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Comment by dimva | Hacker News Reader

$3.7 million sounds like a lot of money, but he could have earned more than that over 7 years if he just took a mid-level job at a FAMANG company.

EDIT: saw that the founder lives in Birmingham, Alabama. So yes, $3.7 million IS a lot of money.

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It averages out to $420k/yr. There's this sentiment on HN that "all you have to do" is get a job at a big tech company and you'll make a million dollars a year. It's idiotic, and not true. Yes, there are people who make $500k+ writing code in a cubicle for 40 hours a week. They are the vast, vast, vast minority compared to the people a) making $100-200k doing the same thing; b) making that $500k+ doing everything but writing code.

Unless you're doing infrastructure stuff at Netflix, ad work at FB or Google, or some high level stuff at Microsoft you're not making half a million a year, and you're not doing it at a mid-level anything, anywhere.

To make those figures doing "ad work" at FB or Google you probably have to come in as a VP or higher, which already comes towards the end of a very long career arc.

So even more pessimistic than my already prone-to-pessimism self thought!

Not necessarily. Bear in mind Facebook's compensation is heavily performance orientated, the bonuses can rack up. You can easily clear $500k at Facebook as a senior engineer, especially if you're getting high evaluations.

Fair enough, I'm talking about the non software engineering side of ad tech.

This is untrue. A Level 6 Engineer or Manager and higher makes $500k+

VPs likely make millions.

Not sure how accurate glassdoor is, but:

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Facebook-Vice-President-Sal...

Highly inaccurate. Even if you look at the data provided there, it’s 2 data points with an insane spread.

Check out levels.fyi for something more accurate. You’ll see L6 engineers make $500K+.

As a Belgian, I can't help but look at these numbers in disbelief. 100-200k/annum for churning out code 40 hours a week? Where do I sign up for this? I'm the best paid employee I know, work insane hours, and I'm not even in that bracket.

Addendum: it's very rare to make more than twice the average wage in Belgium as an employee. It's a different matter if you're self employed.

You need to move to Silicon Valley for that, but cost of living and lose of other benefits of living in Belgium might outweight the higher paid. You can try Switzerland if you want 6 digits salary in Europe.

Same here in the UK.

I know a couple of guys in the UK who are essentially just coding all day, in full time jobs, making £100k a year.

BUt it's very rare IMO, I'm not even on 50% of that.

London salaries:

L5 (senior engineer) Facebook [1] Google [2]

Facebook L6 (lead engineer) [3]

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

[2] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

[3] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

I am always deeply suspicious of the figures on that site. Right now, I'm looking at a L4 at Google, in London, listing $367K total comp at 0 years of experience.

Figures for my company are spot on, so I assume that they are correct for other ones as well. Usually base salary for a given level is set (you can see that majority of entries have very similar base salary if you remove outliers). Bonus is usually preset as % of base salary and therefore will be same/similar for most people. What could make difference are RSUs. If you are coming from another FAANG or startup and leaving behind lot of unvested stock, you might get that matched. Or if you have other offers they will prefer to increase RSUs rather than base salary. Every year you then get refresher RSUs which are quite significant (as big as your base salary but spread over 4 years).

It depends on the industry.

I'm graduating this year, and many of my friends (and myself) are going to work for FANG+ and finance companies and hitting that figure.

In London?

Yep.

Interesting. What area of tech are you all being hired to do?

Hedge funds, prop shops, etc. Few of us are joining Jump/Two Sigma/Citadel/D E Shaw. Comp tends to be 80k salary and 40-50k bonus.

In the UK you could make good money but the trick is to be a consultant and bill your employer through your Limited company.

At one place where I worked with a permanent contract, the consultants were billing at 800-1200 gbp per day depending on seniority. There was agency cut of course but overall they made real well. this is when working at the same office at the same hours right next to me, just like an employee.

I haven’t been in the UK since a while so I hear that now things changed so you can no longer pretend to run a company when being essentially an employee.

I haven’t been in the UK since a while so I hear that now things changed so you can no longer pretend to run a company when being essentially an employee.

That's actually been the case for about 20 years now. The relevant term is "IR35".

Hmm, I have been driving relatively fast lately. must be the relativistic speeds that 20 years is not the same for both of us!

Anyway, apparently the changes are postponed to April 2021 at stationery frame of reference: https://www.taylorhopkinson.com/ir35/

Those are merely administrative changes. The law and tax rules themselves will still be much the same as they have been since 2000 or so.

The reason this is big news anyway is that for the first time, large clients will themselves become responsible for determining whether an engagement falls under IR35 or not, and may also become liable to the government for the shortfall if the determination made is incorrect. Until that point, it's the freelancer/contractor operating through an intermediary who is on the hook (except for various government contracts, where the analogous change came in a while back).

In a surprise to no-one who has ever worked in the independent sector, this has made lots of big businesses that were formerly quite regular users of the flexible workforce much more sceptical, and many big names appear to have outright shut down this way of working for now.

At some point, presumably our government will realise that it has to pay for its spending spree during the coronavirus and that getting the economy back on its feet is going to need that flexible workforce, so with a bit of luck they'll come to their senses and finally do something about IR35, though I'm not holding my breath.

Google in Switzerland my friend.

Or generally contract work in Switzerland.

This year for a brief, beautiful moment(two months) I was making 750CHF daily before taxes.

Regular, experienced employees can count on 100k+ before taxes.

As a freelancer in Paris, I've been invoicing 625€ daily in 2018 and 2019, and 700€ in 2020, doing Big Data / Scala development with a sprinkle of devops, for the same customer. I think I could get 800-900€ if I find a customer that pays better and focus on the Big Data / GCP sectors. Just need to find a contract through word of mouth, and not through a recruiter that takes a 100-150€ margin...

You get less as a salaried employee in France though...

As a Belgian myself: self-employment is the key here. It's not that hard to pull in 100-200K annually in the current belgian tech space, I've done it consistently for the past 5 years, with lots of periods where I did not work full time.

Any advice on how to get there? I'm a contractor after having worked full time for a few years. Working with a very few long term clients, just me.

Is your daily rate very high, are you delegating work to other people, or what is it?

Did you have to specialize in some kind of technology or sector? Or is it simply because self-employment means paying less taxes?

In the US at least, as a contractor, you have to make a lot more in gross pay to come out equivalent to what you'd earn at a lower salary somewhere else. You have to cover:

* Health Insurance

* No paid time off: Want 4 weeks off a year? That's a 7.6% reduction in pay.

* You have to pay both the employee & employer side of payroll taxes

* You're not eligible for unemployment, so you need to save more money to cover that possibility

* No retirement fund so you don't get any matching funds and have to really be on top of what your long term needs are and take that off the top of your income.

As an example, I have a normal salary full-time job, but I also have a hobby business on the side. The money I make from that given the tax bracket I'm in, federal, state, payroll taxes, means my "take home" pay from is taxed around 43%. And that's without needing to take anything extra out of it for paid time off, health insurance, or retirement, all of which are well covered by my salaried position.

I'm working in Belgium as well and really wondering what space you were working now because 100K-200K net is way above developer wages here.

>Where do I sign up for this?

In California

>it's very rare to make more than twice the average wage in Belgium as an employee

Yep, software engineer compensation is crap in the EU, while the cost of living is almost as high as in Silicon Valley. Solution? Apply for H1B at a FAANG. Fuck the EU.

>Fuck the EU.

Yeah? Well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Become a contractor, you'll be in the 100 to 200k/year. (ok yes, that's before taxes)

Be aware that tech salaries in the US are roughly twice what you get in Europe (and most other parts of the world). So don't be too shocked.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/16/coding-salaries-in-201...

Not necessarily true. I was a mid level product engineer at a recently IPOd company (joined 2 years pre IPO). My base salary was $200k, and the stock and bonus more than doubled that.

There was a little bit of “pick the rocket ship” gamble - I had an Uber offer that probably would have been ended more like $250k/year, but it’s not unreasonable to get half a mill joining a late stage pre-IPO startup, and base salary is high enough you do it with little risk.

Hell, I know some mid-level post-IPO folks at Square making $700k due to it 10xing in share price.

Google L5 is $331K a year according to Levels.fyi Eleven years. L6 is half a mil a year. L3 is new grad. L5 is not superhuman. It’s not mid level but it’s not Staff Engineer either, “just” competent and known to be capable of working with minimal direction. FAANG really do pay very, very well.

I don't work in FAANG, but I know someone who works at a 1 tier lower big company. He is a mid level engineer. After 1 year at the company - Salary + Monthly vesting comes in at somewhere between 400-450K depending on how the stock performs, and he certainly has room to grow.

I was told FAANG-ers make even more than him, so yeah I tend to believe these numbers.

In my experience, most engineers, even those fresh out of college, land at above 300k within a few years at Google/FB. You do not need to be a rockstar, and you don't need to work more than 40 hours/week for that (though that can depend on team, I've never encountered one that regularly asks for more than that).

If you're talking finances, Google/Facebook will pay you more, with less risk, and better work life balance than pretty much all startups. There are entirely justifiable reasons to prefer a startup, but you should take a second look at your calculations if you think finances come out favorable on the startup side.

So true. I could have also hated my life for those 7 years. I make a terrible employee. :)

That assumes he took no salary or dividends for 7 years, which seems highly unlikely given their ARR.

Right. I've been paying myself $100-150k a year for most of that.

dimva also has his sums very wrong, 3.7 mill over 7 years is over 500k per year, you won't get that at any FAANG for a mid-level position.

GOOG has 3x'd in the past 7 years, FB has 10x'd, AMZN has 10x'd, etc. The initial stock grants would be worth a lot more, plus all the refreshers. My friends who are decent software engineers with a few years of experience are getting offers in the >$500k range right now.

And I'm assuming that he would have been promoted at some point. I am comparing what someone with his skills could have earned at a FAMANG, not what an average software developer would earn (they wouldn't even be able to get a job there tbqh).

> My friends who are decent software engineers with a few years of experience are getting offers in the >$500k range right now. ... not what an average software developer would earn...

Which is it? "Decent" developers being courted with $500k+ offers or "average" developers can't get jobs?

might not be a fair comparison if you consider taxes on salary+rsu vs. being taxed on capital gains.

That's no different than me buying GOOG/FB/AMZN stock at the time of the grant, it's nothing more than betting on the stock market.

I imagine he paid himself a salary during that time, and 3.7/7 would be >$500k/y which is >mid level at a FANG+ company.

This reminds me of a recently decried point the British government made encouraging people in the arts to consider technical jobs: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/12/ballet-danc...

Josh seems to be extremely entrepreneurial and independent (https://joshpigford.com/projects) and maybe being a part of a trillion dollar machine isn't worth the $ to him. He succeeded doing what he wanted to do and that's fantastic.

Admittedly, people's attitudes to work differ immensely and being able to live the entrepreneurial life is a privilege, but from my POV, you only live once, so $3.7m made from several years of doing things your own way would handily beat even $10m made from several years of employment (and neither are guaranteed).

$500k is staff/principal level compensation at FAANG companies. No way mid-level engineers make as much.

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