How much I made as a good Engineer at Facebook
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There's pros and cons to both approaches, both at individual and societal levels, but I rarely hear Europeans acknowledge why US companies can pay its developers so much more.
The takeaway for me is “complained”. If it’s the same market why the difference in “willingness to pay”?
Are they holding on to higher margins or have higher costs?
I would definitely agree with that. $200-300k is an outlier in the US, but $120k is an outlier in Europe, even for Staff-level engineers.
You won't be a millionaire in 5 years, but you will be just fine. How much do you really need?
Certainly is for me. The $170k/yr startup salary I get is certainly not enough to afford jack shit around here. Even an extra $50k/yr wouldn't do anything to alter my lifestyle. I couldn't get any kind of home around here with that and I'd still be very uncomfortable renting a home on that income - as it'd be more than a third of my take home pay (lose your job? You better have a very large emergency buffer - unemployment won't even pay a third of your monthly rent).
The engineers I know who stay around here are A) wealthy (bought home long before average price was past $1m or inherited one), B) rent, dual engineer income, and enjoy the renter lifestyle, C) Work at FAANG and/or have a spouse who does and make big fucking $$$$ D) Going to move away, no plans to stay permanently.
There are no young people (<35) moving here, working for no-name companies, and buying homes after saving for a down payment after a few years. Almost all young people I know who do such things have A) had a startup IPO or B) work at FAANG.
Certainly can't make it here on a single startup salary - not even in the faintest. I'm proof of that.
The reason people move here is because there's a chance (insert dumb and dumber reference) to strike rich. There's also way more jobs here than anywhere else in the country and that's why I moved here. I couldn't get a job anywhere else but I somehow managed to get one here four times in a row now.
Yes, they rent. But "buying homes after saving for a down payment after a few years" is not a reality in any major metro area at the moment, unless you're fine with small, old, and far out in the suburbs.
Isn't true for people I know in other major cities that are working professionals. Most peers I have in their 30's are buying homes in other major cities - if they are engineers or have a spouse who is an engineer.
I'm not talking about people who work retail. I'm talking specifically about engineers. Engineers in most major cities in the US can afford to buy a home if they have a spouse who works some kind of okay job. This just isn't true in the bay area.
* in their 30s - so, say 10 years of engineer-but-not-FAANG salary
* with a spouse who also has a white collar job & about 10 years of savings
they would not have $200k to put down 20% towards a $1M place? Not that putting down 20% is even common anymore, average is ~9%.
I guess I could believe it given how little housing there is in SF - but wow.
9% down isn't common for Bay Area btw. 30-45% of all homes are bought with cash (higher value the property - higher the all cash offer %). Do you think those numbers are like that in other parts of the country? Do you think you can get by with <10% down for a jumbo loan? The people I know who bought here have either paid all cash or had to put down even more than 20%.
We haven't even discussed what a $1m home gets you here. I wouldn't buy a $1m home here. You will not get a nice home or neighborhood. Minimum $1.5m to break into the decent neighborhoods. Want something resembling what the rest of the professional middle class has? At least $2m+.
If you’re rich, it’s probably better than all those other places. But, again, need to be rich. And it takes a lot to get there for a person who grew up in a lower socioeconomic class. You’ll spend most of your life trying to get there and stay rather than enjoying the riches. (At least, that’s my experience so far!)
They could say something like, "if you're willing to sacrifice your ethics to work for a company that spies on people, you can't be trusted with our product."
Not a lifetime ban, but perhaps a 5 year ban from working at Apple after having had a tenure at Facebook. Maybe they could waive the ban for candidates that publicly renounced Facebook's practices.
It'll never happen, but if it did I imagine the effects on Facebook hiring and retention would be chilling.
Sort of a reverse Brian Armstrong.
I'd also worry about the monopolistic behavior of the incumbents making it harder for challengers to succeed, creating less diversity in work or employment.
Principled stands won't happen. Profits matter, not morals or ethics. It's better for them to maximize the workforce pool and keep them fungible.
Japan has something similar for Yakuza members who are defined as "anti social forces" with a cooling off period of 7 years. FWIW I find the idea when applied to Facebook rather appealing.
Didn’t Steve Jobs already do this?
I wonder if that is part of the reason for the high compensation numbers. I do not know how widespread "counter Facebook ethics" are among Engineers. I could imagine them being higher that elsewhere as it is a somewhat high-compensation segment, even outside of these monstrous FB-numbers.
£100K is a minimum for most of the financial tech recruiters, for senior hires. At least I chat to quite a few of them and there doesn't seem to be anything under. Typical build-a-market-connector jobs.
Also there's a big contracting market where people will pay £600-£2000 a day, depending on what you do. They're semi-permanent jobs that superficially seem to be temporary, but something about how banks are organised makes them feel more permanent.
£500k as a salary is rare, most comp at that level is some sort of bonus.
I've heard of banks that hire people in at ordinary day rates, but then once they are familiar with the person will bump the rate to whatever.
It's tapered from 100 to 125k, but at no point is your employer paying 100% tax. From 100 to 125k, your marginal tax rate is ~60%, but drops after that point.
> £500k as a salary is rare, most comp at that level is some sort of bonus.
Even with bonuses, or RSU/some other form of shares, I think "rare" is understating it, and that's exactly the point. The discussion in this thread is that the top performers in FAANG are clearing _well_ above these values (multiples of these numbers).
> once they are familiar with the person will bump the rate to whatever.
Can you be a little more clear with the "whatever" number? 100k? 500k? 1m?
Actually you're right, I had misunderstood something. Looking at an online calculator, if you go from 100K to 125K gross, you take home 10K more.
Most of the >£100k permanent (not contract) jobs I see have "Architect" in the title which typically means not just coding.
As an additional note, the UK contracting market is on a precipice at the moment with an uncertain future.
> but it is extremely rare.
I'd expect so, and it seems this is rare in the US too, (this is literally the top of top performers at the top companies), but you'd expect to have _some_ indication of this information leakign out.
> Most of the >£100k permanent (not contract) jobs I see have "Architect" in the title which typically means not just coding.
Any idea on the 500k+ roles? (e.g. this post).
Architecture is something to reason about as a team and the accountability of architecturally significant decisions seems to rest with the team also.
The >$500k roles seem to just be the upper echelons of a software engineer role.
Wage stagnation for the last 15 or so years.
Meanwhile things get more expensive and we are in a recession.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-02/australia-september-q...
My first software engineering job in London in 2011 was arguably $1m/year, if I'd hung on to the equity until now!
£100k is easy to achieve in pretty much any faang - https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...
I know that at Facebook the ballpark salary for something approximating senior is approx £100k. I think a range between around £60k to £110k is in line with what i've seen on offer for senior (source: i've spent most of this year looking for work, and this is pretty much what i've seen)
It depends far more on the company than anything else. I've seen engineers earning over £120k that wouldn't have been able to get hired as senior at my last role, where the senior salary was in the £70-80k range.
FB/Google/Microsoft seem to be in the 80-100k ballpark for senior engineers.
25% sounds like a lot, but my cost of living dropped more than 25% moving out of the Bay Area, so I was more than happy.
Once you become a senior enough engineer at FAANG the overwhelming majority of your compensation is stock, and when that happens the base salary becomes pretty irrelevant. My base salary is maybe 1/5 of my total compensation at this point.
Sorry but that's simply not true. Based on my personal experience at FAANGs (including management roles), SV packages are much higher compared to London, Munich, Paris etc. Only exception is Zurich.
> but my cost of living dropped more than 25% moving out of the Bay Area,
The number I look at is total saving amount each year.
Even when told, most people still refuse to believe the compensation numbers achievable by even fairly average engineers.
Of course, there's other stuff - 30 (working) days of paid vacation, solid and cheap education, solid medical coverage (I consider $50 medical bill damn high) etc.
Unfortunately none of these are uniform across Europe. I only have 20 days of vacation, medical coverage is horrible, with 2-3 month waiting lists for even an MRI, and education is absolutely horrid.
I wouldn't even call them free, nor cheap: income taxes come out to about ~35%, and VAT is the highest in the world.
And to add on to that, achieving compensation above ~80k usd is basically impossible. With ~3 years of experience I barely get half of that at a Google L4 level equivalent.
How statistically common/likely is it for EU based engineers to move to the US on a L-1 visa, specifically at google?
Besides housing, healthcare, and maybe barbers, everything is either cheaper, or costs the same as it is in most of Europe.
One simply sees their paycheck cut by ~40% monthly and in case of crisis situation is always put at the end of the queue as a low priority applicant. That's ranging from irritating to infurating depending on the urgency of one's problems.
I guess that stops counting as Europe fairly soon, though.
Contractors always earn more than employees though don't they?
I worked at FAANGs in Silicon Valley for many years. I always got at least 20 vacation days, 10-12 holidays (like Christmas or July 4th), excellent insurance plans and could pay off my 40-45K education loan in a breeze. Total cost of private education is ~25K per child.
If you have a Software job at a FAANG in SV, it will be better than almost any other arrangement in Europe (exception: Zurich) even after taking into account vacation days, insurance premiums, California taxes, private schools cost and probability of gun violence.
You have a chance to complete for free a long queue of take home assignments which might end up with an employment for 2k EUR net monthly.
We’re engineers, not royalty. There’s nothing any one of us could do that would justify these wages, if it wasn’t for US immigration policies causing an artificial supply/demand issue.
This is business after all. Your value is a combination of what you bring to the company and how hard you are to replace. FB makes $$$, the $$$ didn't just appear out of thin air, it happened because of the people who work there. Giving engineers a share of all that money seems much more reasonable than giving zuckerberg a second private jet.
Executives, CEOs and shareholders are all highly compensated for their risk in both time and money and are not "royalty." I would argue that being royal implies birth as an unjustifiably paid skill.
That too is wrong. Paying wages based on supply/demand instead of based on the value an employee actually provides leads to exactly this kind of heavily distorted labor markets.
I admire Europe for achieving a good lower bound on the standard of living of a person in society. If it were my way, all labor laws would only apply to those making less than 100K a year.
The same laws which protect lower income earners by making hiring/firing expensive, make the cost of hiring/firing well paid employees astronomical. That puts a serious damper on the fluidity of labor markets.
What’s missing from this post is how common it is. E8 at Facebook is extremely rare. I can’t remember the exact percentage when I was there, but it’s around 1-2%.
E5 at FB is a terminal level, many engineers don’t get beyond that. I worked on a team of several hundred engineers and we only had one or two E7s, and nothing higher.
To put this in perspective: at FB, E8 is the individual contributor equivalent of engineering director.
The highest level (E8) with recorded information: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...
First of all, congrats to the author of the post! Even having worked there, seeing these numbers is a bit shocking :)
Some comments to help cool down EU emotions in this thread.
As the author points out, there are very few engineers at FB who have this sort of career path or income. The author says that from year 2-8, every single year he got an "additional grant" over the refresher stock. I asked a friend who is a former Eng.Man. at FB, he says that these "additional grants" are given to very few people every year by the executive team, so this makes the career path even more of an outlier. He says this level of income is unusual even for E7-E8s. This career path is probably the statistical quivalent of building a successful startup and cashing out.
Also, to end up with the these W2 numbers (W2 is a tax form in the US, by W2 the author means "total gross compensation"), you need to join early, to get the nice stock appreciation. Having said that, so far it's never been the wrong time to join: in 2016 when I joined (FB was a 10+ yo company) stock was at ~$100, now it's at ~$300 :)
How are these numbers in EU offices: in London (in 2016-17), number were significantly lower than in US, both base salary (and hence bonus, since it's a multiplier) and stock grants, and also opportunities (products) and visibility (eg. every 6 months I got my rating from an unknown quorum of people at the Menlo Park HQ, and I had mostly remote managers who didn't have much time for me). Expect to make -25-50% if you're in London vs Menlo Park for the same work/effort. Per my recollection, as an E5 back then, everything added up (base, bonus, stock), my net salary was around 7k GBP/mo. If I would have stuck around at FB, without levelups, just because of stock appreciation and refresher stocks I'd probably be making >10k GBP/mo now. SWEs make ~20% more than DEs.
Also, to put the author's promotion track into perspective, I found that it's very hard to get promoted at FB. When I was hired (35 yo, working as a SWE/Data/Manager since 23), I felt E5 is under-leveling me, so I worked very hard throughout my time there, working weekends, doing SWE projects, etc. While working there, I saw how strong the talent pool is at FB, and how steep the expectations are (wrt measurable and consistent impact of your work), so I knew that I'm definitely not at an E7 or above, but I did feel that I'm an "entry E6 level" (which is significantly more money than E5). But getting leveled up was out of the question, there were simply no opportunities, either work or visibility for DEs in London at that time. So I left after ~20 months. In retrospect, the right thing to do psychologically, assuming you stay for the long-run, is just ignore the levels, collect the refresher stocks, hope/wait for the stock to appreciate, make/look for/wait for impactful projects, but take the long view (it's a marathon, not a sprint).
Overall, my advice for EU people: if you get a chance to interview at a FAANG, take it, it's a good experience! If you get an offer, take it, you'll come out ahead wrt learning, money, and you'll have a big stamp of approval on your CV. If you don't like it, you can always leave and it'll be easy for you to get another job.
edit: spelling
This made me laugh... One year to become a good engineer and another to become a tech lead. Seriously? Facebook seems like an interesting place to be. Maybe I should also apply there.
But on a more serious note. There is no way, no matter how smart you are, to become a Tech Lead (at least not at a reputable company) within two years. It's just mentally not possible to learn all the things you need to learn in that time. And that is not even considering the fact that most of the time you don't have such ideal conditions that you would be exposed to the necessary scenarios and learning opportunities to pull that off even if it was humanly possible. Perhaps Facebook's levels are more based on "business achievements" than actual competence, which is fine I guess. If I make the company 10 million dollars, why should I not get a good chunk of it, regardless of how experienced I am? (I am serious)
But the fact that E8 is still about "team of 4" tells me a lot. Principal Engineers at Amazon are responsible for potentially hundreds of engineers and that level is said to be about E7. Doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
And the author shows that:
"E6->E7 and E7->E8 promotions were mainly about making something successful. My execution could have been perfect but if the product didn’t work, I would not have been promoted."
Yup, pure business success based promotions, which makes any level based comparison between Facebook and Amazon kinda moot.
I would be interested to know if this is just one data point, or if this is how Facebook generally operates.
We don't know what the OP did before. They possibly had significant industry experience from before, and just had to figure out how to apply that at Facebook.
His first year: "Because of the 3 launches and building a 4 people team, I was promoted to E5" -- looks like he should have been E5 when started (given that he was able to build team in the first year), and they quickly corrected for that.
I almost started laughing. There's no way a green youth can manage a software project without being a decent software dev first. Not happening.
It is possible to have a non-dev be one if they are very experienced and have the right soft skills, I knew one and he was good, but straight out of uni to manage a project, no way at all.
The one good project managers I've had that didn't have a dev background instead put in a lot of time to understand dev and was an at-home hobby programmer so he had a large clue.
I.e. at FB, you could be E7 by just technical work, but you had to be really good and be able to pick important problems and solve them (say that you are able to design and implement core systems for example). But it's easier to get above E5 by going TL way.
Then E5 or E6. But E6 would already mean you were essentially a team lead before you even started. Will they mis-hire you two levels apart? Maybe, rarely, if you really screwed up that interview?
But the OP also says he "became a good engineer" and he "became a team lead". And that is simply not possible. We do not talk about people who "were" a team lead and didn't know it. We are talking about people legitimately hired at E4.
PHD? Perhaps you can do it in two years, but a PHD very likely has a lot of the skills you need already, so it's not a fair basis to start from and they studied up to 6 years longer than a normal Master.
What bothers me more is the E6 -> E7 -> E8 promotion with the associated salary. That is just legitimately NOT possible at Amazon. This would mean you went from junior engineer to Senior Principal Engineer in 8 years. Well good luck with that. Maybe if you were the next Steve Wozniak, you could pull that off. I know A LOT of very smart people, people from M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon, etc. and they are challenged by just being a Senior Engineer at Amazon. Principal and Senior Principal just requires a skillset most people will never develop and according to the OP, that is not required by Facebook. In which case I consider it possible to get promoted to E8 within 8 years. This just means Facebook levels mean literally "I was successful", not "I am a competent leader". Which is fine and I will keep that in mind for the leveling discussion should I ever be on the lookout for a job there...
If you are smart (and I think the OP is very smart, don't get me wrong), and you have a good portion of luck to be in the right place at the right time, I imagine the OP's path to be possible if levels are handed out by "success". But this isn't meaningful to anyone else. The OP may have had a very different experience without a good portion of luck. Or at a different company, like Amazon.
To prove my point, I would encourage E8's at Facebook to try to apply as (Senior) Principal Engineer at Amazon and see how it goes.
Being used to European style job titles of the time (some decades ago), imagine my surprise when I met with some vice-presidents from a big US company who turned out to be among the dozens glorified product managers the company had.
Same with tech leads where the expectation is that you are either just tech focused (best tech resource, authority on that tech in the team, still under a team lead), or less likely both team/people and tech focused (so among the best techs, and proven leadership skills).
> Given the importance of the product [...] the team was back to 4 engineers and since I was the first one, I became the Tech Lead for the product. [...] I was not even in top 3 of the team of 10 based on engineering skills
Being the first assigned to a product because nobody else was around and having your product draw the more qualified techs to you doesn't make you a lead of either kind.
A job title is relevant if it's assigned to people who proved their worth with those particular skills needed for the position (evidently not the case here). So a tech lead in FB basically means you're the first and do a decent job. In many companies this wouldn't fly because being better than your lead but not having the spot because you were not there first is a recipe for high turnover, or at least people dashing between teams and products hoping to catch that spot. But FB and other SV tech giants are juicy enough targets that rely on product attractiveness (success with users) * rather than product quality that this wouldn't be a problem. Hence they can afford to have such tech leads.
* > E6->E7 and E7->E8 promotions were mainly about making something successful. My execution could have been perfect but if the product didn’t work, I would not have been promoted.
The problem with job titles is that they are brag-tags in most companies. At the very low and very high ends they're used instead of a monetary compensation because the company can't afford to raise the salaries for all those people (poor company or very high salaries already), or because money stops mattering after a point and a pat on the back is worth more to the employee.
The post feels like an ad for "you can do it too, apply now". There's enough info there to make the person uniquely identifiable which is perhaps not the best position for our anonymous engineer.
(I know I know it's a typo but it's hard to take any of this seriously when the whole page is about how he or she is such an excellent engineer)