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WillPostForFood

The average entry-level engineer or program manager will have a total compensation of $125,665.

That salary, with stability, good benefits, and stock options, seems pretty good for entry level.

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Not for FAANG. I was making ~$170k total comp out of college at a FAANG as a SWE, and that was >5 years ago.

Though I guess there's no M in FAANG.

FWIW Levels.fyi has Microsoft at $164k vs Google and Facebook at $188k total comp. But if you consider the California income tax, that would knock that total down about $15k. So its really a 164k vs 173k. But with a significantly lower cost of living. Microsoft looks like it comes out ahead in pay.

Now I am not sure on how hard it is to be promoted but it does look like you need several promotions at Microsoft to equal one promotion at Facebook or Google.

These are entry level salaries? I guess the cost of living in Ohio is dirt cheap but I would guess an entry level salary to be half of that now. Edit: I guess the cost of living is way less than half though.

definitely. FAANG mostly recruit from top-tier programs (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) and usually pay $150-200 for a starting salary for someone from one of those programs

Of all the people I know at FAANG companies and that I interacted with while at Google, only one of them has a degree from one of those schools (a MS from Stanford done while they were already at Google). The idea that they mostly recruit from top-tier programs is false. Certainly being at those programs is a huge help, but by no means even remotely close to a requirement.

I have been recruited by a few FAANG companies (recruited in the sense that a recruiter reached out for an interview) and have only gone to public schools, nothing impressive.

I think you definitely need to be at the absolute top of your field to even consider working at somewhere like Google though. That's probably bifurcated between people coming from top schools and independently talented people like I guess yourself.

You really don't need to be the absolute top. Grind leetcode for a month.

This probably feels great to say... but in reality 99.99% of developers will never be anywhere near the standard for Google even if they waste years grinding at Leetcode.

Disagree.

I also disagree. If you are able to pass leetcode style test you have a very good chance at getting into a FAANG. It seems to be all they really care about.

I used to think that Microsoft/Google/etc only hired amazing super-geniuses and I could never walk among their hallowed halls. It turns out, though, whiteboard coding is a skill you can develop just like most skills. The evil logic puzzles they used to ask at Microsoft are a skill you can improve as well, but hopefully you won't run into those.

There are lots of programmers globally, the top few percent is probably on the order of a couple of football stadiums worth of people. You are probably closer to that then you suspect.

Recruiters throw a very broad net. They reach out to everyone. At one point, I’ve gotten emails for software dev positions from Google, Microsoft and Facebook. I graduated from a no name school decades ago, my light LinkedIn profile showed a list of no name companies where I was just your average SaaS CRUD C# developer.

I wouldn’t get passed a phone screen without prep for a software dev position.

I only recently ended up at a FAANG as a technical consultant. Even then, the recruiter reached out to me about a software engineering position and I asked about openings in the cloud division.

Total comp right out of college at Amazon 8 years ago was just a hair over $100k in Seattle. The comparison of FAANG vs MS in Seattle is pretty close.

I make less than that ($150k for 2 years) at a FANG. Yikes. You're really not helping me maintain my will to live here.

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