- ownership of the product and process
- less red tape and politics
- good work life balance
- location other than Silicon Valley
- boss who pays attention to engineer needs and wants
Money is a huge factor but it isn't the only one!
9 years at a FAANG and I'd willingly trade plenty of my money and golden handcuffs for a workplace that was more productive, creative, with better communication, and so on.
But when I look I just find shops with distorted work life balance, pointless whiteboard coding interviews, egotistical pseudo-feudal lord bosses with an illusion of hierarchical dominance, and a bunch of 25 year olds insisting on the merits of the latest JS framework flavor of the month.
Want experienced engineering talent (well, maybe they don't)? Money is not the only factor. Smaller companies are shorter on cash, but there are plenty of other things at work that smaller companies can control for...
The rest of the traits you list I can usually figure out, but how can you get at that one from just a couple interviews at a company?
Also describes almost every job I had before coming to Google.
Maybe this can be true if you're going from like $250k to $270k from FAANG to FAANG.
But most of the time we're talking about something like $180k to $250k when getting poached to a FAANG. It would take a huge amount of perks or otherwise to make that gap worth it.
(Of course this isn't true for everyone. But it's true for most)
You may have restrictions on when you can sell depending on your position in the company and other rules.
But that mostly sums it up at a high level.
I agree, options would worthless. They only seem valuable for startups where you’re paying pennies against the potential of a $10/share IPO.
And they will make you rich. Someone who works for these companies at a non-junior level for more than 5-10 years and is reasonable about expenses can quite easily become a millionaire if they work in their offices in developed countries. 5 years for senior positions, 10 years for regular positions.
This is total comp. I don't know Apple specifically but I'm basing this off of a few of the FAANGs that I have experience with.
In the last couple years we're talking 2-3x from our BigCo's $150-250K. Getting such an increase people do feel like being hit by a bus - at least my friend looked that way for a few days after getting such 3x offer couple years ago from a FAANG style company :) Our managers don't even try to match - during the 2019 not FAANGs gave 2x, 2x and 1.5x (that one still got lucky as his RSUs value almost doubled because of acquisition right before his first year cliff) to the other 3 acquaintances, and beginning of this year a teammate got 2x from Apple after concurrents with another FAANG and couple non-FAANGs.
Most senior devs I know aren't breaking $130 in a flyover. To be clear, a lot aren't breaking $100,000.
[0]: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...
Senior devs don't get those numbers on average in the bay either. Facebook/Google are the top (NFLX too but they only hire senior engineers) and few other companies close behind like amazon, apple and some fintech. I'm saying you can get those numbers because I myself am making 5% below those numbers (245k for mid level) in Chicago for what levels.fyi is showing what FB is paying for their engineers.
As far as I am aware, the data powering these sites (and HN's comments) are voluntary and self-reported, and there is no correction for this self-selection bias. Few people making average or below average compensation really want to admit it or post about it in public, so you're only going to see evidence of above-average salaries, biasing the resulting average figures.
The base at senior typically varies between 160k to 220k where the majority of compensation comes from stock. Seniors at FB tend to make between $300k to $450k. This also includes generous perks like 401ks, health insurance, etc.
At Netflix it can even be astronomically higher.
Levels is a cool site, had no idea how high some salaries can be. Kinda motivates me to get on the leetcode grind.
This is the reason I have a really hard time with the "cost of living" arguments people make when talking about living in the bay area. $2.5k/mon rent is 30k. Even if I'm getting free housing elsewhere, it's generally not worth it.
I lucked into a great job with a good, generous boss that values technical expertise and domain knowledge who also built a growing, successful business with high margin, recurring revenue.
I'm getting close to $250k as the lead dev/CTO. I wouldn't take a FAANG job for $350k. Maybe 2x/$500k.
Though I'd be afraid I wasn't cut out for it, and frankly, I'm not going to put in the work to get an interview and 2x offer from a FAANG so it's a moot point.
I expect if I ever have to change jobs I'll be taking a pay cut.
Our mid-level devs are getting $120-150k. We'll hire a junior - as in their first dev job - at like $70k but they'll be hitting $100k in 2 years. Raises slow down some after that but 10%/year is common. No grind culture, flex schedule & location (we have some people who live out of state).
I can only offer the anecdote of myself, but I've floated the idea several times of taking a pay _cut_ to obtain more autonomy. No manager has ever taken me up on it.
Sure you might be able to sock away an extra $10k/yr but the valley is gonna eat most of your raise and leave you miserable if you don't drink the kool-aid.
I work at FAMANG, and I feel ownership over my product and process. I set priorities for it, I set how work will get done on it, my team collectively determines what kind of processes we follow, and my manager just sanity checks that things are on-track.
> - less red tape and politics
Red tape, sure, politics, there's no guarantee of less politics in a smaller company. If anything, when politics happens, you don't even have the chance to keep your head down and avoid it.
> - good work life balance
There are hundreds of thousands of FAMANG engineers who have good work-life balance. There are many who don't, but there's an pretty big upside to working at a firm/on a project, where you aren't just an expensive cost center (non-eng-firms who generally don't give two damns about their engineers), and where you firm/project isn't default-dead (startup).
> location other than Silicon Valley
Large branch offices exist. Not in the mid-west, but the software jobs in the mid-west tend to be of the 'expensive cost center' variety.
> boss who pays attention to engineer needs and wants
Why would you think you can't find this at FAMANG?
The problem is that when I'm applying for a job, I have no idea if the hiring manager is being honest with me, or if they are just telling me what I want to hear. Any claims of 'no politics' and 'you own the process' should be taken with a lot of salt.
FAANGs have been embracing permanent work from home/anywhere over the past 5 months.