Only top performers (a tiny fraction) get raises to the top of their band. If they are already at the top or above (via stock growth) they get nothing.

- Most other employees get no/nominal raises.

- Employees must be 'consistently performing at the next level' in order to get promoted. This avoids the Peter principle [1].

Why do I say this discourage retaining talent? Let's consider the following scenario:

- You are a good engineer, and get hired for your level at top of your band.

- Because you are at the top of the band, no matter how hard you work, you won't get any raises. Being rated top performer, which is quite difficult, gets you nothing (other than an ego boost).

- You need to consistently perform at the next level to get a promotion. This might take a few cycles in the best case scenario. If you are doing well, essentially you are doing L+1 work for L salary.

- When you finally get promoted, you go to the bottom of the band. Including stock appreciation, you will still probably not get a raise.

- You need to be a top performer at the next level to get a raise.

Also once your initial grant runs out, you rely on stock appreciation and top performer ratings to get more money.

This model incentives behaviours like these:

- Get hired at the top of the band. Use competing offers between top companies to get there.

- Work just hard enough to not get fired in your first 4 years.

- After your initial grant expires, interview somewhere else.

Or, if you have a very good shot at a promotion.

- Get hired at level L.

- Do good work to get promoted to L+1 within your first 4 years.

- Shortly after the promotion, look for L+1 positions in other companies. Chances are that a new hire offer elsewhere will be much higher than your current comp.

Anecdotally a good number of people leave after a promo, and this is probably one of the reasons why.

EDIT: Fixed formatting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Getting promoted only makes sense if you can't get interviews for L+1 without the promo. Otherwise it only makes sense to do the minimum required to not get fired, and prepare for interviews elsewhere.

Many people do, particularly after getting passed for a promotion once or twice. My anecdotal evidence is that it is harder to get promoted to L+1 than to get hired at L+1.

This setup is unique to Amazon and is not at all common everywhere else. Almost all others give refresh grants as long as performance isn’t in the bottom 5-10%.

I don’t think that’s accurate.

Refresh grants for mediocre performance are mostly a Google/Facebook thing.

No, refresh grants (around 25% of initial 4-year grant) for median performance are the norm. As far as I am aware, this is the case in all FAANG except Amazon.

Have you worked at Apple or Netflix? Since that’s what we’re talking about.

> Some FAANGs have caps on 401k matches. Some don't.

Federal contributing limits at 19.5, no?

That’s the individual contributor cap, contributor + company is $57k.

Matches and after-tax contributions go to a different bucket.

Yes for your individual contributions. For the good companies, they will match 50% putting you up to 29,250. If they are good, they will also allow you to do the mega backdoor roth [0] which allows you to contribute the remainder of the max 57,000 (so 27,750) in after tax dollars and immediately move it into a roth account where it grows tax free.

[0]: https://thecollegeinvestor.com/17561/understanding-the-mega-...

An example of a cap: the 50% match is capped at 6% of your salary so if your salary if $150,000 then they will only match that 50% on the first $9,000 of eligible contributions, so $4,500.

I actually think this is a terrible system as it punishes most the people who need it (ie lower level employees) but here we are.

For completeness, there is also vesting, which I mentioned. This means you get the match but if you leave within a certain period (eg 2 years) they will claim back your match.

No.

401K limits are separated into 2 limits, the second being a bit more obscure.

There is the employee limit of ~19,500 which is reviewed by the IRS every year, and there is the employer limit which is an additional number where the total of both is reviewed by IRS every year. It is currently ~$56,000 or so

Many employers only barely flirt with this number, offering a few thousands here and there in various schemes.

Any software engineer doing a little contracting can pump $30,000 into their own self directed 401k acting as their own employer. You can have multiple 401ks as long as the total limit doesn't exceed that super max.

To be fair, the max you can put into a solo 401k on the employer side is limited to 20% of your net annual profit (business income minus half of self-employment tax). So in order to put in $30,000, you need to have net income of around $160k, which is doable, but more than a little contracting.

For most people here, the mega backdoor Roth is probably more doable, assuming your employer offers the option.

This is fascinating to me since I've never worked (since graduating, anyway) outside of the Upper Midwest. I worked for a startup here once, but that was bar none the worst job I've ever had.

Job offers have never been anything but a straight salary and a 401k, sometimes with matching, sometimes not. No bonuses or stock ever. Raises have usually been just below inflation rates. Vacation peaked for me at 3 weeks.

For context, I'm a senior software engineer with twelve years of experience. I make $130k right now.

> I make $130k right now.

If you're in a reasonable COL area, you're probably closer to FAANG salaries than you think.

I make about that in a relatively low COL city in the south. After receiving some recruitment emails, I thought about FAANGs but ran the numbers and decided against it.

$400000 is not nearly as awesome as it sounds if you're living in the Bay area or similar tech mecca. Note: it's an immense salary, of course, but not so far from 130000 when you consider COL. Whether 100000 or 400000, we're all very fortunate.

Finally, from what I've heard, it's far from guaranteed for a non FAANG senior engineer to get offered a senior engineer position coming in. More common is to start at engineer, which would be a straight up demotion in salary when you consider cost of living.

FAANG engineers are welcome to correct me if this is not the case at their company.

Edit: surprised this is getting heavily downvoted. I'm not claiming they're equivalent, only closer than you'd think. Also, I wonder if folks even look at COL comparisons, which don't even tell the whole story. For example:

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

And I live in an even lower cost-of-living city than Raleigh. I also think this site gives an optimistic view of San Francisco COL, based on what I've heard from friends. Particularly if you want to buy a home.

If you're just coming out of school, and can get a job at a FAANG, go for it. But for older devs with established families and spouses with careers, the salary isn't as overwhelmingly more as it appears at first glance.

In the absence of arguments otherwise, I'll assume the truth hurts.

Honestly I don't think I'd switch. My current job is comfortable and interesting, despite the "low" salary. It also allows me the freedom to explore my own ideas and projects while maintaining really nice work/life balance.

Numbers on paper don't tell the whole story.

if accredited investor status accounted for Cost of Living I would agree with you

but the reality is that hard numbers, especially when they are 300% more, really do matter

Sure, but after a certain point, more money doesn't make much of a difference.

I travel enough. I go to plenty of good restaurants with my wife and friends. I can buy some fun toys. My retirement fund is in progress. I have no debt.

Would I turn down another hundred grand a year? No. Would I do much with it? No, it'd just go to investments, which I may or may not live long enough to use.

nah, I want to be able to make the same amount annually from interest alone, I want to be able to afford appeals court for any civil or criminal issue, I want a total exemption from the socio-economic woes of the proletariat such as the privilege of switching fielty to nations when convenient or preferred, a total exemption from ever needing to split assets built in a marriage because they would have never been built in a marriage or at least no real impact to an actual nest egg since they existed beforehand

That's... oddly specific.

You do you, though.

Its the privilege that separates the classes. As you pointed out the consumptive aspects completely disappear, but its an incredibly limited view of money.

I forgot to mention the tax and liability advantages of a fully funded trust and autonomous private foundation.

I admit I never considered these aspects of financial gain. What books or other reading would you recommend on the subject?

The only thing that’s significantly more expensive in the Bay Area is housing. Even with the housing prices, you will still probably come out ahead. Remember that if you own, you are building up equity in a huge asset.

CoL calculators online are not accurate at all.

I personally work remotely for a FAANG from the upper Midwest, but if this arrangement ever runs out I’d move to California or Seattle before I took a 30% pay cut.

I agree with your overall point, but in addition to housing I'd also include childcare / private school tuition, and taxes.

> I personally work remotely for a FAANG from the upper Midwest

Which FAANGs hire remotely, please?

And why do you think online COL calculators are inaccurate? They're relatively close to government reimbursement tables, which are pretty well-researched.

Edit: Also, once again, I'm not arguing that I wouldn't come out ahead, only that you have to consider COL. So many new grads I know have moved to CA for a junior position, elated at making the same salary I make here as a senior, only to realize that cost of living eats up a huge percentage of that salary. Granted, some of these people may not be the most financially frugal around...

My main argument is that COL is an important component of salary.

Amazon at least for AWS consulting positions seem to hire from almost any major city as long as you are willing to travel and are near a major airport. I’m mostly a software engineer now but I’ll probably be looking to work for AWS directly or one of their consulting partners in two years when I am more willing to travel.

I think the same applies to Microsoft (Azure) and Google (GCP)

Cost of living calculators are calibrated for the median budget, which looks very different from the budget of someone who makes 400k/year. Poor people spend a large fraction of their money on housing, which is much more expensive in HCOL areas and skews the cost of living multiplier. If you were only paying 5% of your income on rent in a LCOL area and your rent quadruples after moving to SF, you only need a 15% pay increase to cover that, not a 300% increase.

Also don’t forget that wealthy people can save most of their money, so an X% increase in overall expenses doesn’t need to translate to an X% increase in income.

You need to account for savings. A dollar saved in a high COL area is as good as one saved in a low COL area. If compensation triples and cost of living triples, your savings also triples.

If you are saving 100k/year in a place that is very expensive, and are happy to live in a place with low COL, work for 10 years in the high earning/high cost of living area and retire in the low COL area.

Just to back you up on this, the savings should more than triple. 3x the compensation probably more than offsets the 3x in costs, so your savings may be more like 5x or more compared to low COL areas.

Assumption: cost + savings = income

3 * income - 3 * cost = 3 * ( cost + savings ) - 3 * cost = 3 savings

Is my assumption wrong? Otherwise it's 3x and not 5x.

I should have phrased it differently, the 3x in cost primarily applies to housing while most other expenses only increase marginally. Overall costs are closer to 2x increase instead of 3

Note remote but Amazon/AWS have offices in the twin cities. Google has an office in Madison, Wisconsin. Google is also opening up an office in Rochester, MN. Whether you can work remote is another question.

The problem with COL calculators is that 100% of your pay does not go to costs. You can't just say SF is 4x as expensive as Chicago so I need 4x the salary. The increased costs are a fixed number, not something that scales with salary.

Typically to be allowed to work remote at a FAANG, you need to have spent time doing critical work onsite - this is still a very rare arrangement.

One secret is that management in most companies, even FAANG, often will let you work remotely from time to time as long as you get your work done - I have often worked while traveling in order to cut down on vacation day usage without complaint.

Otherwise, I have seen Netflix offer remote positions on occasion, but know that such positions are extraordinarily competitive. You will not get such a position by being just an above average dev.

You're forgetting taxes. CA has some of the highest taxes in the country. Comparing to TX, for example, gas is about $1/gal more in the bay and TX has no income tax.

I mean, by the numbers:

400k salary - 129k taxes - 72k housing (~1.2M dollar house) = ~200k left over

Just off that alone, the 400k blows the $130k out of the water, no matter where in the country the $130k is living.

https://smartasset.com/taxes/paycheck-calculator#ZI0BD3ambd

Still more money, but your number are off by about 25%

Does $1.2M put you within walking distance of any of the FAANG headquarters? I'm looking at Mountain View, and it appears it's more like $3M to live close to Google. There isn't anything listed (Zillow) close to Infinite Loop, Cupertino. What is listed is $1.8M+.

Just curious, as I currently walk to work and that's a massive QOL issue for me. Sitting in traffic even 60 minutes/day would be awful.

Almost nobody walks to work at the Silicon Valley tech company campuses - they are mostly suburban office parks surrounded by parking, so you'd have to walk pretty far. Lots of people bike though. There are plenty of people that walk to work in SF itself, and walking to work in San Jose will probably become more popular as the various new office buildings around Diridon start to open.

If you highly value walking to work (and to other amenities) then NYC is a great option. $1.2M won't buy you a place, but you can certainly rent a great apartment within walking distance of the Google or Facebook NYC offices for significantly less than $72k/year.

I'm in Reston, VA (outside DC) currently. $500k for a decent townhouse and 1 mile to the town center. I can walk to Google's Reston office spaces, Walmart Labs is around the corner, and AWS (Herndon) is a short bike ride.

Interestingly, the suburban office campuses in this area are beginning to go away. Companies are moving to locations that are at least Metro accessible (Google's new office), or into urban areas (Amazon HQ2). Local zoning has changed to make that more palatable - just interesting to see the change in preferences since I started work in 1999.

Reston is nice! Didn't mean to imply that NYC is strictly better. It would be nice if there were even more private-sector tech jobs in Reston, although I fear that housing supply constraints would then push Fairfax and Loudoun county home prices up to NY/NJ levels.

I own already, that’d be great for my retirement. ;)

And to be honest, my ability to walk was dumb luck. If I change jobs, I’m just as likely to have to drive/Metro into Tyson’s as walk locally. But walking is a big incentive to stay put.

That was one fear with HQ2 coming to DC. With it on the other side of Fairfax, it’ll be a while before it impacts housing out here. But if Google expands its footprint, and with the Metro opening soon, we might see another bump soon.

Here's a 2 bedroom less than 10 mins away from Google for $1.2M: https://streeteasy.com/building/marais-coop/10b

900sqft. I like my space.

I like my city. I don't need more space.

The point is, buying a place for $1.2M in walking distance isn't crazy.

That isn't a house at all.

It's an apartment condo. Worse yet, the land itself is leased from a different owner.

Start with the idea that you own the land and the building, and that you can walk around the building while staying on land that you own. Ideally you would also have mineral rights, the right to drill a well, and similar. You should have the right to bulldoze the building, paint it any color, add brick facing, add gargoyles, or install a triangular front door.

? All the new SFH in mountain view near Google are close to $2m, not $3m. $3m buys you a massive lot as well.

Either way, rent is around $5k a month here for a three bedroom, which is quite doable on a Google salary.

$1.3m will get you a 1300 sq foot town house, so yes, it's quite possible to be located near fang HQ on the budget described above with a family.

Source: Zillow around whisman station

There are many houses just east of AP to the airport in the 1.2 range, and they are not in bad areas

I rent a studio in NYC for $2500/mo ($30k/yr). It's within a 12 minute walk to Google and a 12 minute bike ride to FB. Also close are Amazon, Twitter, Spotify, Uber, etc.

You don't need to be at the company headquarters to make $500k a year. Not being at the headquarters is only a problem if you want to get past director level ($1.5 M/yr)

1.2M house on the penninsula is going to be extremely crappy and definitely in a very bad neighborhood, maybe previously was a crack house.

1.2M house? Assuming you want what's going to be pretty typical in the midwest, that's not at all realistic.

https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco/filter/mi...

If you really want a house comparable to what's affordable on 130k out there, you're talking at least double that.

Kind of. The problem with a $1.2M is that for most people this means you are massively leveraged. If anything goes wrong (e.g., market, tax mistakes, health issues), you can easily end up bankrupt.

Did this once and won my bet, but was very aware of how bad it might go. (Well, "won", since my ex got it all...)

Those are low taxes, to start. You can use SmartAsset [1] for effective total tax rates (40% leaving you $238k in SF, 30% leaving you $90k in NC).

Then you can use NerdWallet for cost-of-living excluding taxes (SF is 211% of NC). So after you've replicated your $90k take-home in SFO, you have about $48k surplus to invest. Not bad, but also probably not what you were expecting!

[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes [2] https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...

I don't think your analysis is correct. Or at least, it's really incomplete and thereby misleading. I'm going to use hard numbers as someone who lives in one of the highest COL areas, but I want to emphasize I'm doing that for illustrative purposes and not to be condescending.

To begin with, the cost of basically anything you buy online from Amazon, Walmart, Apple, Best Buy, etc is the same no matter where you are in the country. Likewise for digital goods. That's a point in favor of the high COL areas.

Of course it's not that simple. You're right that there are plenty of things which cost more money in higher cost of living areas; namely entertainment, cinema, service-oriented experiences like restaurants, bespoke labor, groceries and housing.

In most of those cases the absolute cost raises significantly but the relative cost to your increased salary is still tiny; for example, I spend $6 - $8 for a half gallon of milk, but since I earn well over $300k/year that doesn't really matter. Similarly movie tickets are ~$18 but again, that doesn't scale enough to make much of a dent relative to a competitive engineering salary here.

On the other hand, some cost increases are significant even relative to competitive salaries. This mostly and primarily applies to housing, but it does also apply to restaurants and entertainment somewhat. But despite the fact that I spend over $4000/month for a luxury condo and another ~$2500/month on fun "stuff", I'm also saving over $100k/year on top of maxing out my 401k. That simply blows out any combination of lifestyle and savings I could enjoy in a meaningfully cheaper area.

Finally there is (unfortunately) an opportunity cost to working outside of high COL areas. The concentration of wealth and capital in high COL cities has a superlinear feedback effect on opportunity and lifestyle. There are numerous Michelin rated restaurants near me, a concierge and retinue of helpful staff in my building, world famous entertainment venues within a 20 minute train ride, numerous gyms, lots of childcare, excellent schools, etc. My commute to work is also only 20 minutes.

But those things don't interest everyone. More practically, it is also easier to quickly change jobs here, either out of necessity or for a quick 20 - 50% increase in compensation. Not only is the higher COL a justification for higher salary, but the employee power that comes with a bidding war puts a positive pressure on external compensation packages. The last time I went looking, I received about 10 offers. I don't even currently work at one of the most competitive companies according to levels.fyi.

I don't want to push this on other people because money isn't everything and it's perfectly valid to choose a lower COL area. But I do want to lay out the hard numbers from my experience so as to give a better picture for the situation.

That's interesting. Thank you for that analysis. Again, I wasn't arguing that they were exactly equivalent. They're just not as different as they appear at first glance. It is true that you have a good chance of increasing your savings rate if you can get a job with a FAANG, which is a big deal.

It's also true that it's much easier to change jobs there. That's IMHO the biggest asset and what I used to argue for moving (wife won out).

The culture stuff isn't as interesting. Sadly, wife and I are just homebodies. When we were first married, we lived within a short subway ride of Manhattan yet rarely made it down there. We tend to enjoy cooking, reading, hobbies, etc. Kids are the same. Also, there are multiple other extenuating circumstances that make a move not possible at present.

I do agree with you about the opportunity cost of working outside high COL areas, and I agree that it's not a good thing. It's increasing the country's polarization, which bodes poorly for everyone. But you're right that it's the current reality.

What about my assertion about senior software engineers usually getting shuffled into engineer positions. Do you think that's true, or no?

You mean like downleveling? Sure, that happens a lot. The top paying companies mostly only consider engineers from similarly high paying companies to be known quantities. So if you are a staff engineer at a smaller tech company or a startup, you'll probably end up being "only" senior at Google or Facebook.

> You mean like downleveling? Sure, that happens a lot

Yeah, so that's a major factor here to consider, right? We're talking about moving to a FAANG from a non-FAANG in another region. If most non-FAANG people lose a level, then it really does make the salaries less when you consider cost-of-living.

Downleveling happens, but the $ calculation almost always makes it out very much ahead. At my previous job at a startup, I was making $160k base with stock options as a tech lead/engineering manager, but at my current job at a FAANG, I was offered the same base but with $15k signing bonus and $105k RSUs that are now almost worth double as a high mid-level engineer. For me, accepting the offer was an absolutely a fantastic financial decision. Responsibility-wise, I never felt like I was given less responsibility than at a startup either.

What the downleveling does is align expectations correctly, since most people not at a top tier company likely need some time to ramp up to the expectations of the next level up. What senior/staff/principal mean at companies like Google/FB/Apple is very different from what it means at most companies.

Well, not really. Look back at the salary levels from the levels.fyi PDF. Most people downleveled from senior will end up one or two levels up from new grad. That puts you below the numbers from my comment, but not by a whole lot! And after one promotion you'll be at or exceeding my present situation.

I am much closer to the floor (new grad) than I am to the ceiling, as far as FAANG salaries are concerned.

Does up-leveling happen too? If you were senior or staff at Google, can you get a Principal job at a smaller growth company?

Yes. That's really common when someone very senior at a FAANG wants to achieve a greater level of autonomy and "impact". Once you hit L5/L6 at Google/Facebook (or equivalent elsewhere), the promotion rate slows down quite a lot. So one option to continue career growth is to jump ship for a smaller (but promising) tech company in exchange for more responsibility and a title increase.

It’s certainly true that senior people are unlikely to get hired at a FAANG in a senior role for their first year.

Being a high achieving senior engineer is about delivering on communication and prioritization, more than anything else. It’s very hard to evaluate a prospective hire’s day-to-day willingness to communicate and prioritize, no matter how impressive their resume.

If you do well, you’ll quickly get promoted, though.

And the salary difference is pretty negligible, relative to RSUs, and people who think of themselves as senior can often get pretty senior RSU packages, so this distinction isn’t super relevant for total compensation.

How does that all change if you live a decidedly non-California/non-Bay-Area lifestyle?

I work in the auto industry, which doesn't pay nearly as well, and I'll grant that you're all talking savings rates above my before-tax salary, so you win on that point. However, my hobbies include a machine shop in my basement and a woodshop in the backyard. I estimate the expense of moving to the Bay at north of $150k due to having a non-50-state truck that I would need to replace to be able to move a machine if I ever wanted to upgrade or replace, etc, along with the need for ~2x the typical space that people want in definitely not a condo or apartment. Is that even possible, nevermind practical, in Mountain View?

I probably have a dozen hobbies I'd love to explore that just aren't compatible with my NYC lifestyle. Like anything else, you make your choices on what tradeoffs are worth it to you. For me, not being able to have a machine shop (also on my list) is well worth all that I get in return. You can't have it all, and trying is just going to make your life miserable. If you're happy where you are, then that's what's important.

I hear you on that. I mean that I currently have these things and don't want to sacrifice them, but I seriously am unsure if it's possible to have them in the Bay. If it's not, as I'm coming to expect, I doubt I'll ever consider the switch. I definitely won't for the pay at a startup or the like.

It's very difficult. Whole classes of hobbies are more or less out of the question in the Bay just because of the high cost of housing. If you play the game for a few years, some doors open up but it's never going to be as straightforward as it would be in a low COL area. You'll end up using more shared spaces and possibly need to sacrifice on the commute front to buy more spacious housing.

On the other hand, new venues open up due to the larger amounts of cash on hand. More expensive travel or dining, for example.

As a parent and engineer in the bay area COL is more extreme than other higher cost areas in the country, My company gives a 15% paycut from the sf bay area to say Colorado front range and these were a few things I noticed (having lived in both, colorado on left sfbay on right): - Housing, 3000 sqft house vs. 1500 sqft (sfbay house double the cost) - Taxes(state) - ~4.8% vs ~10% - Property taxes - $6k vs. $17k yearly - Gas ~$2.2 per gal vs. ~$3.40 a gal - Childcare, 12k vs 24k

This is very bad advice. 130k in low COL is absolutely not equal to 400k in Bay. People generally cap their housing expense to 30% salary. So that may give you a mansion in low COL and a 3 bedroom townhome in bay, but the remaining 70% goes very very far. Remember vacations, Tesla, electronic goods, in n out, cost the same no matter where you live.

> 130k in low COL is absolutely not equal to 400k in Bay

It's amazing to me how little people read comments. They latch onto one idea, and then respond to that.

I mentioned - 3 times! - in my original comment that they were not equivalent, but only much closer than they appeared at first glance because of COL. In light of all the responses above, many of which were enlightening to me, I stand by that assertion.

Almost exactly same situation with exactly same salary. I work at a bootstrapped startup.

from a financial POV working for a startup is--how should I put this?--suboptimal. Your equity is probably worth nothing (even if you get acquihired, liquidation preferences probably mean all non-founder stock is worth $0). The hours are worse. The benefits are worse.

This has been my experience over a 20+ year career of working mostly at startups. If you choose to work for a startup, assume the equity will be worthless. Don't even factor it in to your compensation package. It's a false lure.

In many other ways, though, I don't regret working for startups. They're fun and exciting, at least when you don't have a family, and you can learn a lot in a short amount of time. They're good proving grounds for anyone with an entrepreneurial bent, in my opinion.

> The gold standard is probably Kaiser for CA residents.

I love your post but I almost shat myself when I read this. Kaiser is convenient but not top ranked in much. The gold standard is a PPO that lets you go anywhere (else) you like incl. top specialists + a membership primary care network like OneMedical for convenience.

(By the way, I support Medicare4All. Good healthcare shouldn’t just be for wealthy FAANG engineers and even for us the system still sucks.)

Kaiser is also terrible for mental health.

Kaisers mental health services are mostly used by Kaiser staff. Its a fun industry secret.

I was going to say the same thing. Kaiser (KP) is a "full stack" healthcare provider, which means they save money by being vertically integrated (healthcare payer + provider). The downside is that it means you get very little choice of your doctor, the hospitals you use, etc. I had both KP and UHC, and UHC was far better (more specifically UHC + the providers I chose).

I think the only reason people consider it a gold standard is because they market it really well (especially in the bay).

Kaiser varies significantly based on which center you end up in. I've heard very good things about the Redwood City location and very bad things about Santa Clara. There're probably similar variations among its other hospitals. YMMV.

I've been on various Anthem PPOs of varying quality (Google's covered basically everything with zero copay or deductible, their individual plan wouldn't even cover my PCP, my wife's plan was in the middle but getting progressively worse). There's a convenience/flexibility tradeoff. With Kaiser you know that they'll take care of you but you don't have a lot of flexibility or recourse if your particular needs don't meet what they offer. With a PPO you have a lot of flexibility to choose the best providers available, but you have to fight with the health insurance company for a lot of things, and the administrative hassles can be a huge burden.

I’ve heard bad things about both their Santa Clara and Redwood City locations. I’ve also experienced bad things in their RWC location. For example, I was always exhausted and I requested a sleep study. What I got from Kaiser was a crappy take home gadget that detected no abnormalities in my sleep. When I switched to PAMF, I got a real sleep study in a lab. They were able to diagnose breathing and snoring issues within 30 minutes. There are more stories from both coworkers and friends. Save yourself a headache, pay more for a better provider

The only advantage Kaiser has over many health care providers is price.

Kaiser is awful. Sutter and Palo Alto Medical Foundation IME are far superior. I've used these 3 systems.

Thought PAMF was a part of Sutter Health?

Anyway, I agree with you. Kaiser is convenient, but the standard of care of HMO-nominal (i.e. poor).

I've used PPOs with PAMF for lots of years now, and it's been far better than Kaiser no matter who my actual insurance provider was.

You're correct, PAMF is sutter.

For actual healthcare outcomes, Kaiser will outrank most PPOs. Because Kaiser is an integrated health system, they are highly incentivized to actual improve outcomes. PPOs might feel better to you (because they let you have choice and freedom) but I strongly suspect that from a purely what's best for public health is systems like Kaiser. A patient's sense of satisfaction with their healthcare is rarely correlated to outcomes. For example, I worked with healthcare data and we were developing quality metrics and we found for a lot of providers had a negative correlation in metrics to their review scores. I.e there are tons of doctors with high reviews who actually perform quite badly in terms of outcomes. We strongly suspected these are doctors who have good communication and empathy skills but weak clinical skills. I remember looking at malpractice studies and seeing something similar. As a doctor, the probability of getting sued for malpractice is driven by your bedside manner and NOT your clinical outcomes. Essentially, we've found that a doctor with bad clinical expertise but great bedside manner will get sued more than an amazing clinician who has bad bedside manner.

It's a slipper slope if you think your anecdotal satisfaction with your medical provider is a metric of how well the system takes care of you. Unless you are looking at outcomes at a population level it's really hard to see what's going on.

I will say (as others have noted) that Kaiser's mental health support is terrible, but there outcomes outside of that are very strong (if not best in class). They were frequently studied in my partner's master of public health, because of their strong outcomes.

Also don't underestimate the power of primary care in the heaths system (patient's tend to skip primary care visits in PPOs). Many of the life threatening issues my partner sees were caught only due to a primary care visit which exactly why systems like Kaiser are effective.

This type of post is a pet peeve of mine because you use terms like “data” and “anecdotal” but it’s actually a poorly supported argument. This happens too often on HN. It’s certainly true that primary care visits improve health outcomes, but you offer no evidence that people get more primary care at Kaiser. Meanwhile the most significant rankings are not only patient opinions but rather systematic reviews of outcomes, expert analysis and objective metrics. Newsweek did one such ranking that put Kaiser behind 4 other hospitals.[1] US News puts UCSF ahead of Kaiser in many aspects and specialities.[2]

When you need a brain surgery or cancer treatment, you’re definitely going to “feel better” having “choice and freedom” to go to the best.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/04/03/ucsf-medical-center-s...

[2] https://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/area/ca/ucsf-medica...

OP and myself were discussing Kaiser as a health care plan. The ranking you showed was about hospitals not health care plans; a health care plan and a hospital are two completely different things. I also never said Kaiser was the absolute best in every area (I even mentioned their mental heath is very weak), just that their model is solid.

Here's an actual comparison of health care plans:

[1] https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/ncqa-insurer-rankings...

[2] http://healthinsuranceratings.ncqa.org/2019/HprPlandetails.a...

[3] http://healthinsuranceratings.ncqa.org/2019/HprPlandetails.a...

[4] http://reportcard.opa.ca.gov/rc/HMO_PPOCombined.aspx

And here's some research showing Kaiser's outcomes quality: [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26131607

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29625083

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30002140

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270203/

[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC64512/

> It’s certainly true that primary care visits improve health outcomes, but you offer no evidence that people get more primary care at Kaiser. Again, I worked with claims data where we could analyze primary care utilization and kaiser was significantly higher than most PPOs in our systems (and high in general). We specifically built an email targeting patients who did not visit their primary care doctor in the last year and Kaiser was at the bottom of numbers because of the high usage. There is definitely a lot more research you can find studying Kaiser's integrated approach and how it related to primary care usage. Kaiser is pretty good good at preventative care, primary care usage, and some chronic care management.

> When you need a brain surgery or cancer treatment, you’re definitely going to “feel better” having “choice and freedom” to go to the best. Again, I've outlined research showing outcomes and quality metrics showing Kaiser is pretty solid. Their primary care usage is higher than other health plans, and there are quality metrics and research showing they are pretty good at preventative, primary care, and chronic care management. There are definitely gaps, but from a population level outcomes, they perform at or better than many PPOs given their costs. If you take a step further and look at the economic ROI of their plans, they definitely outclass most PPO and HMOs.

It's not like they have that much secret sauce, the main advantages they have are the same ones a nationalized system has (being integrated aligns incentives better).

> If you take a step further and look at the economic ROI of their plans, they definitely outclass most PPO and HMOs.

You moved the goalpost from “healthcare outcomes for tech workers” to “economic ROI given their costs”. This is what I mean by poor reasoning.

Sure, Kaiser is a good bargain. Lowering costs means more people get care vs don’t get care. It is not the “gold standard” when premiums and deductibles are not an object, like a tech workers company sponsored plan.

> OP and myself were discussing Kaiser as a health care plan. The ranking you showed was about hospitals not health care plans;

This is a bizarre retort as Kaiser generally locks you into their hospitals. Clearly we’re arguing different things.

Netflix is a little different from other companies. Netflix pays entirely in cash plus a small stock option bonus on top. You can opt to get any amount of your salary as stock options if you choose. There are no vesting schedules, you get everything immediately (including 401k). Netflix has unlimited vacation.

I wonder how unlimited is that - how common is that people take e.g. 60+ days off (not including sick leaves of course)? I guess most self-impose 30 days limit (or 15, considering US culture).

It varies a lot from team to team and person to person. In general I would say that Netflix encourages healthy work/life balance and people do use vacation a good amount.

And just to be clear, I currently work at Netflix.

Why would you take 60+ days? Why not go for 600+ days?

The idea of unlimited is that it's not 14 days or 21days. Take as many as you honestly reasonable need to. Everyone's life is different, you might get sick, have a sick family member, have a new child. There might be things that come up that requires you to take time off without you having to grovel to your manager. If you also need to take time off for the good times, a wedding, a party, to go see a world cup, Olympic, whatever, do so. So long as you're contributing, not holding your team and peers back and your impact is constant.

p/s. I don't work for Netflix, but that's what I imagine anytime I hear "unlimited".

I was advised ~30 days/year was normal. Only downside is you don't get paid out accrued vacation days when you move on.

60+ is ridiculously high. Isn't the upper end of European countries only like 30 days (6 weeks)?

For what it's worth, the company I just started at is "flexible", but the average is around 25 days per year.

total compensation depends A LOT on when you joined and what the stock has been doing, especially a year after that (typical time RSUs start to vest).

A lot of companies had seen their stock more than double, so a 500K grant turns into over a million (typically vested over 4 years). This is before any bonuses and perf grants

Having worked a total of 10 years at 3 of the FAANG companies I second most of this. At least in the parts of Netflix I saw, though, people do take adequate vacations.

100% agree - I joined a FAANG company 2.5 years ago and was given a $280k package as a mid-level. After two annual review cycles, I currently make $318k. My initial RSU grant is about to hit double what it was ($105k initially), and my refresh RSU grants are close to hitting 50% above their initial value (two grants of $125k) still as a mid-level. Benefits like 401k matching and ESPP stock purchasing also push up effective compensation.

I worked about 5 years in startups and small companies beforehand, and I probably work about the same as in a startup (long hours, partially because I'm a workaholic/ambitious), but with far better quality of life due to management being more competent and working with me to manage stress.

Some comments on specific bullets:

> - Vesting schedules can vary. Some are monthly, some every 3 months, some annually. Try to avoid anything less frequent than once every 3 months. It can create bad incentives for the company to get rid of you before a big vest date.

I have not seen Apple trying to play that game at all (their vesting schedule is every 6 months) - my understanding is if the company wants to get rid of someone, they give them zero refresh RSUs come annual review time as a strong hint.

> - Vacation days vary but 4 weeks (20 days) should be considered the norm for the US (30 for Europe/Australia).

Apple is a bit abnormal in that they give you 12 days to start, but the company typically has ~18 company holidays. Creative folks could negotiate with their manager to make those more flexible with comp time after showing competence.

> - Unlimited time off is bullshit. Think of this as no time off.

I agree for most companies, but Netflix I think is an exception here - my Netflix friends all enjoy copious time off and still get sizable annual raises, one even being offered a promotion to manager.

Does Netflix have a true "unlimited PTO" policy or do they enforce a minimum PTO usage per year? I've heard of places with unlimited PTO but they require their employees to take a minimum of 2 weeks a year (and strongly, strongly encourage 4-5 weeks a year).

I've been at Netflix a few years now as a SWE.

There's no forced PTO, though good managers will encourage you to take it. That's relatively common from what I gather.

I've never had any friction around taking time off, if I was responsible about clearing/delaying/delegating projects and getting my day-to-day work covered.

It's easy to fall in the psychological trap of thinking you never can, sure, but since Netflix pretty much starts at the Senior level for hires (biggest reason they aren't in the first two sections probably) I think it's less of an issue. The fact you see your coworkers taking time off without the world blowing up is also a powerful social cue.

I'd never trust a startup with unlimited PTO, but Netflix actually does mean it.

> Unlimited time off is bullshit. Think of this as no time off.

I'm so tired of hearing this. I think there are some professions/job levels where that is true (client facing jobs or higher up managers), but for most non-management development jobs, this just isn't the case. I've worked at three different companies that have had unlimited time off (I seek it out now) and I have plenty of friends who have worked at companies that have unlimited time off as well.

I've had a few friends work at companies where "unlimited time off" = "no time off", but those are the exception not the rule, in my experience (and usually down to a bad manager somewhere in the chain of command).

I've been at my new company 6 months and have already taken 4 1/2 weeks off. I had a friend take 6 weeks off to backpack through Europe. Two companies ago I took off the entire month of September one year. I'm convinced people who say "Unlimited time off is bullshit" are just bad communicators.

If are at a company that has unlimited time off and actually want to use it beyond just a few days a year, here's my tips:

- Get your work done. Above all else, when you are in office, get your shit done. You want your manager to trust you and be able to justify your job if someone higher up goes "why are we paying someone who isn't even here".

- Be aware of your teams workload. Don't try and take a month off two weeks before you're about to ship a mission critical piece of feature.

- Communicate with your manager/PM/team early and often. If you want to take a month off, let everyone know a few months in advance. Planning is usually done quarterly. Letting your boss know you are going to be gone for a month allows them to only schedule two months of work for you instead of three. Additionally, remind them occasionally that you are going to be gone (I usually bring it up every other one on one)

- Before you go, make sure your work is wrapped up or handed off to someone else. Don't start a task and then disappear for a month.

- If possible, leave a "how and when I'm reachable". You don't need to always be working or even online, but seeming available (even if you're not needed) does a lot to calm nerves. Things like leaving a phone number where you can be reached incase of emergency, listing dates where you will be 100% unreachable, and checking email or slack occasionally for high priority things (I tend to do this while I'm sitting in the airport) make things so much easier for managers.

I know a lot of this seems like common sense, but so people get it wrong and then complain when they get reprimanded because they didn't do it.

If you provide value when you're at work and make sure you leaving causes as few disruptions as possible, taking large portions of "unlimited vacation" is totally possible.

If I can't join the company then immediately take the next 30 years off I don't have unlimited time off.

Do you also get angry at all you can eat buffets when they won't let you eat it all?

Unlimited PTO is bs because when you give unlimited time off people usually request less time off, and companies don't have to pay you for unused time off when you leave. The potential to punish for taking time off isn't a thing anywhere I worked that had the unlimited deal, but the result was typically that the average employee would rarely ask for more than 8 days a year because they didn't feel like they had anything worth taking time off for and there was no use it or lose it mentality either.

Unlimited PTO is always in the company's favor because even if you try asking for more time off than you might have been granted your manager can simply claim that now isn't a good time, or say too many people have asked for the same days off, or point out that others haven't taken as much time off so they should get more time off before you do and because it doesn't risk you not using limited time off they can feel like it's not a problem and it leaves you with no way to prove a loss.

If the company says you get unlimited pto, and actually delivers on it's promise, why couldn't you just take off for like 6 months every year? If you actually need to get approval for time off, then it's not 'unlimited', because they are literally 'limiting' your pto. Is there anything to these 'unlimited pto' offers, besides being an obvious scam?

I don't think they're usually a scam. Typically, small startup (which may have quickly grown into a larger one) with idealistic founders who fancy themselves as being forward thinking and pro work/life balance and think that an unlimited PTO policy will allow employees to take care of themselves. Likely they at some point worked somewhere with a very strict policy and saw bad things happen to people who had medical problems, family emergencies, etc. and don't want to subject their employees to that. The reality of course being that nothing is truly "unlimited" and instead there's an unspoken limit that you don't want to cross (because it will affect your performance reviews whether it's mentioned or not) and the fear of accidentally doing so means that people take less time than they otherwise might. Then of course, because people look at how much time their coworkers take off to figure out what the "norm" is and stay on the safe side of that, the "norm" edges even further down over time and eventually no one ever takes time off unless it's a true emergency. So generally, I think their heart is in the right place; they just didn't fully think through the systemic effects. Or who knows, maybe by now some truly unscrupulous execs have figured it out and are actually doing it on purpose...

Yes, but you still need to be a really really good engineer in the top X% of your field for a FAANG whereas the startup will higher anyone whose qualified to do the job.

I agree with your overall point but as a small nit: usually founders hold common stock, so they will get paid at the same rate as employees (bar "acquisition bonuses" and other similar things).

I tried doing starts for the first couple years including during school. I've been personally involved in 5 different startups and after my involvement I conducted research to see if my experience was typical. To make a long story short, all 5 starts I participated in were badly managed to the point of failure and this is typical.

Any promise of eventually being the smarter move due to ownership or profit share is not worth it. Only 1 in 10 startups is likely to exist at the 10 year mark, and the majority of those still won't be well funded or be issuing dividends. Working for a startup is roughly similar to playing the lottery, somebody is going to win and it won't be you.

To your point FAANG companies used to be the worst career option because managerial expectations were impossible, but that ended almost a decade ago. If anything, FAANG companies will likely be among the first to even implement a 30 hour 4 day work week in the next 10 years for the same salary as the 40 hour 5 day work week. It's getting batter to work for an established company, and most of the bad managers that insisted on making the working environment terrible are now running the startups.

After years of research the clearest conclusion about who you should work for should always be answered by who has the best management team. Good managers enable work life balance, compensate above average and rarely dictate how to get things done. They should be more interested in making you valuable than whether you plan to stick around, and all of this is supported by real research into successful management techniques (See books like Good to Great, Team of Teams and The Goal for supporting reference materials).

so essentially I AM missing out, big time

It makes me feel bad how many people see these figures and immediately start trying to find ways to rationalize why they must be overstated. Aside from some of these companies not being public (so those RSUs are not very liquid) or backloading vesting, they’re pretty accurate IME.

The main thing I would point out is that the years of experience guideline is a bit optimistic. Many engineers get downleveled moving into top paying companies (so someone with 9 years of experience might be level 2) and usually either level 2 or level 3 is a terminal level, meaning it’s both ok to stay at that level for a long time and that promotions get harder.

Also, while these figures don’t (or shouldn’t) include signing bonus/relo, nor health insurance, free food, and other benefits, it should be noted that most of these are in the Bay Area or similarly expensive areas. So a lot of your money goes to housing (with housing close to work large enough for a family being super expensive), and state taxes are a bit steep.

>It makes me feel bad how many people see these figures and immediately start trying to find ways to rationalize why they must be overstated.

Some of the numbers can be hard to comprehend... for example, tech salaries weren't great until about the last decade. And, it used to be that the eye-popping numbers were not for everybody, and certainly not for entry-level / new-grads. Heck, just the amount of transparency in compensation available now was completely foreign when I started my career. Likewise, what's interesting is that in our always connected digital world, location still matters. Thus, for someone not working at a FAANG and not in specific geographic locations, these numbers are other-worldly.

> for someone not working at a FAANG and not in specific geographic locations, these numbers are other-worldly.

Yes. other-worldly is a good word for it. It's not so much that people don't believe these numbers, I think. It's more of a sense of disappointment and feeling left out.

So many experienced professionals work their whole adult lives and end up maxing out at only a 1/10th of the compensation of a "principal" at a FAANG in Silicon Valley.

And the last few years I've taken to blowing off recruiters from SV (including FAANG companies). I'm earning very good money for a software engineer where I live, but... dang, "other-worldly" is a good term for the money you people make.

OTOH, being forced to live in California is a huge downside to any FAANG job (for me, anyway).

We need to cut the myth that these salaries only exist in Silicon Valley.

Seattle and NYC also offer otherworldly packages.

Google (and probably other FAANGs) also pay extremely well in Boston, Los Angeles, Boulder, Chicago, Austin and Zurich/Switzerland.

Yes - but try Des Moines or Missoula or Boise or even Portland, OR (a growing tech hub) and these salary levels are hard to hit. And, outside of the FAANGs the salaries are a step down just about everywhere.

Was just responding to the "being forced to live in California" comment.

> being forced to live in California is a huge downside to any FAANG job (for me, anyway)

You must not like being able to go snowboarding on a Saturday and surfing on a Sunday :)

some of it could be jealousy and envy since most SWE won't get to ever work at a FAANG. FAANGs higher the best, and if you've failed at getting highered by a FANG then you probably won't like seeing all these great figures.

hired*

But yeah.

Now imagine having one of these incomes but having a spouse who is hellbent on moving back to the southeastern U.S. in a year. It’s driving me nuts; I can’t find any company in the south that pays anywhere near my current compensation, and a rough calculation indicates that leaving FANG will bump my retirement age from 38 to 65 (never mind the amazing health insurance I’ll be giving up too). It’s like throwing a winning lottery ticket on the ground and walking away. I’m seriously considering commuting by plane in the future, because even with a $200 per day flight, I would still retire a decade earlier than taking a local job.

Surely cheaper housing, education and other costs would compensate for a locally lower income? I don’t know where in the southeast you’re talking snot but I imagine it’s 50-80% cheaper for housing?

Here's the central issue with the coast: saving 10% of $350k anywhere is a lot easier than saving 20% of $175k in a dirt-poor county in <Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana>.

Partially, this has to do with the desire to retain your absolute peer tier: if your neighbors have PhDs in Alameda, then you want to live with the PhDs in New Orleans. And the Sliver by the River is still expensive. Same holds in Augusta, Jacksonville, wherever.

Those numbers are way off. Th comparison is saving 25+% of $350k vs 50% of $175k.

And that's assuming your spouse doesn't work.

Sure but then you need to go for even cheaper housing when you retire. Instead of going from high cost of living to medium cost of living, you end up going from medium cost of living to low cost of living or worse.

Also higher quality of life. The spouse wants to move for a reason. I wouldn't live in San Francisco for any amount of money.

I would divorce before considering working an extra 27 years. If your spouse thinks this is justified then he/she needs to be replaced anyways.

Yeah because nothing is more important than the acquisition of wealth.

It's worth mentioning that retiring early is an important goal in and of itself. You can either spend the bulk of your healthy years working towards a far off goal in your 60's, or you can work hard in your 20s and 30s and then spend your only time on this earth doing things that interest you, with your spouse.

> It's worth mentioning that retiring early is an important goal in and of itself

Is it really?

I'm not sure retiring early is such an important goal per se.

There are many categories where it isn't true: researchers, scientists in general, doctors, writers, journalists, politicians, teachers, artists (some arts more than others) etc.

The more they age, the more their reputation goes up.

I think many of those people having retiring at young age as a goal are going to change their mind when the time comes

Retiring at (really) young age is a goal when you are in your 20s, not so much anymore when you are in your middle 40s and have a good stable job, where you are respected

It's amazing what you can do with life if you don't care much about your reputation. I'm not in my middle 40s yet (still ~10 years off from that), but have a good stable job, feel respected, and still totally want to go for early retirement in 5-7 years.

You got a point, a provocative one, but still one.

Let's expand it: it's also amazing what you can do if you don't care much about being good at what you do and pass it to the others (that's what reputation is for, being authoritative), it's even more amazing what you can do if you don't care about your family or other people in general.

Madoff achieved a lot by not caring about scamming other people

Then he got caught

It's ok to not care, but rest assured that one day not caring will catch up with you

What I mean is: if your wife wants to move far away from the place that will give you early retirement, maybe it's because she hates the kind of life that will let you retire early...

Is it better to retire early (much early!) or end up divorcing or having an unhappy marriage?

Have you thought about that?

These are the kinds of compromises people usually go through when they are building something that involves more than ME.

> or you can work hard in your 20s and 30s and then spend your only time on this earth doing things that interest you, with your spouse

What if your spouse wanna spend her 20s and 30s with you, in a place that has a normal cost of living, doing a job that doesn't require you to be on 60hours a week?

What if she doesn't wanna wait for you to retire or she doesn't want to retire early (or can't)?

What if you spend your 20s and 30s to do the things you like and interest you and then spend the rest of your life working a steady job enjoying your family?

It is possible to work hard in your 20s and still have a lot of time to do what you like.

It is not possible to do what you like in your 60s with the same energy you had in your 20s.

It's not binary, you either work or stay with the people you love doing interesting stuff, you can do both if you realise that retiring at 38 is not that important as a goal.

> What if your spouse wanna spend her 20s and 30s with you, in a place that has a normal cost of living, doing a job that doesn't require you to be on 60hours a week?

I'm not sure 'bout the exact number of hours, but the top comment in this thread already said "In fact you'll typically find significantly better work-life balance at a FAANG than a startup.".

"Better than a startup" is a very low bar.

I work at a startup in San Mateo and feel that the work-life balance is great here. Not all startups are created equal.

> "In fact you'll typically find significantly better work-life balance at a FAANG than a startup."

I agree with that sentence.

But it also depends on what people are looking for. If working at a FAANG means having to spend a capital for housing in the bay are, maybe that's not what they really want.

Or maybe life in the bay area is not the kind of lifestyle they like.

My point was more about trading money for freedom, especially freedom from bureaucracy/politics and freedom to prefer to be with your spouse instead that being at the office to retire early in your life and maybe divorce in the meantime.

We are young only once in our life, we have plenty of time to work hard.

I'm gonna die before be I can retire (cuz shit happened). I decided to deal with this by getting a remote job and traveling. My cost of living is lower than when I lived in SF, and every weekend can be a mini vacation with a little planning. It's a new development, just since December. I'm planning to do it thru end of year to see how I like it.

I did this for 18 months, figured out that stable personal relationships were critical to me (read: met someone I loved) and settled down again. It was completely worth it though as it really changed my outlook on the world and I'm a much happier person. I also feel more grounded in where I'm at in my life. I wish you all the best, if you ever want to chat with someone who has been a digital nomad and knows a few spots, feel free to reach out to me directly.

Another way of putting it is adding 27 years of work to someone's life.

It's okay if your marriage doesn't work out because you want to be in different places and have different life goals.

I would put financial freedom pretty high on my importance list.

Not talking FU money, but retire and maintain current lifestyle.

There goes half your pay to alimony

It's harder, but not impossible to get this sort of compensation in a remote gig. I recently went through a similar process, needing to move from Seattle to central MD for family reasons, and not wanting a lifestyle-altering commute. E.g. Stripe is high on this list and is very remote friendly.

Negotiate better terms. I work for a FANG, and my salary is pretty consistent with what's in that list despite the fact that I work from home elsewhere. Sure it's northeast, but that's probably closer to southeast than to west coast at this point. Maybe in southeast you'll take a bit of a salary hit, but probably still make quite a bit more than you can get locally.

There are a couple of other downsides, though. One is that you'll probably only be mostly remote. I travel one week a month, which my family can tolerate well enough (one kid in high school) but if your need to be with your family is greater then that could be a bigger issue. The reason I do this is because of downside #2: being the only remote in a team sucks in 90% of cases, even more at FANGs which tend to have extremely remote-unfriendly work flows/habits. A lot of people just can't be weaned away from hallway (across the desk, lunchtime) decisions, nothing written down, each outcome typically presented as a no-longer-debatable fait accompli days or weeks later - no matter how much it screws you or anybody else. Questions asked online get answered hours instead of seconds later, if at all. Code reviews take days instead of hours, again because everybody's attention is exclusively on what's happening in person and also because of time-zone issues which you can't avoid no matter how well you've educated your colleagues. Get used to working west-coast hours at least half the time no matter where you really are, and expect to get dinged on reviews because you can't complete anything collaborative as fast as your peers (short of being such a force of nature that you can overcome the entire org's resistance to change in this area).

I know that sounds pretty dire, but that's how you'll earn those big (by local standards) bucks. Only you can decide if it's worth it. Good luck.

I'm in central Canada and work remotely for an org in the bay area, and this is (generally speaking) true.

As the remote worker you're always going to be a step behind. Still totally worth it, financially speaking, but know that your triumphs are smaller and your fuck-ups larger while remote.

Hi any chance I could speak to you offline? I am about to start a similar situation and would love to understand your setup. My email is in my profile.

How much of the delta in years is compound growth?

Btw Monday to Thursday with a corporate apartment (aka hotel) might he easier.

See if you can negotiate a remote work position. I work for one of the companies in this report in a fairly senior position and even though they don't advertise it, they do allow some folks to go remote after a lengthy HR process. If not your current company, figure out which companies will allow it and get a different job, then work there for a year or two to establish a great reputation and then ask for a transfer.

Please don't consider commuting daily by plane. The CO2 impact is immense. Heck, even flying 8x or 10x a year or so is a huge impact that requires significant lifestyle adjustment to mitigate.

> See if you can negotiate a remote work position

If you're lucky and they DO offer a remote position, it will be for 1/4th of your current salary. Bet on it.

Do you have any evidence for that claim? I don't have anything broad-based, but I work remotely for one of these companies and make exactly what I would if I worked at HQ. And it's not because I'm some super-awesome negotiator.

Gitlab famously publishes a bizarrely micromanaged & comprehensive policy on how they will reduce your salary based on where you choose to move, and they are a fully remote company.

It never ceases to amaze me how companies try to argue they shouldn’t pay their top wage everywhere, and how workers are willing to accept this. Especially for a remote-only company where your salary should literally not be based on costs in your home region (since the company is not based there, not paying taxes there, etc.).

I think there are actually two issues here: where should companies hire, and what should they pay those they do hire. The answer to the first question is unequivocally "somewhere cheaper" even though the cost in terms of cultural change and coordination cost can be non-zero. I think it's valid to pay differently in different markets. If an increment in salary has negligible effect on recruitment or retention in that market, it's wasted money. I don't even believe in "shareholder returns uber alles" but I'd rather see that money spent on hiring more people rather than the same number at higher salary.

In my case my employer couldn't have gotten me for too much less, because I did make clear that being an only remote with frequent travel was a negative. That concern doesn't apply equally to everyone, though, and tends to decrease for all as companies adjust to having remotes on every team.

> Gitlab famously publishes a bizarrely micromanaged & comprehensive policy on how they will reduce your salary based on where you choose to move, and they are a fully remote company.

They literally punish you for working in your own country. Today I work for a company based in the Valley that pays me a great salary, maybe not SV, but also not "median local (Mexico) rates".

When I started looking to opportunities at GitLab, I was surprised at how they punished remote workers based on where they were from.

I could always move to SF or around on a TN1 and earn the full salary, but I am happy where I am.

I've looked at Gitlab's calculator and decided not to apply for a job there as a result. As a potential employee it does feel quite unfair that someone else doing the same job might make twice as much money.

If you put yourself in Gitlab's shoes and imagine hiring people, it does make some sense. A couple years back I remember reading articles about the oil boom in North Dakota. People were flooding into a remote area that was lacking all sort of services, so next thing you know rates shot up, even for mundane stuff like barbers or auto mechanics. Of course, I don't want to pay twice as much for a haircut or oil change just because some folks in a boomtown a thousand miles away are charging those rates.

Of course, my hair can't be cut and my oil can't be changed remotely, but a REST service sure can be implemented from a thousand miles away. It'll be interesting to see if GitLab sticks with their approach long-term, as I do believe (anecdotally) they are missing out on good talent in second-tier cities.

>a bizarrely micromanaged & comprehensive policy

Perfect description.

I've always been amazed by that blog post.

It reads like a textbook case of bike-shedding(seriously the number of words and engineering thought spent on it is asinine) for what ultimately amounts to faux virtue-signaling about how you're going to get paid 20% below market.

I wonder if GitLab's policy is actually more bizarrely micromanaged than most large companies, or if we just get to see it since GitLab defaults to everything being open. I mean, I'm sure Apple has had countless debates about how to pay their people in many different locales, they just aren't open about it. If you get an offer from Apple, you just see that offer, not all of the policy and philosophy that drove why that particular number made it onto your offer letter.

It's kind of interesting to see how the sausage is being made, even if I feel like GitLab would underpay me in my current location.

that's not my experience, is it your experience?

Yes, that has been my experience. Remote offers have been for the local area market, not the company physical presence market.

Harsh remote pay disparity was much more common ~5 years ago, but in my experience it's significantly better these days.

There's definitely a large swath of companies that try to use remote workers to lower costs, and there's usually some hit to package size, but the serious companies make extremely worthwhile offers.

Two anecdotal data points:

I work semi-remote for a non-FAANG enterprise company and my comp is bay area level. I'm in Seattle, which helps negotiation, but my colleagues in rural areas have a quality of life that suggests competitive compensation even in middle america.

A friend in rural NY got a remote job that was within 10k of his bay area salary. ~120K for a non-engineer at a company with ~13M series A.

I work remotely for Bay-area tech(not literal FAANG, but similar orbitals), and my pay is in no way arbitrarily multiplied for my location.

>Bet on it.

Where do I collect my winnings? :)

Did you start remote? I wonder if there is a difference in experience between people who start off working onsite but then decide they want to live somewhere else and negotiate remote work after proving themselves.

>Did you start remote?

Not right away. My progression in tech was as follows:

* Company 1: Explicitly onsite, no existing remote paradigm

* Company 2: Explicitly onsite, no existing remote paradigm

* Company 3: Explicitly onsite, existing but ad-hoc/unofficial remote paradigm

* Company 4: Explicitly remote, with other onsite employees

* Company 5: Explicitly remote, with other onsite employees

Companies 1 & 2 had no existing remote paradigm, and there was no opportunity to negotiate for it.

Company 3 had an existing remote paradigm, but it was somewhat ad-hoc/unofficial, and dependent on varying levels of political/organizational capital(how influential/liked was your manager, and their manager etc...). I was able to prove myself and negotiate for full remote after a couple of months. Unfortunately, said political situation deteriorated and with the prospect of my contract not being renewed(or renewed exclusively onsite) I sought a different role.

Company 4 had an onsite/physical office space, but my team/role was explicitly remote, and this was an established aspect of the role throughout the interview process.

Company 5 had an onsite/physical office space, but my team/role was explicitly remote, and this was an established aspect of the role throughout the interview process.

Hopefully this is helpful. My anecdotal experience says that you might need to seize an opportunity to negotiate for remote work where it might not be a first-class paradigm, and later pivot this experience to get a 100% remote role with the established infrastructure and organizational frameworks to properly support it.

Ok thanks this is helpful.

As someone who worked for a remote FAANG office IN the southeast US, I feel your pain. Rates in this part of the country aren't anywhere near what they are in the bay area sadly. I took a job with fedgov for twice what I was making at FAANG.

You mean half?

No. FAANG remote position paid a pittance. Promotion was going to require a relo to HQ. Fedgov paid double what FAANG was paying in the same area believe it or not, and I had no desire to move to SF. Admittedly the barrier to entry is quite a bit higher w/ Fedgov and the work isn't nearly as glamorous.

> because even with a $200 per day flight, I would still retire a decade earlier than taking a local job

You'd get so many air miles too!

HN never ceases to amaze me. Plenty of people here are great at negotiating job offers, but struggle negotiating in relationships. Different skill, set I guess maybe no surprise. Well, either way, figure it out. Go remote, long-distance, invest, build a business, or whatever else you need to do to retire around 40ish. Learn to make sacrifices.

There's more to risk in the relationship negotiations, especially if there are kids involved. You can play potential employers off against each other. You might be able to leave an employer and come back in a few years at a higher compensation level. Try playing off a spouse against their replacement and see how that goes ;-D

It didn't go well.

Have you considered working at a bank in Charlotte?

No offense, I'd let her go. Speaking from a guy with 14 years of marriage and a subsequent nasty divorce. I have custody of my 2 children as well. You only live once. Retire early.

are you kidding? that's the dream. Just work for the FANG for 5 years and save 75% of your salary. then you can retire for the rest of your life in the Southeast US. I'd love to be in that position.

Do not relocate. Figure something out. Have dual residences. Negotiate negotiate negotiate. Read every relationship book known to mankind. Especially out of fashion things like ”way of the superior man” and such.

Read How to Win Friends and Influence people.

Do not quit your job.

How many years to go to hit 38? And what do you plan on doing from ~38~58? Do you plan on sending your kids to a big name school that's going to charge 5-6 figures per semester?

As someone who's bearing down on my mid to late 30's, my recommendation is to work you ass off while you're still young and full of energy.

One of the highest paying companies is stripe. They recently annouced that their fifth hub would be remote.

https://stripe.com/jobs/search?l=remote

Another point of reference: here are some offers recently aggregated on Blind. In 2019, I got an offer almost identical to one of those listed below, and a friend got an offer a little higher than listed below. So I believe the reports are legit.

While the raw salary data on levels.fyi is useful, other context about the candidate & team is pretty important. For example, my friend has no college degree but matched to a very profitable / well-funded team, so he got a relatively larger stock award. levels.fyi probably has a pretty good estimate of how each company assigns base salary bands to the now "standard" four levels (junior, senior, staff, decorated).

It seems sign-on bonuses grew a lot in 2019. Several posts for Facebook new grads getting $100k sign-on bonus.

Senior

* 185 base, 10% bonus, 300k - 400k for 4 years stock, 60k sign on

* Total Comp: 294 - 319 / yr

Staff:

* 210 base, 15% bonus, 600k for 4 years stock, 75k sign on

* Total Comp: 411 / yr

Senior Staff:

* 230 base, 20% bonus, 1M for 4 years stock, 100k sign on

* Total Comp: 551 / yr

Facebook

Senior:

* 210 base, 15% bonus, 700k for 4 years stock, 80k sign on

* Total Comp: 437 / yr

Staff

* 225 base, 20% bonus, 1.1M for 4 years stocks, 100k sign on

* Total Comp: 570 / yr

Google

Senior

* 195 base, 15% bonus, 750k for 4 years stock, 100k sign on

* Total Comp: 438 / yr

Staff

* 220 base, 20% bonus, 1M for 4 years stock, 120k sign on

* Total Comp: 544 / yr

I've recently interviewed and got 5 offers. Those numbers check out.

All SF/CA numbers I suppose? Any idea how these differ in Austin?

yeah pretty sure these were all CA. offers I've seen for Seattle are a bit lower, not sure about Austin.

Yes, all SF offers.

No idea for Austin, but I used levels.fyi to give me an idea of what to expect and negociate, and it helped a lot (and was on point with what I got offered). I think you can filter per city, so there might be some data for Austin.

Does “1M for 4 years stock” mean a 1M grant per year that each vest over 4 years or 4 years worth of grants that total 1M?

1M/4 = 250K vests each year (excluding any refreshers)

Do you know how many years of experience these companies need to place someone in these levels?

For my offer, I had 10 years of experience and they slotted me as Senior. Generally I've seen people with as few as 2 years of experience slot as Senior. I think it has less to do with the years of experience you actually have and more to do with your panel.

I just landed a senior role at a FAANG-ish SF company paying over $300k TC. Some comments on this:

1. Equity is the biggest factor in these figures. Levels.fyi is extremely bad at clarifying whether you should be reporting your equity value at signing vs how its changed since. Signing is the only apples to apples comparison.

2. These level descriptions are weird. They make it sound like “senior” engineers with 5+ years exp don’t write much code, are just 30% of the company, etc. I suppose it depends on the company, but key teams at FAANGs are able to hire more seniors and just invest in better engineers writing code every day. Good engineers like writing code and working with other good engineers. Netflix for example is known to hire mostly seniors. They’re not just writing design docs.

3. Speaking of Netflix they are an interesting outlier in that they don’t do equity, they do cash TC that is competitive with cash+equity FAANGs. So their offers are great data points that clear up some of the ambiguity around equity value. They are out there every day negotiating for talent. Although I think there’s a little bit of a premium to attract engineers down to Los Gatos.

4. Can they see who opens their doc on google drive when shared like this? The link immediately opened my app with me logged in.

What I find completely demotivating is working for a FAANG in Europe, and seeing the massive disparity between US colleagues. You can argue cost of living is different, healthcare is public blablabla, but recruiters have told me straight out: we dont adjust for cost of living, we adjust for market rate. Therefore they dont give a rats ass about how much it costs to live in a specific country, they just pay based on the average going rate. Unfortunately, some EU countries (e.g. IT) have very low purchasing power due to stagnant wages and inflated prices. So we're getting the shit end of the stick.

> we dont adjust for cost of living, we adjust for market rate.

This is true everywhere.

For what it's worth I moved from SF to AMS a few years ago for my employer (FAANG-ish) and they cut my salary by 30%. I was pissed and fought hard, but they didn't bulge. My quality of life (including buying power) was still more in AMS.

Depends on what you're buying. I made a similar move from SV to Munich, some things got cheaper, like rent, transportation, childcare, and groceries. "Stuff" (anything that comes out of a factory) was generally more expensive, as was media/digital subscriptions. Definitely feel poorer in Munich, though part of that was just an unfortunate school situation.

media/digital subscriptions more expensive than SV? Like which ones and at which scale?

My experience with europe (France and Netherlands) is that most of those things are also incredibly cheaper, 20e/month for unlimited data cellphone plan, 40euro for fast internet, etc.

What type of media subscription you have for those to feel like they lower your buying power? I feel like once you've paid cheaper "rent, transportation, childcare, and groceries" you mention, how are your media/digital subscriptions making a difference?

You are lucky it was 30%. For most people hired locally it would be much lower in most companies.

Also we don't get free heathcare, we pay for it through taxation. I believe this is morally right, but that's beside the point: These well-paid American employees are also probably getting a great healthcare package as part of their contract, so they don't even have to pay for it.

Oh, healthcare still costs money in the US, when I was at Google in the bay area I still had monthly premiums and out of pocket costs. It wasn't super expensive though...as long as nothing went wrong.

All employer provided healthcare is subsidized not free.

Haha, your comment reminded me when I went to Las Vegas and the hotel told us to go into bus X that they offered as part of the service for their guests.

When we arrived to the bus, we asked the driver: "Is this the bus service that goes to XYZ place and it si free?" . The driver very seriously told us: "It is not free", to which we replied "but they told us it was free!", finally he added: "it is not free, it is complimentary"

I found amusing how the US culture finds the concept of "free" (gratis, kostenlos) somewhat dirty.

It is free are G. There is a 1000 deductible and people get 1000 in their HSA at the start of the year. Nothing gets cut monthly from your pay check..

The Swiss offices have much lower tax rates than their bay area counterparts, a tax rate which includes health insurance (correct me if its a separate tax)

Health isn't a tax as such, but an insurance service that everyone is obliged to buy from one of several providers. Importantly, it doesn't depend on your income, rather your age and health stuff like whether you smoke.

At 200k+ pay from FAANG swiss income taxes are not that low. In Zurich they roughly are comparable to US federal taxes, like what you'd pay in Seattle with just a few niceties like no capital gains tax. It gets a little cheaper in Zug and Schwyz but not much.

Health care is absolutely not free, in fact it's probably second most expensive country in the world for healthcare after the US. A doctor visit is going to cost you 100-200 franks at least. Insurance system works much better than in the US, but prices are (almost) as crazy.

There are over 1000 engineers in Amazon's Toronto office. Every one of us knows we could make a huge increase in total comp by moving to the USA. Amazon would even help us make the move, relocation support, everything.

I know ~3 people who've done so after 7 years here. We just like it better here, money be damned.

Presumably the ones who wanted to move already have so you’ve never met them.

Exactly, most of the people that I know and moved to Amazon Canada did so,because they got stuck in a visa limbo in the US

But after a year or two in the Canadian offices, they usually qualify for an L-1 if they wanted to go back.

And yet, here we all are.

What's the pay differential between Toronto and SF/NYC?

I think what this whole exercise proves is that remote working is an unsolved problem, that "can physically see employee at their desk" is worth well over 50% of their salary. Therefore it's not a global market. Proper global markets produce things that cost similar amounts almost everywhere, like crude oil or iPhones.

That's more of a "how do we manage people in a knowledge industry" problem, not a function of employee-desk visibility.

We already have webcams and software on corporate laptops that logs every single keystroke. I'd argue it's already been solved, just not implemented.

50%?! More like 90%.

And your point does not explain at al why salaries are so much lower for on-site workers everywhere else in the world.

The answer, I'm afraid, is privilege.

You'll do better if you focus on living your best life instead of worrying about someone else having more money.

If you don't move to USA, how does envy make your life better?

I don't think that universally true. I work for G in Munich, and salaries post cost of living are competitive with the Bay Area (maybe 10%-20% off, but OTOH consider quality of life). From what I can tell, Zurich beats the Bay Area.

> From what I can tell, Zurich beats the Bay Area.

Yes, with the similar salaries and a 1:1 exchange rate between CHF and USD and the only tax is the Cantonal tax of 13% vs 50% for Bay Area, it makes Zurich way far ahead.

The offices in Zug down the street get only 7% tax.

And healthcare is free, but its a negligible concern at these compensation ranges. It just shows how the American arguments fall apart, since most of them are based on "how much Europeans must have to be taxed"

Basically everything you wrote is incorrect.

- It's not just the cantonal tax; you've ignored the federal and municipal taxes.

- The location of the office isn't what matters, but where you live.

- Healthcare definitely isn't free. Everyone is legally obligated to buy private health insurance.

Thanks for the summary, makes me wonder if I would live in Zug and work in Zurich.

If you like having a 40+ min commute instead of a few minutes of walking/biking for a few thousands of tax savings a year. Some people don't. Generally the richer you are the more you get to value your own time.

>From what I can tell, Zurich beats the Bay Area.

Not really. Out of all FAANGs there's just Google in Zurich with a significant presence. They pay well above almost all other swiss and european companies, but are not really the top paying employer in the Bay anymore.

Not being able to job hop among FAANGs is a big risk to your compensation here in the long term and will make you eventually lose out to Bay Area, even despite lower taxes.

What are FAANG in Europe salaries like?

Is there also a perception of core product/business work taking place in SV and therefore European teams aren't as important?

You can dig through the salaries on levels.fyi. From my brief perusal, it looks like 50% less for London. I'd guess other places will be even lower.

I can pitch in to say in London I make ~$150k + $50k/y options (not sure how to value these, strike price is only slightly discounted) for L4 (should be ~$300k according to levels)

From what i've heard London has by far the highest tech salaries in Europe

Is that at Google?

That is around £114k, which is a high salary for London, but nothing in comparison to what you can make contracting (and at the same 'salary', as a contractor you'll pay less tax in the UK). The base rates for web technologies are around £500/day, and if you specialise and have a track record for delivering you can easily push that up.

For Google, Zurich has slightly higher salaries but half the RSUs compared to SV. But taxes and housing are lower in Zurich, so.

Comp isn't based on what's important for the business; it's based purely on market reference pricing.

>but recruiters have told me straight out: we dont adjust for cost of living, we adjust for market rate

Isn't that how it should be?

What I'm taking away from this is that many (most) companies are grossly underpaying their engineers. I've been through the SF/NYC Senior SWE interviewing gauntlet twice in the past three years, and received 10+ offers at half this rate. Levels claims to be checking offer letters, which is great IMO. It's really hard for people to know they're being undervalued when the employers are low-balling and the self-reporters are lying.

> the self-reporters are lying.

I think it's less that self reporters are lying and more that there's a selection bias among self reporters. Engineers with average salaries probably don't bother to report.

Levels.fyi seems to be pretty accurate in my experience, though there may be selection bias as there are more offers at the top of band than bottom submitted.

> many (most) companies are grossly underpaying their engineers.

No, that's simply unfair to the companies who don't have billions of dollars in free cash flow or effectively infinite amounts of VC money.

The top firms have gotten themselves into an insane bidding war which has a side effect of creating an oligopoly on talent, as it's simply unrealistic to impossible for many firms to compete. Not to mention they apparently pay many people these sort of salaries to do basically nothing [1]: they've decided it's better to simply retain talent than risk them going to a competitor, regardless if they provide any value or not.

That all said, as an employee in whole debacle, you should simply focus your interviews on firms willing to pay these levels and maximize your income while you can.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961560

Under/overpaying has nothing to do with how much any particular firm has and everything to do with what other companies are willing to pay. If there's a bidding war, then whatever that produces is the fair market rate.

Yes, it's the market rate but no, that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good buy; it's set by the most optimistic buyer. Buyer's remorse is sometimes a thing in auctions too.

I think of open (non-sealed bid) auctions as effectively discovering the price by the second most willing buyer, not the most willing buyer.

> it's set by the most optimistic buyer.

No, it's set by the least optimistic seller.

That's the reason we have labor unions -- to stop those that otherwise would work for low wages and/or in deplorable conditions, from doing so. Thus undercutting those that "hold out" for fair wages and conditions.

Think about it. If the entire graduating BSCS class of 2020 banded together and declared they would not work for less than $400k/yr starting, FAANG would simply have to pay that (they have the cash). It's because there's one dipshit willing to work for $250k TC that all the rest have to take that salary as well.

>> Not to mention they apparently pay many people these sort of salaries to do basically nothing [1]: they've decided it's better to simply retain talent than risk them going to a competitor, regardless if they provide any value or not.

I don't think Google is purposely ok with some of their employees doing basically nothing. I've heard the theory that companies pay for some top talent who don't generate value just to prevent them from going to competitors, but is there any hard evidence for it?

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2920903/google-really-k...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-en...

[3] https://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley-TV-series-Do-low-perfor...

[4] https://money.cnn.com/2007/01/05/magazines/fortune/Search_an...

> The top firms have gotten themselves into an insane bidding war.

That may be true, but there's more to it than that. The first wave of successful IPOs (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, etc.) caused a spike in housing prices as employees purchased houses. On top of that, companies have added tens of thousands of new jobs, without proportional growth in the housing supply. So housing prices are now absurd, and these companies need to pay more so their employees can buy smallish houses on the peninsula at $1.5-$2.5M a piece and have a middle-class quality of life.

Yeah I think this part is a stretch.

Just look at Vancouver as a far more extreme example of how local property prices can be out of whack with wages.

House prices are a function of wages (or, more accurately, have a floor set by wages if land is constrained) not the other way around.

Also, the level of entitlement by a lot of such engineers I find to be borderline disgusting. Why do you think you're entitled to a $1.5m house at all let alone 3 years out of college? If you really want cheaper housing (as a function of income) just move to a lower income area. It's actually pretty simple.

But the most objectionable part for me is not just how much of a non-problem this is but it completely ignores people with real problems, like, oh I don't know, the people who drive the shiny white buses who need to live 2+ hours away. Or those not in tech who have to do the same.

Engineers are compensated well now because of the value they create for their employer, nothing more, nothing less.

> House prices are a function of wages (or, more accurately, have a floor set by wages if land is constrained) not the other way around.

I guess if you state it as a fact, that makes it true?

But if that’s the case, why would the company pay an engineer more when she moves from the Austin office to the NYC office? She has become more valuable to the company overnight? And the most valuable engineers just happen to live in the most expensive cities?

Sorry, but salaries are impacted by cost of living. Because if they’re paying top talent too low relative to cost of living, those engineers will just move elsewhere, as you suggest.

Yes, this puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the housing market, affecting everyone in the Bay Area. I’m not claiming this is good.

Vancouver is a different situation entirely.

> Why do you think you're entitled to a $1.5m house at all let alone 3 years out of college?

This is not at all what I said. And most people I know here cannot afford a house 10+ years out of college, unless they’ve worked at a top-paying company all those years.

Who is claiming they’re entitled to it? I’m saying companies are offering it to retain employees, because it’s in the companies’ best interest.

> it completely ignores people with real problems, like, oh I don't know, the people who drive the shiny white buses who need to live 2+ hours away.

And there are plenty of people less fortunate than the bus drivers. By your logic, if they don’t like it, they can just move somewhere cheaper. Maybe it’s just too late in the evening, but I’m not really seeing your point here.

>Engineers are compensated well now because of the value they create for their employer

This is dubious.

No, COL definately is a large reason. Even the same engineers at Google will get paid different amounts based on where they are located. I believe the Bay area is x1.5 more than other cities, for google.

> can buy smallish houses on the peninsula at $1.5-$2.5M a piece and have a middle-class quality of life.

That's the same situation as in Sydney, but Aussie engineers aren't getting near the level of pay of Bay Area engineers.

It's not the housing prices, it's more the labour market competition.

Yes, labor market competition is the primary factor. But is there a place in Australia where engineers can work for higher salaries and the same or a lower cost of living?

In the US, the discrepancy between Bay Area and non-Bay Area salaries is not as great as they seem at first glance, once the real cost of living is factored in.

Yeah Melbourne has 1-3 companies where you can match your Sydney compensation, and Melbourne has a significantly cheaper property market.

But Melbourne has far fewer high-paying positions, so it's not really much of a help.

> No, that's simply unfair to the companies who don't have billions of dollars in free cash flow or effectively infinite amounts of VC money.

I mean.... so what? Why should I, as an engineer, care if some companies are suffering under the "unfairness" of high salaries?

> which has a side effect of creating an oligopoly on talent

It doesn't really make sense to use the work oligopoly, which has certain negative connotations, for a situation where companies are merely choosing to outbid others.

I would only use the term oligopoly, if there is some sort of unfair barrier to entry, such as because of some government law that is hindering competition.

> I mean.... so what? Why should I, as an engineer, care

You shouldn't, you should always maximize your income. That wasn't my point. My point was the guy shouldn't interview at a 5-person bootstrapped startup and act bewildered when they cannot offer Facebook level comp packages.

> oligopoly

It's absolutely an oligopoly. There are a small number of firms who possess the capital to compete on salary and that creates a extremely high barrier to entry. It's not a bad thing, it's just the reality of the situation. There's plenty of options though, e.g. don't decide your HQ must be in San Francisco.

I think the technical term would be “oligopsony”.

"Unfair" sorry that's not how capitalism works

> No, that's simply unfair to the companies

Maybe that's true of Walmart and GM, but your random A/B round startup? I don't think it is unfair at all. They could offer legitimate equity of they choose not to. Sure, it would be still be a gamble but at least it would be French roulette and not the West Virginia lottery.

I think these numbers are accurate.

Some of the numbers are skewed by the unicorn startups: since employees at Airbnb and Stripe (and Lyft and Pinterest, at the time these numbers were reported) can't sell their equity, and since the equity may drop considerably after IPO, these companies compensate by offering more of it.

LinkedIn is widely known for paying extremely well (to the chagrin of people at parent company Microsoft). Same with Netflix.

I think it's more that software development's divided between the maybe—maybe—5% who are looking at comp at these levels, and everyone else who's in the $70K-180K range, with a cap somewhere in lower-leadership positions that perhaps reaches $200K, maybe mid $200Ks at best as you start to move into management proper. Anything past that you've gotta really nail some niche that someone with lots of money (probably finance) needs and likely become a consultant of some kind, or move into the smallish (relative to all US software development) set of positions that compensate like the ones at the link.

Its not a small number of positions its just a small number of companies

At the moment these few companies are expanding as fast as possible and have an infinite number of positions that pay these amounts until they dont

Relative to all software development, I mean. There are tons and tons of places employing anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of developers each, in the US, not paying anything like this. And almost no smaller shops are, of course. All the positions at all the companies like this, even though most of them are large, I'd still be surprised if it's more than a single-digit percentage of all software positions in the US.

Yeah but it starts to add up when you see how much the tech giants employ

These comp ranges from the growing companies on that list arent different from the tech giants

Not infinite. They have hard caps on how many they hire each year.

Disagree.

This is top 5. Look at the difference betwen position 1 and 5 (30% (sic!) for entry level). Ask yourself how many companies are in the SV area?

Then think where MEDIAN of those numbers is.

Looking at top 5 is like looking at best performing stocks in last year (from 5000 of ohers), and thinking "YEAH, thats what I should expect from my future investment portfolio".

Your portfolio should only contain FANG companies. Every single one has outperformed the market by at least 2X and up to 6 X over the last 5 years.

The contrarian position now is to double down on a small number of stocks where the business model function as a data aggregator hence FANG. As opposed to index tracking style portfolio investing, even your Uber driver has ETF's.

The best investment is whatever large cap company left wingers hate the most. It used to be oil companies.

> Your portfolio should only contain FANG companies. Every single one has outperformed the market by at least 2X and up to 6 X over the last 5 years.

Based on this, your portfolio should have only contained FAANG companies for the last 5 years.

The argument for "Your portfolio should only contain FANG companies" would be "Every single one will outperform the market by at least 2X and up to 6 X over the next 5 years".

Buying FAANG in 2020 is buying assets whose price has just gone up a lot - the very opposite of contrarian.

I've been in this industry in NYC for about 20 years of progressive levels of responsibility where I'm now directing multiple project teams and doing company strategy and am somehow earning as much as a college grad in SF.

Honestly, it all depends on the type of company. There are only about 20-30 tech companies who consistently pay this much, and at your level of seniority, half or more of your comp is going to be equity. If you're working for startups, agencies, Fortune 500 companies, etc, you're just not going to be making anywhere close to what the big tech companies pay.

Why don't you do a round of interviews for roles at the big tech companies in NYC? You could probably double your comp pretty easily.

Oh, I have. Thought I did pretty well in some of them, but never got anywhere. Not really sure what kind of role I would actually do since I haven't really been a coder for so long.

I have never worked in the valley, so the answer to this question might be obvious to the people working there. What happens to all the experienced engineers?

According to this, the Senior, Staff, or Principal titles are generally for people with 5+ year experience? Those roles make up 30%, 10%, and 3% of companies respectively. That leaves 57% of engineers in positions listed are usually for people with 0-5 years experience. Does that mean over half of engineers are relatively new to the industry? Are there large numbers of engineers that go their entire career without getting a Senior title? Are there large numbers that end up changing industries? I know some people transition from hands on engineering to management, but there can't possibly be that many management jobs to make up that difference, right?

Many people stay at lower levels for years. The experience is necessary, but not sufficient, for those higher levels.

They leave the valley, remember it as their time at a startup, and work decades at a non-tech firm.

It's so variable that I don't think there's even a good answer for this. My current company does the engineer -> management track, so there can absolutely be an abundance of management jobs. You can also work as an Junior/SEII/Senior for 5+ years without being promoted at all. Keep in mind all of these titles are arbitrary/subjective.

Most companies in the valley have a terminal level (a level at which you're not expected to progress to the next one) that's close to level 3 in the chart here. In my experience, a lot of people don't progress beyond that. For the ones that do, the number of years of experience plays a smaller role than the quality of the experience itself.

A lot of Sr. engineers have way more than 5 yrs of experience. Or they go into management.

That took me by surprise too. One hypothesis could be that so many companies that levels.fyi tracks have grown so quickly that they've chosen to stuff themselves full of relatively junior SWEs. I think there are lots of reasons people in strategy positions would choose to do this, whether I agree with them or not.

But re-read the description of "Software Engineer (II)" closely:

> Typically 2-5+ years of experience. [...] At many companies, this is considered a 'career-level', as in you can spend the rest of your career operating at this level without being pushed out for not being promoted.

So, it doesn't suggest it caps out at 5 years, and this could be where people who do "good, but not outstanding" work end up. Also the next level says "Role shifts more towards design rather than implementation depending on size and expectations at company.", so maybe the big break isn't "seniority and how good you are at your job" but rather "can you, and do you want to, work at the next level of design abstraction?"

I started working at FANG recently, after spending 15 years in a different field. The very first thing I noticed was how young the average employee is. It was a little startling. I've heard different theories:

* Today's big tech companies are still relatively young, so the workforce is young.

* The companies have grown exponentially in recent years, and they've hired many new grads to meet hiring targets. This would also shift the average employee age lower.

* The people who joined these companies 15-20 years ago would likely be very well-off financially by now, so they don't need to keep working. They've retired early, created start ups, left the Bay Area, etc.

I think there's likely some truth to these claims. But Silicon Valley also has a reputation for ageism, so who knows.

Looking at this (hopefully someone can find longer-term data), the number of CS graduates was in decline until 2009.

https://i1.wp.com/danwang.co/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/bach...

There was a peak in the mid-80s, and another around 2005.

CS enrollments reached a max around 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble. But when the bubble burst in 2000-2001, enrollments plummeted in 2002, 2003 and 2004, leading to the local minimum in graduates in 2009.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity/images/BS...

I'm getting a bit of a dot-com feeling around these compensation figures, especially seeing the sign up bonuses and how tangible stocks are considered as normal compensation now. The FAANGs remind me a bit of Microsoft, Cisco and Intel before their y2k peaks.

I do get some of that feeling. The differences is that the FAANGs are all public, have been for a while, and have real revenue. The dot-com bubble was mostly fueled by VC, IPOs, and a virtuous cycle (though I guess Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel had been public for a while, and they did survive the bubble burst).

Facebook and Google do ads, and most online advertisers look for immediate, real value. These success stories are as real as e-commerce.

That brings us to Amazon. It's e-commerce is real, but margins are low. AWS looks more like the dot-com bubble in that some of that money is coming from VCs. If funding dries up, AWS gets hit. That said, there's a larger migration to the cloud, and that's also real.

Apple makes high-margin phones that people all over the world buy. Full stop.

Netflix is the least like the others. It's smaller, and while it revolutionized how we consume content, it's current model is heavily funded by debt, and it's facing stiff competition. No one's talking about how Netflix will take over long-form video, they're griping at having to pay for six streaming services.

The alternate story for tech salaries is that PCs and the internet weren't ready for prime time in 2000. After the bubble burst, there were too few CS grads for when the internet was finally ready. The internet wasn't ready until 2006-2010 when most people had broadband at home, smartphones matures, and LTE was ready.

I'm surprised it started growing even that early. When I attended school (2007-11), we thought CS jobs would be outsourced to India/China/etc. (we were wrong).

I started a few years before you and remember people saying I was crazy to go into development since the jobs were all being outsourced. They might have been wrong in the long run, but I did spend the first few years of my career managing offshore development more than doing actual development.

>The very first thing I noticed was how young the average employee is. It was a little startling. I've heard different theories

These salaries come with a big gamble on SV real estate and the market performance of these companies. The first one is a big difference between young and middle aged people. In my 20s I averaged a new home every year as my financial situation changed and I wanted to live in different parts of a city. Now in my 30s with a wife and kid I don't expect to move for 10+ years. The only way to achieve that is buying a house. Which, in SV, means plunking down 3-4 million. That's doable given the salaries, but it's a huge bet that the real estate bubble won't burst.

Same thing with the market performance. Sure, the FAANGs + MS (and minus Netflix) make a ridiculous amount of money and that likely won't change. But what about companies like Snap, Pinterest, Lyft, et.al. that lose money? There's a huge risk that these companies (1) go bankrupt or (2) decide to focus on profitability and slash their engineering workforce.

If you're a 20 something renter you ride the gravy train as long as it keeps coming. If you're a 30 something with small kids and a mortgage you want stability.

Now in my 30s with a wife and kid I don't expect to move for 10+ years. The only way to achieve that is buying a house. Which, in SV, means plunking down 3-4 million.

I think you're pretty deep in the bubble or you have really extreme tastes. I have tons of friends in their 30s with kids in SV and NYC. Almost all of them are renters. The actual financial calculation for renting vs. buying in these markets is brutal. You need to stay for 10-20 years for buying to start to make sense.

Also, you don't need $3-4mm in either of these markets to buy a place suitable for two adults and a child. There are plenty of 2 bedrooms for a third of that.

They become managers.

Many go to management. You realize as you get older that the whole “you can progress up the salary chart as an IC just as well as management” is a total crock.

If you want to afford a nice house in a good neighborhood with good schools in the Bay Area, you’ve got to go into management.

I kinda disagree, Oracle/HP (personal experience) and Google/IBM (extremely good friends) both have career tracks for IC which go up to ‘Distinguished Engineer’ level, and where compensation can be equivalent to a VP on the management track.

What you might be trying to say is there are more available positions at VP than DE, so your chances of making it are better? Or that being promoted to VP is easier than to DE? I think having seen how the sausage is made, would agree with both of those.

Yes, that's exactly what he's saying -- the "just as well" part is key. Sure, there's an IC track that goes up to the SVP level at many companies, but it's statistically much harder to climb pretty much everywhere.

I think most companies do not even have IC roles analogous to SVP. Google has two Senior fellows, and those are two guys who are far too famous and responsible for too much of the Google backbone infrastructure.

Yeah you're probably right that VP, rather than SVP, is the more common cutoff.

> both have career tracks for IC which go up to ‘Distinguished Engineer’ level, and where compensation can be equivalent to a VP on the management track.

Sure, it exists. How many DEs do you know of, vs. VPs?

How do you get a DE job? Usually you are the most well known person in your field.

How you do you get a VP job? You have to be a pretty good manager.

At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many.

That's the BS. It's like saying "there is totally a path to getting really rich as an actor!". Sure, there is a path, but not a lot of people make it. And even the ones that do usually get there by also doing the management path (producer) at the same time.

The lie is in the claim it's just as easy to climb the DE ladder as it is the VP ladder.

It's not. Not even close.

> At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many

Fwiw, the number is significantly higher than 10, though still fewer than there are VPs.

That said, things get tricky: there are DEs who have reports, and there are VPs with no (or trivial, like 3) reports. But either way, if your metric is DE/VP or if it's manager of a large org vs IC/TLM, the number of IC-track people is higher than you suggest.

There are a lot more people working in software now than there were 20 years ago. Even if everyone over 40 who started in the industry was still there, they would be totally outnumbered by young people.

Ageism is real, but so is the growth of the engineering profession, and so is early retirement (which is definitely possible at the salaries senior people make, especially if you consider they bought houses in Silicon Valley for a lot less than they sell for now).

> Does that mean over half of engineers are relatively new to the industry?

Jackpot!

All it takes for this to happen is that the number of software engineers in the world grows by 10--20% every year. (Because this means it doubles every 5 years, which means half the workforce has less than or equal to five years of experience.

I recall reading somewhere that the actual growth of the workforce is even greater than that -- somewhere around 25%!

There is a vídeo by uncle Bob stating this.

Around minute 13

https://youtu.be/QHnLmvDxGTY

what struct me actually is this: > Typically 2-5+ years of experience. (...) Possibly lead a small team or project. Ability to mentor engineers (...)

WHAT?

I don't know a profession with high knowledge requirements where after 2 years you can and are expected as a job req to manage a team.

This speaks to me two things: a. a lot of staff is young and unexperienced b. rotation in segment <5 is big

There is another thread from yesterday, somewhat related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964946

It’s not “manage” but “lead”. Which basically means the technical aspects. Certainly I’ve seen lots of great leadership from people with 2-5 years experience.

What I've personally seen is that the smaller the company the more experienced people you'll have, because they need more independent people and have less time/resources to mentor juniors.

So the proportion for a large majority of startups is not similar to what this document shows, which is centered to bigger (1000+ engineers) companies.

Often times experienced engineers eventually move to much smaller companies that aren't as likely to appear on levels.fyi

They might get tired of the politics at their company, or they just want to try something new, or founding/joining a smaller company might be the easiest way for them to continue to get promoted

It would be really nice to see more companies that aren't the top 5. What do 6-20 look like?

I'd like to know when companies start getting to average pay levels. Is it only the top 5 companies that pay this? Or do the top 50 companies all pay really high? Is that data even available, or is it just that this represents some of the most attractive offer letters at top of bands for some of the most well funded startups and presenting the available data this way makes for a more attractive blog post?

I feel like reading too much into this top five list is causing a lot of people a lot of consternation.

We have plans to publish more information, but for now you can view salary information for a number of other companies on our main website: http://levels.fyi

I love levels.fyi. Will it be possible to specify which companies do or do not sponsor visas ?

Added to our list, will try to work on it!

Sorry to highjack - any plans to expand to Europe and/or the UK (Brexit looming...) ? Cheers!

We're working on it! Still very sparse data for Europe right now, but you can search for UK specific salaries on our compensation page at https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...

We also have a very preliminary salary page for London available at https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/London/

Amazing, thanks!

Please see if it is possible to add Bangalore as well!

use h1bdata.info to check if a company has sponsored an h1b in the past, it also shows compensation data

its pretty illuminating at small companies because you know exactly who the data is referring to

even with limited data can you publish by year? so we can see how long we've been wasting our time feigning passion about a startup

I do the job of a senior engineer and yet am paid a bit less than what's listed for an entry level engineer. And I live an incredibly comfy life. What's the catch? Are these for more than 40 hours a week? Is silicon valley really that expensive? Or are they literally giving college grads enough money to retire by 35?

There is not necessarily a catch. Pay is not based on cost of living -- it's set by market rates, and the market rate for software engineers in these areas who can do the jobs required at these companies is high. All these companies operate at an immense scale where an engineer, through what is often a simple change, can add significant value to the company.

So, yes. For now, these companies are giving college grads enough money to retire by 35 (assuming the college grads are halfway financially savvy).

Source: I am a recent college grad at a FAANG.

A senior position in the doc will probably get you ~2M in savings by 35. How do you retire with that?

Agreed - that’s not enough to retire on that young unless one relocates to a very LCOL area.

Using the 5% drawdown rule, 2M in savings is enough to have a 100k/year income in perpetuity without adding to savings.

Idea being that average market returns are 7%. So if you use 5% per year, you will never run out.

5% is not a safe withdrawal rate for "in perpetuity". 3% is much more realistic if you want to be conservative.

Yes it's a rule of thumb not the law of thermodynamics. Run your numbers with your own parameters for details.

That's assuming you want to leave the whole 2 million principal in your will to your children. I don't see why - if you want to retire, you can consume the whole principal while you live.

You can't plan to spend your last dollar on your deathbed unless you can predict every expense, the market, and the day you'll die, especially over a retirement that long (potentially 50+ years). Planning to leave something behind is really your only chance, unless you're comfortable with a very high chance of bankruptcy along the way.

Even at a meager 2% interest that’s $40k a year. That’s a comfortable wage in much of the USA, especially if you’ve been camping in an RV for a decade to retire.

I don't believe anything I read on HN about the lifestyles of the SV elite, but I think this scenario is comical if it were representative.

You get paid well into six figures but have "to camp in an RV for a decade", and then you retire with a $40K income. You could have just gotten a $40K job at some place* that didn't kill your soul! In ten years, you'd be making at least $60K. And if you burned out for whatever reason anyway, you could go on disability.

*by place, I mean either employer or city.

you'd be in a position to invest too as you go.

You read through all the advice in these blogs [1][2]. Seriously.

If you are invested in low cost index funds, most assume you can safely withdraw 4% a year and not deplete your principal. If you're retiring at 35, you might want a greater safety margin, so let's say 3%. That gives you 60K a year.

How do you retire on 60K a year? Obviously take what I'm saying with a grain of salt as I'm a relatively young person and haven't done any of this yet. But...60K is the median household income in the US, so half of families in the US live on less. If you're retired, you can probably save in ways others can't. For instance:

* Housing. You don't need to stay in a high cost of living city, so move to a much cheaper area (maybe a college town).

* Education. You have much more time, so send your kids to all public education, and use your extra time to educate them further.

* Debt. You have a ton of assets. Why hold any debt?

* Automobiles. Bike instead, if you're physically able.

* Health. Probably the hardest one since insurance in the US is tied to employment. I understand the recommended approach here is to pay out of pocket for a plan, but many have trouble with this. Of course, the standard advice is to use the extra time you have due to retirement to stay as healthy as possible, but I acknowledge this isn't a perfect plan.

[1] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ [2] https://www.madfientist.com/

Good advice. Just one nitpick: The 4% rule, which states you can as a rule of thumb safely withdraw 4% of the starting capital per year in real dollars (IE increase it each year to account for inflation), is intended for a standard retirement period (65+) and does expect the principal to decrease.

There's more debate as to what would be a safe withdrawal rate over the long term without depleting principal, but I expect 3% would be a bit on the high side, although not unreasonable if one has a backup like part-time work.

Of course, that's assuming you withdraw 3% of the initial amount each year and adjust for inflation. Obviously if you only withdraw 3% of the current amount each year you'll never run out, by definition, but you might end up with shrinking spending money.

Still, just a nitpick. I agree with you in principle for sure.

That's a bit incorrect. Returns from a typical investment portfolio have been over 4% for the last 10-20 years, so that's the amount you can withdraw without depleting any principal. If you're looking to consume your whole principal by the time you die you can go way ahead of 4%, easily double that.

> Returns from a typical investment portfolio have been over 4% for the last 10-20 years, so that's the amount you can withdraw without depleting any principal.

Past results do not guarantee future performance. People in the FIRE community generally look at market performance since the final decades of the XIX century. For many, even these numbers do not guarantee anything, as the growth during these days reflected USA entering its golden age. Who knows if it will last through XXI century.

> even these numbers do not guarantee anything

at this point a reasonable response is "there are no guarantees". If the 4% rule was back-tested through the great depression and generally came out fine, it's probably in the right ballpark.

As another FIRE blogger puts it, "3% or less is a near sure bet as anything in this life can be"

https://jlcollinsnh.com/2012/12/07/stocks-part-xiii-withdraw...

We've basically been in a continuous bull market over the past 11 years; it's not a representative sample. Nor is any period of 10-20 years nearly long enough to tell you much about long term stock market returns. Plus, valuations (ie P/E or P/B) are significantly inflated currently compared to the past. Since valuations can't inflate forever, future market gains over the long term are expected to be lower than past.

In addition, we're talking about a real withdrawal rate; a 4% real rate of withdrawal will be approximately a 6% nominal rate assuming inflation sticks around 2%. It's very unlikely you're going to maintain that from a balanced portfolio over the long term without depleting principle at all. Might be possible with an all-stock portfolio if you get lucky, but significant chance of failure if you get a poor sequence of returns.

Easily by not living in the Bay Area. People FIRE at 1 million, which I always found a bit silly considering we're in the midst of an amazing market hyperinflated by some rather concerning fiscal policy, but with 2 you can weather a lot of bad years.

Family with kids in a big, expensive city? Probably not.

400k- taxes = 270k for joined filing

Monthly expenses = 3k mortgage+ 500 property taxes + 2k daycare for one child(or 529) + 1.5k for food and other = 84k

Without compounding interest you need 10 years to get 2m, and these salaries are for 5+ or more years of experience. (And you need down payment, etc.).

Living in those areas is expensive.

If you are making 500k, that's a different story :-)

people never factor in healthcare into this calculus.

Yup, I forgot about it. 7-8k max out of pocket (in-network) for family. In some companies there is also some payment for the health plan out of pocket. But the diff here is that on HSA plans the out of pocket comes before taxes.

With no or self-sustaining offspring, you can retire on $US2M in savings just about anywhere in the world; not silicon valley and a handful of similar locations. Most of the world, including many places you would consider holiday resorts and amazing places to live, is quite achievable if you stay away from boats, fast cars and gambling. Its how people doing the same job in other cities get by earning half as much.

Interesting, thanks.

Now I wonder how many of these jobs are 100% work from home. I'm not sure a salary doubling could take me away from my family and into commuting an hour a day. But I mean, if they're going to pay me to engineer in my pyjamas, sure! =)

Remote work at FANG is possible but usually earned through a niche in-demand skill set or years at the company.

Or finding the right team within!

None of them are 100% work from home. Work from home pays work-from-home market rates, not high end silicon valley rates. There will be some, but they will have negotiated a switch from office work to remote work after a few years, or have hard to source specialist skills.

I effectively have 100% work from home for a FANG. I live in the Midwest and my compensation is the same as engineers working from HQ. I worked from HQ for a few years then told my manager I was gonna quit to move closer to family and we ended up being to arrange this. I fly to HQ a few times a year to have face time with my team. Not sure how long this arrangement will last, but it’s been awesome so far.

Pay is partly based on cost of living, and cost of living helps to set the market rates.

You'd have to pay me 10 times more than I get now, with a huge hiring bonus, to make me move to San Francisco. I'm not alone in this thinking. This is why the market rate is high.

Part of that is sort of circular, due to the bidding war for housing. Part is that some people just hate the political insanity. Part is that people have family connections elsewhere and they have hobbies that are incompatible with San Francisco.

Let’s say you’re the median American SWE getting paid $80k a year. You’re saying you wouldn’t move to SFBA for less than $800k/yr in total compensation? I find that hard to imagine.

I can see what it costs. Getting $800k/yr means a house of about $1,600,000 should be affordable, but that gets you trash. Getting a "house" that PHYSICALLY TOUCHES the neighbor's house will go for more than that in a semi-tolerable San Francisco neighborhood. That is substandard living conditions.

How do you afford housing wherever you make $80k? Unless literally everything comparable costs 10x in SF, there's no logical way you can say 10x is the mark at which SF wages are pegged at.

In accounting, this is an idea known as operating leverage.

$1.6m will get you 2,200 square feet of sweet, sweet detached single family living in Pacifica, Berkeley, or Marin. Double an $80k annual income will get you a 640 square foot home with $250/square foot land and construction costs, so not a particularly high end or spacious place.

Briefly looking at redfin shows that my 500kish house would be 3.5 millionish in Mountain View. Similar in SF but it's a lot harder to find a directly comparable house. That's a 14k monthly difference in the mortgage. Equivalent to 240k annually after taking taxes into account.

Using that number means I'm roughly at par with a FAANG salary given my level. But it's not like the FAANG engineer is setting fire to that 240k. Depending on where you are in your amortization schedule 20-80ish % of your payment goes to principle. And my 500k house is probably going to be worth 800k in 10 years while the bay area house would be 4.5-5 million. When you take that into account I'm probably at 70% of an equivalent FAANG position.

The more important thing to look at here is risk. FAANG salaries and bay area real estate prices are out of whack with the fundamentals. If you get in and out without the bubble bursting you're sitting pretty. If it bursts or even has a 10% correction the FAANG engineer is way behind.

One can rent a perfectly decent home in Cupertino with 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms for under $4,500 [1]. Price to rent ratios are very high for most SFH properties, so renting is often the right move. This will allow families to send their kids to public schools ranked among the best private schools in the nation for free, without any charter or magnet lotteries. I don't think rent for any comparable home in, say, Austin is more than $2,000/mo cheaper, or $40,000 before tax. That's a much narrower gap to justify than most of the hyperbole in this thread and especially narrow if both partners are working: job opportunities in the Bay Area are strong for almost all kinds of professions.

[1] https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/d/cupertino-3-bedroom-3...

God forbid you live in a townhouse. How do people survive in such poverty??

> ...enough money to retire by 35?

You have to keep in mind that a 1br apartment in a second tier area will run you like $2k, and that will not be an especially nice apartment. That seriously cuts into the "retire in 10 years" plan.

I find it hard to believe that you're reading HN while still being surprised about the cost of living here?

By the time you're 35, you'll probably have a family with kids. You don't want a long commute to spend more time with said family so your 2000 sq.ft. house on a 7000 sq.ft lot will cost between $1.5M to $2.5M.

You won't get any needs-based financial compensation to send your kids to college, yet chances are that you don't want to deny them going to the best college that they'll accepted to. Add another $200K per kid if they're going to a UC school.

Everything is going to be a bit to a lot more expensive than elsewhere. Childcare, the electrician and plumber who charges $175 per hour (they need to live too), eating out etc.

$400K in yearly pre-tax compensation reduces to something like $250K after tax?

There's no way you're going to retire at 35, unless you're willing to give up on a lot of niceties of life before bailing. I don't know anyone who did.

It’s incredible that people think you need seven freaking thousand square feet to raise a family.

That's a lot size, not a house size brotato. That's 0.16 acres, which is actually below the standard lot size in the US for most houses. Standard lot size in the US is around 0.25 acres.

2000sqft is a larger home, but not absurd if you're married and have two kids.

Nobody needs a luxury car. Nobody needs to eat at nice restaurants. Nobody needs vacations in Europe. Nobody needs a $1000 phone.

But if I had to choose one thing where I have no problem spending more than what is strictly needed, it's going to be the place in which I'll be spending the vast majority of my time for the rest of my life.

If it makes you feel any better: for the low end of my range ($1.5M), you're not going to get that 7000 sq.ft. You'll be buying a house on a 3500 sq.ft. lot, so the argument still stands.

Go on Zillow or Redfin and look at Bay Area housing prices near major tech companies (Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Francisco) and you'll see that 1 million dollars is entry level for a single-family home, and ~700k is entry-level for a condo that has HOA payments ~400-500 per month.

That's the bottom line -- cost of living is so high the salaries need to be high too, or people won't accept them.

You're implying high housing prices cause higher salaries when it is almost certainly the other way around. High salaries and limited supply seem to be the key causal factors in high housing prices.

It's a vicious cycle. People are still coming to the area and they demand high salaries because housing prices are high, and housing prices are high because of the high salaries of people already living in the area.

As others have said, the catch is incredibly high cost of living. The housing market has grown by something like 10%-15% annually, for years.

Obviously, it can't grow like that forever - even professional couples have problems pooling together money for a down-payments on decent median priced homes.

And while you're building equity by owning, you're also kind of stuck to keeping up with salaries / career trajectories.

But you know, with higher salaries comes more purchasing power. And then you also have foreigners parking their assets in the housing market, similar to what's happening in NYC and Vancouver.

It's hard to compete even with a nice $500k salary, when some foreign investor can casually overbid you with millions in cash.

Sounds a bit dramatic, yes, but that's life in most cities with hot markets and high salaries.

I'm a senior engineer at FAANG, work 40hrs/wk, and get paid $400k+/yr.

The cost of living is higher, but it's well under the increase in pay for being in the area. My current living situation is actually pretty cheap; I split a 4BR house, live 7 min from work, and pay $1650/mo for my portion of rent/utilities.

Most people I know tend to get 2BR apartments and split it with someone, usually paying $2000-2500/mo.

imagine making 400k+ a year and still not having a place of your own.

Having roommates can be a lot of fun. I loved it and am still close friends with all my roommates.

That person could rent entire 4 BR house to themselves, and be stuck with an equivalent of a measly 340k+ a year. It's obviously out of choice.

You're also stuck renting, with three other people, with a $400k salary. Conversely, I bought an 1800sqft house in upstate New York, alone, and the total per month is roughly $1400(mortgage, property/school tax,utilities).

He’s not “stuck” renting, he’s choosing to rent because he wants to save money and doesn’t mind having roommates. You can absolutely afford your own apartment on far less than 400k/year in the Bay Area.

So he's still renting then?

So? Not everyone is brainwashed by their banal suburban upbringing into thinking that home ownership is the highest state of enlightenment a human can achieve. I can afford to buy a place outright in cash but I still rent because I like the flexibility and have no interest in betting a large fraction of my net worth on the direction of real estate prices.

Thanks for the response, I appreciate the feedback. With that type of capital, wouldn't it be best to invest in real estate, and rent them yourself?

Dunno, what’s the return on property, less maintenance turnover and annual wealth taxes vs the market? What’s the risk of dumping so much capital into exactly one asset vs a stock portfolio?

Home ownership is the strongest correlating factor with financial independence and overall net worth. Even in the Bay Area, owning a home and the equity in it is generally the most critical asset financially independent people have.

I'm not going to claim renting is universally bad, as it has some upsides (mainly flexibility), but it's definitely financially less savvy than buying, and is generally something you wouldn't want to optimize for at high salary.

You know whats an even stronger correlating factor? Having $400k liquid per year.

Homeownership is advertised as owning an extremely leveraged illiquid asset whose margin calls take years, which is the only reason why it works for people that don't have enough cash to be financially independent another way.

> strongest correlating factor with financial independence and overall net worth

If the only way people save is "force saving" by diving headfirst into something that sucks all of their other assets in, sure.

How could we make housing a terrible investment?

* It should be illiquid. We’ll make it something that takes weeks, no – wait – even better, months of time and effort to buy or sell.

* It should be something that locks its owner in one geographical area. That’ll limit their options and keep ’em docile for their employers!

* It should be leveraged! Oh, oh this one is great! This is how we’ll get people to swallow those low returns!

(copied from amusing thought experiment for another perspective: https://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/05/29/why-your-house-is-a-terri...)

That said, I bought a place to live anyways.

I'm not planning to buy a house until after I'm married.

Also, houses here tend to all be over $1M, good ones well over $1.5M. The average sold house price last month in Palo Alto was $2.76M with an average ~1900k sqft: https://www.redfin.com/city/14325/CA/Palo-Alto/housing-marke....

Additionally, I'm slightly concerned about a possible real estate bubble + I'm not sure if I plan to live in South Bay for 5+ years (the usual amount of time needed to keep your house for it to be worth it financially).

It's not that I can't afford a house, I can; I'd just rather have my money in an index fund and rent instead right now.

> Are these for more than 40 hours a week?

> Is silicon valley really that expensive?

Yes yes yes oh my god yes. Rent eats most of the difference. 300$/mo for a parking space, etc. However, non-local things (like amazon purchases) are the same price everywhere, so you still have lots of purchasing power for those things.

> Or are they literally giving college grads enough money to retire by 35?

Only if you play it right. If you have a high-earning spouse or are willing to live with multiple roommates into your thirties, have no kids, rent an apartment, and live modestly + save diligently. Want to live alone and get food and drinks with your friends every day? That will seriously handicap any strides towards financial independence until you're nearing the 300k range, and even then it takes you from "rocketship bank account" down to "really great life". Very much a first world problem, but if the goal is "retire at 35", the distinction matters.

> Or are they literally giving college grads enough money to retire by 35?

This is it.

All the answers about Bay Area Cost of Living are just as applicable for people making $150k and would be the same answers if those were the "high salaries" being paraded around.

All thats happened is that the tech sector has multiple of the largest publicly traded companies in the world, all in one place, and its brushing up against the compensation style that the finance sector has had for decades, which has always been divorced from cost of living and closer to the value brought to the organization. Its a good deal with a lot of potential to get better, or the market slows down and it gets worse.

If this is for real, _everyone_ I know is getting completely screwed.

I have a hard time believing any of these numbers. If I earned any of these amounts for 2-3 years, I could live off the interest for the rest of my life.

They are most certainly real.

This is for real.

Absolutely real.

It’s for real

These are not salaries. It’s total comp. My total comp. calculating pension and benefits in the Great White North is similar, and that’s govt. to boot. Total comp is always a highly misleading number.

Your pension and benefits are not immediately liquid and wouldn't be included in this comparison.

RSUs from publicly listed companies, on the other hand...

These numbers aren't including benefits (medical, dental, 401k match, etc). These are salary, RSU, bonus.

Really? I’m surprised. Every offer I’ve gotten in Canada has been 20-30% of US offers (and this is in high CoL cities like Vancouver and Toronto)

This is total comp outside pension/benefits. So solely salary + bonus + RSU. Only income earned directly not benefits.

If you added benefits to these, it would likely be an additional 50K a year (healthcare, 401k match, other incidentals).

Many companies hope that engineers don't know their value or that they simply aren't willing to relocate near one of the tech hubs. A trick of startups is to woo you with stock options which almost never amount to any value. You also have to watch out for REMOTE work where many companies seem to place an excessive $ on the "privilege" of working from home.

I'm willing to relocate for better pay so that I can afford nice things.

I want to have a place where I have room for a chicken coop (30 chickens) and a 1-acre fish pond. I'm willing to commute by car for a maximum of 15 minutes. A slightly longer commute might be OK if I can afford to commute by horse and the employer doesn't mind.

Which tech hub should I move to?

You can find this in many places around the Bay Area outside SF. I have 5 acres and keep chickens in Woodside, and it's 15-20 minutes drive to several big tech companies in Palo Alto and Redwood City. Some people keep horses here.

5 acres that is 15 minutes from Palo Alto/Mountain View? How much does that cost?

Yeah seriously. Just the land for a regular house lot can easily be over a million dollars in the area, and 1 acre can hold like six of those. So five acres...like thirty million dollars? Unless there's some weird situation I've never heard of.

5 acres in area where minimum lot is 5 acres is much cheaper than in area where minimum is 5k sq ft. In most areas you can’t subdivide lot - that’s the reason houses in Atherton on huge lots are so cheap (relatively).

The land is what you're generally paying for in any real estate deal. It doesn't cost millions to build these houses, but the land is valued as such because it's finite.

Nice, but I don't see how it generally works. The highest levels of pay in the article was $950,000. Wikipedia says that in Woodside "The median household income in the town is $212,917, and the median family income is $246,042."

Double those pay numbers to determine the price of a house that a person can afford... and it is not looking good. I looked around on www.trulia.com a bit. An empty lot of questionable geological status goes for $1,500,000. A small empty lot far from the tech companies goes for $500,000. Most of the actual homes go for millions.

So I guess yeah, it could work for the experienced person earning $950,000 per year at Facebook. That would allow building $500,000 of house on the $1,500,000 empty lot, assuming you can solve the geological issues and get the permits redone.

That is the top pay listed though. It's the top level at the top company.

Why on Earth do you think you need to make 950k/year to afford a million dollar home?

The mortgage on a 2 million dollar loan (which would be a 2.4 or 2.5 million dollar home) is 10k/mo or 120k/year, which is solidly affordable on a 400k income.

I know of 5 and 6 bedroom houses than can be gotten for that much in Palo Alto and Cupertino.

This is assuming you never lose a job or can get a new one to replace current one easily. When market downturns, those equity based salaries will go heavily discounted, and you might not be able to afford mortgage anymore.

People overestimate their max credit payments... And financial system incentivizes that (why wouldn't you borrow from 401k? It's just your retirement savings)

Which are great reasons to be responsible and run a large emergency fund, or be responsible and make 450k combined before buying the house. But not reasons to make 900k.

Sure, if you have $Xmm you can spend on land or can afford the mortgage on it

None of the major tech hubs fit this. Hell, I'm not sure any medium-sized tech hubs fit this. 1 acre is a hell of a lot of land for a real city, and 15 minutes doesn't get you very far by car most of the time at rush hour.

In Berlin (not exactly a techhub so about 100k for a good engineer), they are currently selling a plot of about 2 acres (8500sqm) for 1.5M (plus cost of a good new house ~= 300k). About 30min by public transport to city center. 40min to the new Tesla factory by car...

(in german) https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/108629168

(Though even if serious, I would not do that as you can get more land further out much cheaper and why do you need a pond directly at your house, having it within 1 hour reach for the weekend should be enough)

I am serious, aside from minor personal details being changed. (different animal, etc.)

The pond is so that the kids can go fishing out in the back yard. They don't need transportation, they can be watched from the house, they can have friends over, and there is no performance pressure to catch fish before it is time to go home. They can float on the pond with a canoe or a makeshift raft.

Having a little creek is fine too. Kids can build damns, dig for crawfish, catch frogs, pan for gold, make waterwheels, and so on.

The kids can camp in the backyard, complete with a campfire. The larger back yards have room for shooting.

The point really is personal land to enjoy.

These companies are also ludicrously selective. I think to think I'm a pretty good engineer and I have built up a lot of management experience to boot and I can barely get the time of day from any of them. I only ever got to the interview round twice and I felt like I did really well and just never heard back.

Here in Canada entry level SWEs are getting paid 60k-70k CAD (45k-55k USD). It's worse in Europe.

These numbers are absolutely mind boggling. Even with a higher cost of living and California income taxes, you still have at least 100k of free money to invest. It's no wonder so many people apply for jobs at FAANGs. A job at a FAANG is practically a ticket to early retirement.

At one point I fancied the idea of working abroad for fun, I could learn a language and try something new. The income disparity was far too great compared to the US, so I never did it.

The one exception: Google pays pretty well in Switzerland, but I hear it's hard to land.

Same. We've toyed with the idea of moving permanently if only because healthcare here's so bad and doesn't seem likely to get significantly better any time soon (the most "left" ideas beginning to creep into the Overton window still don't address prices seriously within the next decade). However, as a developer making way under FAANG comp levels, I'd still struggle to make more than like 2/3 what I do here, in Europe. Before taxes.

NY state pays all IT people (with a 4-year degree) $56K to start currently. Of course, you get a pension(!) and good health insurance. Private sector companies often don't pay much higher, and have much worse benefits.

IT is not comparable to SWE.

All of the latter are a subset of the former in this context.

And of course, many people go from, say, QA, help desk, 3rd tier support, or programmer/analyst to developer.

That's situational in the UK IT is short hand for working in tech

Software engineering isn't IT, and it isn't engineering, according to the know-it-alls (ok, probably different people), so what does that leave?

Fact remains, some organizations classify everyone as an IT specialist that does anything with a computer.

It is worse in Europe, but try getting a FANG job in Europe and they still pay extremely well.

My base pay is 150K pounds and not in London! Definitely I have a very niche skill in demand and I had to work really hard and be luck at the same time, to land at this role, but I will any day pick Europe with all the other benefits that a European country gives me.

Yes, working for Google or Apple in Sweden pays very, very well compared to other companies.

This is not widely known by engineers. I wish more people would talk about salaries here.

I think your niche skillset is probably the main reason, I doubt many FAANG people at an engineer level in the UK (especially outside London) make anywhere close to that.

I've been getting offers on that range in London for a few years now but they're senior management roles and I have a pretty unique skillset, FAANG recruiters haven't even bothered contacting me for like 10 years (they were chasing much harder when I was a junior engineer)

What do you do and what is your skillset, if I may ask?

I am working at the leading edge of both 3D gfx HW and SW.

Average senior software engineer salary in Vancouver is apparently $80-130k, median at $100k even.

The manager from a FAANG company that called me up the other day said the engineer position they're hiring for in Vancouver (senior-ish, but nothing exceptional) has a compensation package ranging from $200-270k.

It's not just the location. I think these companies are just really good at extracting value out of engineers and scaling to make good use of engineers, so it's worth it for them to pay well above market to acquire as many people as they can.

And to the rest of your message -- yes. I love the company I'm at right now and am being compensated fairly well for the market, but with a wife and a new baby on the way there's no way I can not follow up on a job with that kind of pay. For us that's the difference between never affording to enter the Vancouver real estate market and being able to buy a house for cash before we're 40.

The housing prices you see SF are unheard of in Europe, outside maybe only London. And even then, we're talking about the most gentrified areas of London.

FWIW, I make a "meager" half of those starting salaries, but I'm able to save around $80k / year. Why? Because I pay next to nothing in housing.

Purchased my home for $15k. Dropped another $15k in renovations, and that's gonna last a good time. I'm on the track to early retirement, and it's completely possible other places too.

I took a huge pay cut moving away from a big and expensive city, but I can save a lot more, and with a ton less work-related stress.

Can you say more about your home? Perhaps rough size and country? 15k is really cheap even if you bought it a while ago.

I assume you’re in Europe somewhere from your comment, but even Bulgaria which is fairly cheap isn’t that cheap. For example, housing outside the center of town in Sofia is about 1000 euros per square meter [1] (for sq ft folks, multiply sq meters by 10 roughly). Varna is a bit cheaper at 700 which is a bit below the countrywide average of 750.

Bulgaria is often listed as the cheapest country in the EU, so I’m curious to understand if there’s a drastic housing price drop somewhere. But even $30k to buy would mean about a 30 sq m (300 sq ft) flat, which is more like microhousing.

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/in/Sofia?displayC...

Northern Norway, but there's a ton of variance in prices here. You can easily move tens to hundreds of thousands in one city, so to find the cheapest you really need to look hard. I found a relatively old and run-down place, but which was easy to fix.

With that said, I have a very nice salary - relatively speaking - but as mentioned, it's around half of what jr. Engineers make in SW.

I'm lucky because my background from both Business and Engineering has been a good mix for landing my current gov. job - and the pay is good because the area / location is not very attractive, and it makes harder to get talent here. (I grew up here, so that's no problem).

Work involves a lot of travel, and I travel otherwise during my vacations, so things rarely get boring.

I've worked all over the world, but after I turned 30, I really haven't had the big-city needs, so living somewhere rural doesn't bother me anymore.

Software in Norway and saving $80k per year? In government, no less? That means post tax you're making in the ballpark of $150k, or maybe a bit less if your expenses are very low? Very good number for the location regardless.

I'm able to save $20k per year in Norway (south) and consider that great, relatively speaking. Remote work? I didn't think the public sector jobs paid this well.

Not quite software (scripting at most), but in a senior engineering position with leadership role, and with a ton of travel - had almost 100 days last year. OT pays well, too. (So the salary varies a bit from year to year)

But the largest portion of savings boils down extremely low COL - I have a grand total of $800 / 7000 NOK in expenses pr. month, that includes everything. Pre-tax anywhere between $120k-$130k, depends on OT and travel.

State / gov. (directly or owned) jobs can pay pretty well, if you find the right positions - but they tend to lean towards engineering or medicine.

Really nice and thanks for the info. GJ on getting to a ridiculously low COL. My costs are on the ballpark of $1000 per month excluding housing costs, but housing costs easily approach that number as well. Which obviously reduces the potential savings rate dramatically.

Most of the comp is RSU and bonus. If you’re working for one of the listed companies and aren’t in the pay band you’re getting screwed.

You might want to look at

Is dev compensation bimodal?

https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/

i.e. can you draw a line between devs who get paid a lot and those who don't?

I wish there was a date on this article (and all blogs) but it looks like it's from 2015.

The conclusion isn't crisp, but to me it's plausible that the trends have continued since 2015, e.g. maybe it's more bimodal 5 years later (though I haven't really been paying attention). I would be interested in a followup.

My friend got 260K out of school at Google. I got slightly less.

If you want to know the lay of the land in terms of compensation in the Bay Area, put your house on the market as a rental. You'll get to see the offer letters from Google, Facebook, Apple etc.

It was enlightening, and made me go to my manager to ask for more.

The number on levels.fyi closely match what I saw in those offer letters.

That's a very clever way to see real paystubs! Landlords get too much info in my opinion, especially commercial landlords. I wish there were something like credit scores for income. You can share your paystubs with that "income score" company which will then just tell the landlord if the rent is less than 25% of your income and hence you can afford it.

It's real. I mod r/cscareerquestions and work at Google. You can search the subreddit for "salary sharing" and find our threads where people are sharing various offers.

I don't have much to say except Zuhayeer your site's numbers are dead on from what I can tell of both my and my spouse's employers. Glassdoor et al. tend to low-ball by quite a bit, possibly due to stale information.

Keep up the good work!

Looks like us over here in Europe are getting shafted. Even if you adjust for living expenses, European engineers are grossly underpaid.

It's even worse because many of these companies have offices in Europe and pay European market rates. Same company, same level, big differences in compensation. And it's not just Europe too, same in Canada, Singapore, Israel, etc.

It is really quite sad. I know that Zurich is a little better when it comes to compensation, but I don't have any of the specifics.

I don't really understand why people would feel they are shafted. The reason people get paid that much is because of supply and demand, but it has little to do with what you deserve to get. Does a software engineer really need 5-10x salary compared to their peers in other industries?

Given that the salaries are so driven by market demand, it makes total sense that there's large differences in other markets. It doesn't mean you're getting shafted. Low minimum wages is what we should be getting angry about.

I might be wrong here, but I think the biggest reason for this is that Europe hasn't really produced a tech company in the past ~25 years, with revenues (and profits) amounting to anything close to those of the FAANGs.

OTOH, there is the separate issue of FAANGs not compensating their European workers as well as they do the ones working in the US.

The only consolation is that Europe produced WWW and a number of programming languages creators :)

Sure, but that's small consolation if you're not able to capture the value. That said, as a Finn, I'm quite happy about Linus Torvalds.

Still, almost all industries will be tech-enabled in the future (software eating the world etc.), so one would expect European banks for example to up their game when it comes to tech salaries. Alas, it seems that they're are also quite poorly run [1], so I wouldn't hold my breath.

Also, apart from Spotify, European tech workers haven't been able to enjoy the benefits of the streaming wars. And even Spotify is hamstrung by relatively low margins due to high licensing costs [2].

I guess the one industry that might have already increased their rates for SWEs is the car industry and specifically, the relatively profitable German car brands. But it seems they're more focused now on producing electric cars rather than creating online services [3].

As a European tech worker, if you're not willing or able to move to the US, two good options can be to get involved with local startups or to go into independent consulting. Maybe a little ironically, the opportunity costs of starting or working for a startup in Europe might be lower than in the US, due to the smaller pay gap.

[1]: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/04/06/fixing-europes-...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/chart/13406/gross-margin-of-spotify...

[3]: https://www.ft.com/content/81a5030c-1a64-11ea-97df-cc63de1d7... (apologies for the paywall).

> OTOH, there is the separate issue of FAANGs not compensating their European workers as well as they do the ones working in the US.

They don't, but they do compensate them similarly relative to the local average pay. They pay what they need to to get the talent they want.

I work at Google Munich, the pay here is much higher than a regular company in Munich, similarly to how Google pays much more than a regular company in the US. In some ways the difference is even more striking here, because there are few peer companies here that pay similarly to Google (there's a Lyft office, and a small number of Amazon devs, that's about it AFAIK), whereas in major tech hubs in the US you usually also have Facebook and Apple and Amazon and Microsoft and Netflix and various others that are similar or close.

Sure this makes sense, and I've heard rumblings that the average pay in the Berlin startup scene has been climbing these past few years. But I guess we're still far away from someone with five years of experience making 400-500k per year.

It very much depends on industry. It's typical that industries with a lot of money also pays higher salaries. When I first started out as an Engineer in oil and gas, salaries had peaked. Senior Engineers were getting paid $300k-$400k.

The brain drain was real. Why would any engineer bother with other sectors, when you could get paid 50%-100% more in O&G, compared to other sectors? Startups, almost no mater how well-funded (by European standards), couldn't compete.

But, surprise surprise, the good days came to an end - massive layoffs, and people suddenly found themselves in those other "lesser" industries, with massive pay cuts.

The good news is that I've seen an explosion in entrepreneurship and tech the past 5-10 years, and people are more willing to try those routes, as well as that the VC community seems to grow stronger.

Just join a FAANG company that has a branch office in Europe. They'll pay a bit less, but a senior engineer should still be able to get 250k+/yr.

Nah, I got an offer letter from Amazon in Berlin, and it was easily 1/10th the compensation they offered to people in NYC or SF (compared with Levels). I made sure with the recruiter that I understood the position and the internal salary ranking--then I told them I would not be taking the position as I found their offer insulting.

It's not a "bit less". A senior engineer in sunnyvale is making 400k+ a year. That's nearly 70% more pay. Assuming 250k is correct, which I'm doubtful of.

I can assure you, that you'd be lucky to be making anything north of 150k. 150 is for principal and above.

Income equality is double edged sword.

Exactly. We talk about income inequality being bad, but obviously if you're on the higher side of the average, it has a direct financial benefit (though other aspects, like a higher crime rate, are still bad for you).

Just to be clear, most engineers in the US aren't getting close to this either. This is only for top companies. Even good engineers at "normal" companies in the US are getting less than half this much.

I get Airbnb and Stripe being up there for entry-level engineers, those companies are almost printing money.

But Lyft, haemorrhaging money, is top of the list, and Oracle - the company no-one in the Bay Area or on HN seems to work for, and everyone seems to hate - is 5th? Are there legions of quietly-well-paid Oracle engineers out there just keeping their heads down and getting on with the job? Why isn't Oracle in the more senior lists - they make complex and expensive databases, isn't that something you need to pay a lot of money to get really smart people to work on?

And Netflix, which I thought famously paid very well, only pops up in one tier?

It's more likely I'm misinformed than this list is wrong, but I find this pretty surprising.

Netflix only has one tier for all engineers (equivalent to Senior Engineer III).

I know a number of people at Oracle, senior engineers mostly. They are not the online forum aficionados. They do their work, get paid go home to their family, plan vacations just like most other folks out of the tech industry. Very industrious and well deservedly compensated, if I do say so myself. Not just Oracle folks either, there are plenty of companies that are not buzzing or on everybody's lips but treat their employees ridiculously well. Look at SAS for example. Some of the happiest and most well compensated people I know.

Thanks, this makes sense to me. It’s a good reminder of the boundaries of my personal bubble. I’ve always figured there must be a bunch of Oracle engineers out there (there just has to be) and wondered why I’d never met one in the Bay. 99% chance this says more about me and my network / social circle than anything else. I’m happy that Oracle engineers are getting paid well and (hopefully!) getting on with enjoying their lives :)

I went to NC State, which SAS recruits heavily from (for obvious reasons).

The people that work at SAS are not the top tier, at all. They have a surprisingly large number of test engineers too. From what I gather the 35 hour a week thing is a myth, and benefits are mediocre compared to top tech companies.

Yeah, the public perception (mostly created by the company) of SAS is very different from reality. The work is mostly boring, the pay is just ok and the lifestyle balance - while better than the Bay Area - is definitely not 35 hours a week on average. Historically the COL in the RDU area has been a major selling point but even that is changing as property prices continue to rise across the Triangle.

There are much better paying companies in RDU now, including Microsoft which is seems to be growing rapidly.

At some point Oracle Cloud (OCI) started poaching engineers from Amazon by paying ungodly money, so much so that there was a running meme on Blind about this.

The article is a so great and shocking at the same time.

I understand the rant and a sense of discomfort us engineers are facing looking at the dataset. I would definitely want to get more context out of these numbers like -

> Why these engineers are paid so much and why others are not?

> Is education/college a factor in this pay gap?

> If one wants to earn this much. What are the required skills to achieve this goal?

It is a very good sign that a level of awareness is being developed about the pay gap not in among different genders but also within the same organization/experience levels.

Salary negotiation is pretty one sided today with companies holding all the cards. Better visibility into numbers will definitely help level the playing field.

Collecting offer letters is an interesting way to build trust in data. What's the incentive for someone to upload their offer letter though?

> Salary negotiation is pretty one sided today with companies holding all the cards.

What makes you think companies hold all the cards? Especially in tech.

It's not all the cards but companies (recruiters) usually have information asymmetry on their candidates. Sites like levels.fyi are a good remedy, with the right info and counteroffers you can negotiate salaries/sign-on bonuses up by pretty large amounts.

A strategy that has worked for me is to interview in batches. Companies interview multiple candidates, too.

That gives you extra leverage and extra information.

I tried this in West Norway recently, being as firm in the negotiation tactics as possible. Didn't yield higher offers at all! So that tells me the market here is actually not nearly as competitive as all the consulting companies try to make people believe.

In other words, the success of this strategy is market-dependent, but it certainly seems to have a huge effect in SV.

I never worked in SV, but I did mostly work in global cities.

It's important to be aware of 'BATNA's, ie the best alternative to negotiated agreement. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

For the employer that means hiring the next best candidate, or not hiring anyone for that position. For you it means taking the next best offer, or staying at your old place etc.

The concept is closely linked to opportunity costs.

In general, you can negotiate an agreement only between your BATNA and their BATNA.

(Part of interviewing in batches is that you can credibly present that your BATNA is very high. So you can be tough in negotiations.)

Yep, I'm aware of this and use it. I guess in these terms, my claim is that the BATNA of most companies here is actually that they have all the engineers they need at low cost. But are presenting publicly that they have a shortage and more people should become engineers, so that they can get them even cheaper.

It might be competitive in the other direction: too many engineers, not enough opportunities. Then it becomes a bidding war to see who will accept the least pay.

Yes, but that's not the industry we work in.

Just a few years ago many large silicon valley employers (including some companies on the above list) were part of an illegal anti-poaching agreement and were sued and settled with the DOJ for it. Just because engineers get paid a lot doesn't mean their employers aren't scummy.

There is absolutely no way IC2 makes $175k at Oracle. LOL. I doubt you can even find an IC2, period. They hire everyone in at IC3 and above, and everyones paid like shit.

The only exception I can think of was the people brought in to work on the 'next gen' cloud stuff who were poached from Amazon. They were all 'senior' and 'principal' engineers though.

A friend of mine was just hired as an IC2 at Oracle at 175k. He is on cloud stuff in Seattle, but by no means a senior or principal engineer -- only 1 year of experience.

Yes, as I stated in the last part, Seattle is the exception because the cloud has become make or break. Oracle has 135k employees and the vast bulk are not in Washington. HTH

Some of these salaries are hilarious. I work in a small city in the Southeast at about 250k cash comp and feel blessed because of it. Leave it to HN to make me feel that tinge of envy. The weird thing is, I never get jealous/envious of someone my age making 1 million. 2 million. Or hitting the jackpot and selling their company for hundreds of millions. Doesn’t give me one iota of “wish I had that”, but the 400k starting salaries really make me wonder if I should be starting the job search again and uplifting the family out of the Southeast lol. I wonder if it’s because I can envision myself working for those companies and actually making it (versus founding a company and making millions). The mind is an interesting thing. I am very grateful to be making what I do, and even more grateful that people who practice my trade (in some form or fashion) are getting paid well for it!

How the hell do you make $250k in the southeast? On top of that in one of the smaller cities

I found a company that was trying to compete for “Silicon Valley Tech Talent” so they ramped salaries up to do it.

I was a manager at one of these companies and my L5s were making half of what this thing says. Don't trust everything you read on the internet.

Can you name the company? These numbers are in line with what I've seen from peers for new offers.

Maybe you’re thinking of salary and not TC, or that was a few years ago

Total comp including RSUs? Seems unlikely.

Might be the team or sub-org you were in. This data is also for fresh offers in 2019; most FAANG engineers who started prior to 2019 are earning less to much less than listed.

This is false. I'm friends with many people across many companies, and we all openly share salary information, including RSUs. The numbers are fairly close, there's no way it's off by half. The biggest difference is Netflix, I would have expected them to be higher. Their biggest difference is they pay cash, and the culture is either you fit in and are extremely happy, or you're terrified of getting fired and you are within less than 6 months.

This is the biggest difference between now and 15-20 years ago. Before it used to be a secret but now everyone shares the data.

This isn't true.

Manager since when? Maybe 6+ years ago it could've been half.

I'm L5 and I earn 400k+ (I joined last year), the compensation on levels.fyi also lines up accurately to my company's compensation data group (in which individuals anonymously report their salary).

These compensations are also accurate to those reported on Blind (anonymous work discussion app) by hundreds of individuals.

I have many co-workers and friends, and know the soft max paybands of each level. The comp reported on levels.fyi is very accurate.

I'm not sure about the salaries, but I'm more sure Amazon isn't in Seattle, CA. (Staff engineer slide).

I'm also wondering how much of the salary (which certainly contains a lot of stock) is due to stock appreciation. If someone joined Amazon in late 2016, the value of their stock awards has more than tripled.

Do offers for these companies go this high, or is this only after a few years? This seems it's more "what I'm getting paid now" rather than what the offer was.

These numbers are roughly around what I've seen for new offers.

These are offers.

Assuming this is the levels.fyi dataset, it is “what I’m getting paid now” rather than offers. Levels.fyi doesn’t seem to filter based on offer vs ongoing salary, and the submission form doesn’t include flagged offer vs ongoing.

Yeah good point! we’ve actually been thinking about how to support it - potentially collect the number of shares / RSUs so that offers can be more dynamic

Just wondering if there was a way to get more data for non-US locations. For example, according to my knowledge, most of Canada's "senior" position salaries (in CAD) are not even near the "entry-level" salaries (is USD). If you convert the CAD salary to USD then it becomes even more pathetic. Canada has "free" healthcare but the taxes are higher than California/Seattle. Granted, you don't have to spend 2-3M for houses (only California), but the housing markets around Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa are also anything but "affordable" (around 700k-1.5M mark). I wonder why there is such a huge pay disparity between two neighbor countries with sort of similar "standards" of living. Just house prices and "free medical" (which is covered by your job anyways) cannot justify the 5-7 times salary difference. Wondering if anyone else had other opinions?

This looks to be the source webpage where the PDF came from: https://www.levels.fyi/2019/

Presumably you have to pay income tax on base+rsu so shave off >50% from these figures if you live in California? Then rent can run you 35-50k a year or more in the bay, and then other expenses? So 600k a year can be more like <200k savings at the end of the day? Someone debunk this.

Taxes average 30-40% in CA/NY, lower in WA, which has no state income tax. You are probably thinking about marginal tax rate, not average. Mortgage and property tax in the Bay Area can actually be closer to $100k, but some are paying that on dual income. $600k becomes more like $350k after tax and housing. That's still an insane amount of disposable income, hence everyone buying Teslas.

Ah yes, I was equating marginal with average. Thanks.

It would actually be something like this: Gross: $600k Federal Tax: $142k CA Tax: $45k Net: $413k Effective Tax Rate: 31%

Of course your savings rate depends on how much you spend, you could easily spend >$200k/yr, especially if you have a family and want to live near good schools or pay for private school.

What I would like to know is how much is your take home pay when working for a FAANG after taxes and rent. Not including equity.

If you make 130k base in TX, you see around 8k monthly assuming you put close to 10% in your 401k. For a two bedroom relatively close to Downtown you pay about 2k so that would leave 6k monthly after taxes, rent and 401k savings. What would be the realistic equivalent in a FAANG in the Bay area if you want to maintain that standard of living? Meaning at least a 1000 sq ft apt that's at most 20 mins from work?

I'll use myself as an example. I live in NYC, my rent is $4300 / month (2 bedroom apartment in nice doorman building on Upper West Side), and I just accepted an offer at a public tech company. My first 12 months should pay me $420,000, assuming the stock price is stable. I'll ignore the possibility of any raises, promotions, bonuses, stock price increase, and refreshers. I'll also ignore the 401k match (max is about $5k / year) and the ESPP.

I'm married with a kid, so here are my numbers:

  Gross: $420,000
  401k: $19,500 (max for 2020)
  Taxes: $143,485 (federal, state, local, and FICA)
  Rent: $51,600
  Net: $205,415

I'm already really happy with that number, but my wife has her own income, I have a profitable side business, I'll do a mega backdoor Roth and the ESPP, and I expect refreshers, stock price increase, and a promotion over the next few years.

It's a very good time to be a software engineer in a tech hub.

Congratulations! Can I ask how many years of experience you have ?

12 years of experience, 9 in iOS (what this role is for), all self-employed. More detail littered across comments in my history.

Wow, these numbers are so insane.

How is that the work we do is worth so much?

And is prepping for algorithm interviews the core to getting to numbers like these?

Prepping for algorithms is somewhat mandatory if you've never encountered those types of questions before, as you'll most likely fail without some familiarity/practice. However once you're able to do well enough on them, they're actually the least important for senior engineers. Algorithm questions are mostly just treated as a weeder/low tech bar for senior engineers.

Doing well on the behavioral, architecture, and practical interviews is usually much more important for senior candidates.

Well, even at my Norwegian small-ish finance company, company profit is on average >$100k per employee, and that includes the janitor and after all salaries, taxes and expenses are paid. The FAANG companies are at least 10X this. At those profit levels, paying $300k to get the best available person in each role almost doesn't matter to the bottom line.

And it does answer your question, yes, the work we do is worth so much. We have the ability to command an army of robots, and that greatly amplifies the reach of our abilities.

But of course, the pay is because the market is able to, not because our abilities are magical. They are correlated, but there isn't direct causation.

It's really not that much money.

I'm in the Midwest by the way and have explored moving to Bay area. But here's the reality. Contribute to 401k $19k small 3 bedroom house for family with decent schools - $5k/month - $60k a year Daycare $4k/month - $48k a year Health Insurance, Household Expenses, Food, etc $5k/month - $60k a year Car/gasoline $12k a year Assume 0 savings that's $180k post tax $360k before tax + $19k = $379k.

Wanna save a little bit, we are already over $400k...

... and this is with a small shack of a 1200sq house and 2-3x the commute. It's easy to look at the numbers and drool in the mouth but start running the numbers and it's not that nice for those with family. If you're young and single, then it's worth it. Go do it, rent a room, live like a pauper and save like hell.

These numbers are wildly inaccurate. Public schools are free and my kids daycare is $1500/month. 48k health insurance ? I pay $200 per paycheck for Kaiser for a family of 3. Other expenses are all relative and not that different from living in a low COL. Living in Bay Area, you can easily save $200k per year at $400k salary

but you know whats even worse? Making 1/3rd or 1/5th of that. Cheers.

I think you really want your analysis to be true, so you're fudging the numbers to "prove" to yourself that it makes no sense.

- Taxes are not 50%

- Daycare is not $4k for one kid, though could be for 2

- You don't need a 3 bedroom unless you have 3+ kids

- Health insurance is a few thousand per year, max (employer pays most)

- Household expenses and food expenses aren't THAT much different from elsewhere. Do you spend $5k / month on those now?

Curiously, even though this story has far too many points and comments, and is even very fresh, it has been booted from the front page and is right now at number 48.

Stats on the story:

Points: 622, Comments: 489, Time: 16 hours ago

The frontpage has a story on Knuth, with similar freshness but much lesser comments and points.

When you look at top pay by region I'm really surpised to see such a small difference between SF and Pitsburgh. Considering the insance COL here in the bay area, I would expect bay area to pay at least 3 times more than pistburgh. as far I can tell SF and Palo alto are vastly vastly underpaid and the likes of Pitsburgh are extremely overpaid.

I think the numbers seen here for Pittsburgh miss a big part of the picture. There are only a handful of big tech companies with offices there and they employ a comparatively small number of engineers. Most engineers in Pittsburgh are not working at those companies and do get paid 4x less. These are pretty much dedicated AI offices that recruit from CMU and are companies that don't adjust pay much between locations

How do other roles in the companies mentioned here, compare to these numbers? Meaning Data Scientists, Product Managers and Designers? Would it be correct to assume that a PM with five years of experience would have roughly the same compensation as a SWE with similar experience?

I wish they had one for the product managers too. I remember their website had that data as well.

There’s 1 PM for every 20+ engineers, so it’s harder to gather a representative sample.

I am a PM and a hiring manager. These numbers are very close to PM

I still don't understand how they're defining total compensation. Federal taxable wages, like what shows up on your W-2? Or the amount you're promised including RSUs, regardless of vesting schedule?

Salary (W2 before tax) + bonus + promised RSUs.

It's not an unreasonable way to calculate it, and given the way the economy has been going in the past 10 years, it's lowballing the real taxable compensation.

A W2 includes bonus and RSU vest though...

Yup, my bad. So definitely not what's on the W2.

Typically it would be base salary, bonus, and the value of RSUs vesting over the next 12 months. I'd guess this is about the same as W-2 income?

I'd be interesting in seeing something like this for engineering management. I'm a director outside of a major technology hub and am largely in the dark about what I should be getting paid.

Maybe you need to think differently about this: What's your contribution to the company and what is your replacement cost? In non-hub areas, it might be very difficult to replace you, thus your value increases. Likewise, if you are driving significant revenue / cost savings, you can justify a significant piece of the action. Point being, rather than just making a comparison to bay area comp (for example), negotiate your own deal on its own merits.

I don't disagree, but I think this applies to engineering salaries too, not just management salaries. Sometimes it's just useful to have a reference point.

What places pay less for benefits? No relocation, working sub 40 hours a week, greatly increase time off (none of this “unlimited vacation but really it’s just up to your manager” bullshit)?

Can anyone reconcile the difference between $227k median wage in SV and the fact that even entry level jobs listed pay more than than? Is it just the most SV jobs are not in FANG companies.

> Is it just the most SV jobs are not in FANG companies.

Yes. Even in SF the majority of jobs will not be tech based at all let alone FANG

That $227k median must be SV tech jobs, the median wage for whole of USA is $32k

I think those are median pay of the areas overall, not just tech

So SV has $227k median, but that includes all jobs

May be misunderstanding the slide though, it isn't clear

edit: Median salary for SF is more like $95k, so this must be tech only

I suppose that means that >50% of the responses at L3, hence the median being ~L3 salary

The Bay Area has around ~900k "tech jobs". FANG is a small fraction of that. Also "tech" may include other roles (non-engineer) which earn less.

Is there a similar comparison available for Germany?

Damn. Here in Australia, I'd be surprised if any companies paid over $200,000 for even the most senior engineers (bar management).

How trustworthy are the numbers in levels.fyi? Who verifies numbers entered by anyone?

They claim they check the offer letters. Numbers look decently accurate from a few people I know. Remember this is total compensation, not just cash.

OK I need to move to the USA, you can't even get close to this in Australia :(

I'm surprised that Google and Facebook didn't show up more on the list.

These studies are annoying and just smell like envy by the most average parasites in this industry. How about you focus on adding value and setting the right price for yourself.

Some are grateful with 100k and others 500k. You can negotiate your price because you're an adult.

If you can't, then grow up.

Can someone share a copy? The link appears to be dead.

Are these numbers just salary or total compensation?

Total comp ofc. These would be crazy salary numbers (although for Netflix, I believe it might actually be all salary).

More reason to consider FAANG over startups.

PDF says Seattle, CA, should be WA.

how does this compare to the data at levels.fyi ?

This data is from levels.fyi

Reposting from previous comment of mine [1]:

I can't speak to the actual work yet as I haven't started, but I just accepted an offer as a senior / staff level engineer in NYC at one of the smaller public tech companies (think Dropbox, Lyft, Pinterest, Snap, etc) after 10+ years of being self-employed. I had two startups offer me $170k plus some (probably worthless) options. When the offer I ultimately accepted came in, I had several more startup interviews lined up and likely could have gotten closer to $180k - 200k from the startups.

Now, $200k isn't bad. But the offer I accepted from the public tech company is for $420k the first year [2], and will likely go up from there, especially if the stock does well. It's not crazy to think I could be making $600k - 800k within a few years. And to be honest, I think it's on the low end for the big tech companies at my level. And it doesn't come with some crazy grind as far as I can tell. People seem to actually work 40 hours, the PTO policy is flexible and people take 20-25 days a year off, people work from home when they need to, the benefits are solid, etc.

After this experience and seeing the huge disparity in pay, I would never go work at some random startup unless I was founder level or deeply, deeply believed in their mission.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21837849

2. It's $200k base, $800k RSUs over 4 years, $20k signing bonus. Role is IC, iOS engineer. 12 years of experience, 9 in iOS, all self-employed. I have a business degree from a state school, and I've never had a software engineering job.

I had a similar experience after my recent job search. The pay gap between startups paying ISOs and larger tech companies paying RSUs was over $100k.

Damn I really need a new job...

this is really awesome. I've worked at a SWE for over 15 years and never made anything close to that amount, even in a super high COL area.

Since you had no big tech company on your resume, what do you think was the biggest factor in getting you the job? Interview performance? Project portfolio? Or something else?

I can't be sure, but probably specializing in iOS. I also had a few "name brand" Fortune 1000 clients on the resume, though I hadn't worked on those projects for years and didn't discuss them. But maybe helped get me to phone screen stage.

From there, it's all about interview performance.

I too work at a smaller tech company, market cap is near the ones you posted and one thing many people forget is the share price upside on those sized companies is enormous(also downside too!) I came in during a low point in the companies stock and saw my yearly RSU's go from being valued at 70k to over $200k a year. I don't think the large FAANGs will see even a 100% upside in share price(maybe NFLX though) in a year or two.

It's true, I see a ton of upside for my company. I think they could theoretically 10x over the next decade, which seems unlikely for FAANG. But yeah, they could also 0.1x, I guess. I'd move on before that though!

For everyone who doesn’t know, you’re getting shafted at that medium size startup/company. Most of these FAANG engineers are not geniuses, they just studied for the interviews

I know. I get paid lower than an entry level engineer while managing, developing and maintaining the entire web presence for our company - public site, e-commerce store, etc.

I get paid 1/50th of what the company made in e-commerce sales (similar amounts through other channels).

I can’t quit and prepare for a job interview as I need to maintain visa status. And my workload averages ~60h/week.

The visa situation is just terrible, I knew so many smart coworkers who were afraid to move because of H1B uncertainties. Ultimately this hurts everyone in the industry because labor markets require a liquidity to function properly.

What uncertainties exactly? Just interview normally and if you get an offer then you can accept the offer and they will start the H1B process. You will get the H1B approval in about three weeks. Then you can put your two weeks notice. Overall it will take around 5 weeks from your offer date to your joining date which is pretty reasonable. If there is a delay in the H1B or it does not get approved, then you can continue to work at your old place. Pretty much everybody on H1B these days is following this process.

I'm curious: you've chosen to tie this pretty closely to your real world identity. Aren't you concerned at all that a company that you're beholden to and is willing to underpay you will just let you go if they find this?

It sounds like (guessing based on phrasing) ameen is the only, or only senior, technical staff member? Why would they let them go? If I were a cartoon-villain, mustache-twirling higher-up for said company, what this post tells me is that the situation is currently working, that my employee knows the score, and they don't seem liable to do anything about it except complain on the internet. In a really evil way, wouldn't it be reassuring to them?

I should be clear, I sympathize with the situation and hope that ameen's employer is not cartoonishly evil, and instead would maybe even realize they have improvements to make. But just thinking about possible outcomes of someone venting on the internet, firing doesn't seem like one that makes any sense.

If they are such a central team member to an ecommerce operation, likely the company feels equally stuck with them (e.g. how many sales would be lost if the site went down while looking for a replacement, and would the company even survive that?).

Totally, nail on the head. And folks from my company don’t really frequent HN (although I wish I worked for such a company).

I’ve learned a great deal about how not to run a business, treating employees right, delegating tasks/responsibilities, designing for automation, etc. I do hope when I get my green card to start my own startup (lifelong goal of mine) and try to set an example of everything I see wrong with our industry.

Not really, while the status quo isn’t the best - I trust my abilities at getting into a similar level company in the industry.

I do doubt my abilities at getting into FAANG without preparing for interviews just because so much of them are just not part of my day to day.

You're definitely getting shafted if you're working for a privately held start-up and they don't give you a 10 year exercise window. Many start-ups pay "median" salary or below, which make their numbers look bad versus levels.fyi. But in many cases if a start-up has an exit, then early employees will easily eclipse what they'd earn at FAANG. (Later employees, maybe not ..).

The 10 year exercise window should be standard behavior by now; if you're not given 10 years, your employer sadly doesn't want to be competitive. https://triplebyte.com/blog/fixing-the-inequity-of-startup-e...

Actually it’s rare for the options to be worth more than FAANG options. Only the earliest stage employees do well, and adjusted for the risk they take, it’s a really bad deal

If I have learned one thing is that's much better to get paid very well for 20 years at a big tech company than it is to be paid median at some smaller outfit hoping to hit the jackpot.

Because even when the start-up has a successful exit, and even if you were an early employee, you'll still have a very small chance of out-earning your buddy who joined big tech.

This has been especially true in the past 10 years: look at the stock prices of Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. They've all gone up significantly, making those yearly RSU additions even more valuable. In a rising market, a 4 year vesting schedule works to the advantage of its owner.

Worst thing is when one of these average fuckers from FAANG decides they want a change and is now your director of engineering at $medium_startup despite knowing fuck all.

As an average fucker from FAANG, this comment hurts my feelings :(

No comment on the "shafted" aspect, but the "not geniuses" thing is exactly correct, and I wish I had realized it sooner.

I didn't apply for google when I left college because I didn't feel like I would "meet the bar". ~4 years later, feeling like I was a much stronger candidate, I interviewed, hoping to barely scrape by and be the dumbest guy in the room to keep leveling up.

I was dumbstruck by just how totally normal everyone was. Everyone I met at google struck me as being in the 50-75th percentile of my peers in startup land. They're not some high-powered cohort of elite intellectual supermutants. They're regular people. I was ready at graduation, and sold myself short for no good reason.

Now that I work at a BigCo, I feel even more strongly that the bar is, if anything, on the low side, simply because an org that big needs a constant influx of warm bodies. We hire more people in a month than some of my past employers would hire in the lifetime of the company. It's flat out impossible to staff 5,000 people while demanding that they all be in the top 10%.

There are weird and arguably arbitrary hoops to jump through, but you can do it. Interview prep was radically simpler than EG buying a house (in terms of prep, context gathering, etc.)

$175,000 at Oracle for an entry-level engineer?

I mean... just... wow. You could retire at 35 and not have to work for the rest of your life.

How hard is it to get these jobs?

Not that hard depending on your natural cognitive ability. Just grind leetcode questions. For higher level interviews, also study up on systems design questions.

I think that's underselling things. These companies have very low admit rates, and leetcode is pretty tedious. That said though, divide the compensation difference by 200 hours of studying and it probably works out to a worthy investment.

One reason they have very low admit rates because most candidates are absolutely awful and cannot code at all, even if they have years of software development experience! Grinding leetcode is definitely worth it.

If they get far more applicants than they hire, it isn't possible for the solution to be something anyone can do.

> You could retire at 35 and not have to work for the rest of your life.

Why does everyone on this site want to “retire by 35”? I don’t know anyone who retired (or plans to retire) at 35. Besides, hand-waving about “basic financial literacy” aside, doing so would require living like a broke college student from age 22 to 35, and then moving to an RV in Nebraska to live out the rest of your natural life in “retirement”. What the fuck is the point?

I don't want to retire at 35, but I would like to be able to if I burn out, can't find a job, or whatever. Not having to work ever again (but choosing to continue to work) eliminates a lot of sources of stress for me.

It's not about wanting to, it's about having the option. Then you can do whatever you want. There's no downsides, and it gives you much more leverage in negotiations even if you continue working exactly as before.

Bachelors in CS from Stanford. Pass the interview. Decent GPA. Internship somewhere interesting certainly wouldn’t hurt.

That’s not an unusual offer for smart software engineers coming in from top colleges, where you’re being hired to work at Redwood Shores or Seattle.

Having a Masters or PhD will push it up a bit higher again.

What about a MBA? I was on the business side before learning to code..

Before you go gaga over this figure, here's a reality check. Oracle only paid such high wages in their OCI division which had a blank check. After their brutal fight with AMZN over the cloud wars and the subsequent reality check, they've had a ton of layoffs (surprise, surprise). So I would take this comp with a pinch of salt.

Are you that levels.fyi guy?

I believe what is needed is a salary and stock breakdown, just like levels.fyi. You can’t pay the rent or buy food with stock.

Most of these numbers are including RSUs, which are treated like regular income. It is usually wise to sell at vest, in which case you can then buy food or pay rent.

Levels.fyi has this on their main site. But RSU vesting at public companies is a lot more humane these days (unless you work for Amazon).

If RSUs vest every quarter and the companies are public and fairly stable (like almost all of them in the list) then there isn't a very big difference.

Public RSUs are easy enough to turn into cash. The cash/stock breakdowns are on the site.

Typical L5 who earns 400k might be 225k cash/175k stock.

levels.fyi doesn't accurately represent the overall picture. Not everyone gets paid so well at each of their levels. Every company, especially FANGs, maintain a bell curve. levels.fyi cannot capture that curve accurately. They tend to skew high in most cases. So like everything else in life, take it with a pinch of salt [unless you're hypertensive ;)].

I would say they're pretty accurate, maybe a ~5% skew toward higher compensation because of self-reporting bias.

It’s worth nothing that most of these numbers are inflated from share price increases boosting the value of RSUs vesting over 4 years. New offers at the higher levels from those companies are unlikely to be that high unless you are coming in at the top of the pay band for the level.

That's not true. New hire offers are roughly around these numbers.

The way I understand it, it's the number of RSU that are offered each year, at the time of them being offered.

If so, then the movement of the stock price is irrelevant.

Per zuhayeer’s comments elsewhere in the thread, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I only saw one relevant comment from him and it doesn't address this question?

Others have mentioned that it's primarily based on offers, in which case my interpretation stands.

Nope. These seem pretty spot on for new hire compensation. Most people don't incorporate stock inflation when reporting their total compensation.

I'm an L5 that joined one of those companies last year, and earn 440k/yr. If I counted stock inflation, it would be 500k/yr.

It's important to compare apples to apples.

Lists like these are incredibly misleading, as they include non-cash bonuses. First off, these bonuses (say, RSUs) take a while to vest (incurring opportunity cost), can go down (there's risk), and so on. For example, being an early junior engineer at the next unicorn can make you orders of magnitude richer than working for FB or GOOG as a distinguished engineer (basically top 0.0001%). But that's kind of a silly data point, because you're probably making a 70k salary, whereas the distinguished engineer is making like a 250k salary.

So let's stick with cold hard cash or let's stick with bonuses, but it's misleading to conflate them.

At Facebook, Google, and Snap, at least, the RSUs start vesting immediately (no cliff) and are as good as cash as the stock is liquid. It's not very clear what your distinction is.

Even if liquid, these salaries probably reflect people vesting stock from years ago - and the high end would include people vesting stock offered at a much lower valuation. In this kind of ranking there’d be a bias towards companies with rapidly growing share prices ... and remember that last performance is no indicator of future returns.

No, these are roughly inline with new hire offers

At all of the five listed levels?

Yes

You can get from 180k to 260k as a new grad at Google.

I'm an L5 that joined a FAANG last year, and earn 440k/yr. If I counted stock inflation, it would be 500k/yr. Most people don't count stock inflation into their total compensation.

When I compare the numbers for my level, I see a salary that is more or less in line with mine, and I see RSU compensation that is in line with the number of RSUs that I received in 2019.

In other words: it does not take into account stock appreciation.

I don't know whether or not that's generally true, but from where I sit, the numbers seem sound and are not inflated due to a rising stock market.

It's true, but for most people they consider the yearly (or monthly) bonus and liquid RSU vests as equivalent to salary, so it's mostly apples to apples. RSU can go up or down, but you take the value at current market price as part of the offer.

Yeah it seems to be an incomplete comparison.

I know some companies like Facebook have crazy signing and relo bonuses ($50-100k+), however the base may be much less (Taxes are also different as I recall)

Also a couple of the companies listed (Airbnb and stripe) have yet to go public so those RSUs are not exactly liquid cash like with goog/FB stock

Most companies and employees do not see 4-year stock awards (whether options or RSUs) as "bonuses" but rather part of regular compensation. There are some cases where engineers get additional awards, or some stock-based compensation is tied to objectives by contract, but levels.fyi has a "bonus" field for that data.

I agree that levels.fyi is doing a poor job of comparing the value of RSUs. For example, Microsoft / LinkedIn stock grew 55% in 2019 and pays a dividend. If MSFT did that again this year, it might eclipse Aramco. It would be more useful if levels.fyi simply recorded the raw grant details (e.g. RSUs uniform 4yr vesting N shares) and used stock price data to facilitate comparison. That's especially key when looking back upon offers 3-4 years back to asses salary growth (and potentially find oddities like no-poaches).

Why should you exclude RSUs?

Risky or not, you'd be exceedingly dumb to not take RSUs into consideration when accepting a job offer somewhere. Chances are that they'll be a major part of your total compensation come tax filing time.

The data points are incredibly non-misleading. Most of the companies reported are public, and the compensation is already cold hard cash or publicly tradable RSUs (usually without even a 1-year cliff).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com