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Comment by tempire | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They are most certainly real.

Absolutely real.

My friend got 260K out of school at Google. I got slightly less.

This is for 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.

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

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

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...

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

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)

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