Top Paying Companies by SWE Level | Hacker News Reader

Top Paying Companies by SWE Level

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81 pointszuhayeer109 comments

In Europe, a senior developer with 15 years experience earns much less than a junior in united states.

This is a subset of (mostly) Silicon Valley companies. In most of the US, $250-$300K is still considered a very solid mid- to late-career salary in tech and related roles.

Remarkably out of touch.

In most of the US (i.e. outside of a few large cities), $250-$300K is executive compensation, not individual contributor compensation, regardless of experience level, genius, or negotiating ability.

I'm not really disagreeing. Yes, in many/most places in the US, the top fresh grad comps reported in that survey are at levels many tech people would be happy to retire at.

We might not be connecting in the way that we're expressing ourselves.

At $300k TC, most people in the United States could pay off their mortgage and retire after only 3-5 years of working. Is this what you mean?

I took the statement to mean that "in many/most places in the US", software engineers are earning a $300k TC by the time they reach retirement age. I still think is not correct in many/most places. It is correct only in a very small minority of places.

>At $300k TC, most people in the United States could pay off their mortgage and retire after only 3-5 years of working.

I was saying it was a very good (I used the term solid) salary by retirement age which I think is true. Maybe it's even exceptionally good.

I think your quoted statement is only kinda sorta true though. Assume they have $1m in the bank with no debt at age 30 now that they've retired after about 5 years and bought a $200K or so house with cash. They now have a low-risk income stream of about $50K (less than the US median income) which has to cover property taxes, maintenance, health insurance, etc. Or maybe they want nothing more than to be a ski bum or a river guide etc. for the next X decades. It's certainly possible although I doubt it's what most people able to earn that kind of money aspire to.

(If you expand it to 10 years, I'd more generally agree. If retirement from corporate life is someone's goal, that's eminently practical at that point without being at all spartan.)

but gets so many benefits:

- healthcare

- 30 days pto

- maternity leave

- protected employment, i.e not at-will

etc.

You'll have all of those things at the companies listed in this PDF with the exclusion of protected employment. I'm fine with that.

You don't have all of this, first of all if you stop working you're screwed right? Like somehow you lost your job and you have something serious happening, good luck with hospital bill.

I've never seen someone starting at FANG with 5 weeks vacation right away. Lot of of European countries have 5/7weeks when they start working.

Correct, you won't have 5 weeks of vacation right away at all of those companies. You will have 5 weeks of vacation quickly.

You're not screwed if you stop working. You have both long term and short term disability. If you just decide that you'd like to live on a beach or under a bridge, and there isn't an actual problem, ie you choose to be lazy, then yeah, good luck with that.

Personally I don't want my tax dollars helping people who just decide to not work, but that's just me. The government mismanages enough things in the US as it is.

I am personally willing to let a small percentage of people decide not to work (e.g. lazy) if it means a safety net for a much larger group of people who have a legitimate need for that safety net.

What percentage? Who gets to decide who gets to opt out of working for a living? Who grants the final approval?!

It'd be fraud/abuse, and I'd expect it to be prosecuted, so nobody "gets" to opt out, but refusing to help many people because a handful could potentially abuse the system is not something I'm willing to do.

I should have explained a bit more, but if you have a serious health issue and you can't work anymore for sometime how does it works with hospital bill? If you stop working for 6month for example are you still covered?

With the exception of one small company I worked for, every employer has offered both short-term and long-term disability at no cost to employees. You're still covered by the employer's health insurance during that period.

> first of all if you stop working you're screwed right? Like somehow you lost your job and you have something serious happening, good luck with hospital bill.

I was unemployed for a bit due to family issues. I switched to COBRA which let me stay on employers insurance. It was expensive but I am sure its not a big deal for software engineers mentioned in the document. Then I got onto to obamacare via job loss exception. So yea I never screwed so to speak.

It's not really that different for most of these companies. They'll typically have good health insurance either fully-paid or heavily subsidized, probably at least 15 days PTO, often paternal leave, etc.

If you're pulling a gigantic salary at one of these companies, you almost certainly have healthcare, generous PTO, and generous maternity offerings as part of the package too.

The engineers working at these companies in the slides get all of that too, except the not at-will employment. But even if they didn't, the entry-level engineer could pay for all of that and still have way more money left than most any SWE in Europe, regardless of seniority. And that money probably gets them better health care than most Europeans, too.

This is true, but these benefits are not necessarily exactly as good as they look on paper.

For example, I work in London, and I routinely have to resort to private medical healthcare because wait times at my borough NHS clinic can be 2-3 weeks, even before COVID-19 hit. In one serious incident, I was not able to be seen at either a local GP or a local 'walk-in' emergency room due to standard winter capacity issues, and so had to shell out 250 quid to see a private GP, who didn't even have the equipment to suture me up, so my friend, who works as an NHS GP, did it for me in his apartment. Dental coverage is extremely limited here too, although it does cover basic cleaning/checkup services (so it's better than Canada in that regard).

As for days PTO - sure, but it's going to depend again on the company. You may or may not be able to actually take that PTO at fear of reprisal (indirectly or directly). At least on paper they can't stop you from doing it I guess. Fair point on the maternity as far as I can tell.

At the end of the day, would I trade the above benefits (with the exception of maternity leave) for 200k USD per year? Uh - yeah, for sure.

Several states, including California, Rhode Island and I think now New Jersey have paid maternity/paternity leave.

In Germany it is common to wait many months for certain medical services. For example I have to wait 4 months for a x-ray examination... Many services are not available at all if you have government insurance.

Just to preface this: I’m actually not disagreeing with you.

The issue with the above is that the top software engineers earn less than they could otherwise. Thus, the very top engineers will always be looking to move to the United States. This kind of decapitates the European tech ecosystem. It’s actually one of my theories for why we see the very different tech ecosystems in America and the EU.

And that's why a huge amount of my friends in San Francisco are foreigners. Europe needs to do something if it wants to stop the brain drain.

Is the quality of life in SF much better or do you just get a bigger number in your bank account?

QoL in SF is about the same to worse than most major cities, with the added benefit of astronomically high rents.

Sure, but on the other hand I used to travel abroad four or five times a year, inside the US every month or so and my checking account wouldn't even feel the strain.

I don't think that many people stay in San Francisco for the quality of life.

Traveling somewhere and paying San Francisco's immense rent are pretty different.

Would you rather live in a cheap city but get a salary that ultimately leaves you with less disposable income?

The bigger number is the important part. I could spend 3 years unemployed in my Canadian city then work for a year in SF and my savings account would be bigger than if I spent 4 years working locally. That's a huge QoL difference. I'm not sure if Europeans plan on staying in SF for long

Bingo.

It's not just about getting a bigger number in your bank account, but about your career. Silicon Valley offers amazing opportunities for anyone ambitious enough and it's literally the place where most of the innovation in tech is happening. If you want to build an amazing resume, you can do it. If you want to save money for a few years while working for FAANG and then start your own startup, you can do it. If you want to spend every single bit of disposable income and live like a king, you can do it.

Money, it turns out, makes things way easier.

Not US, but San Fransisco/Silicon Valley, at least for the top-10 lists.

The numbers also strike me as quite strange - the median comp in SF/SV is barely higher than the entry-level comp listed a few pages prior. Employment in that area must be very bottom-heavy for that to be true?

Medians seem to be in their self reported dataset, which surely isn’t a representative sample.

I think it lists the Top 10 companies, and then latter on lists the median salary across all the companies they have data for.

Ah, that makes more sense. Different data sets for each list.

Employment in software engineering is very bottom-heavy everywhere.

The number of software engineers doubles every five years. That means half of all software engineers have less than five years of experience. (And 75% have less than ten years, and 87.5% have less than 15 years, and so on.)

The report seems to have cash salary only.

Most of these companies have a significant payout in stocks every year, and the ratio of stock to cash gets bigger the higher you go in the company.

I can confirm for the amazon amount(under level IV) is not cash only. That's total comp.

Don't worry, there are plenty of us in the US that see these "junior" salaries as an impossible dream. In much of the country, even a senior engineer is doing well to have made it to six figures. 150k would be a end-of-career peak goal.

You can see based on BLS data that 107k is the median salary for all software developers. [1] The figures quoted here are not realistic for most of the country.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/...

You’re comparing total comp (Levels.fyi) to base salary (BLS data).

Fair enough, but most of us are not getting RSUs. Base salary is total comp, excepting things like 401(k) and HSA contributions.

Hmm, is this true? Do you have data for that? Big swathe of people who don’t get liquid RSUs: contractors, startup employees. Big swathe of people who do: all FTEs of large public companies (banks, tech, health care, etc).

I suppose I’ve convinced myself that it might be true that “most” applies, but it’s a close call in my very back of the envelope analysis. :)

>all FTEs of large public companies (banks, tech, health care, etc)

I very much doubt that is true.

I have been an FTE in multiple F500 companies and been in a position to have insight into the compensation of many others and none of them received stock compensation except into their 401(k).

My current employer (large public company) has a "deal" where I can buy company stock for something like a 5% discount.

I'm a Senior Engineer in NY and making about mid-level San Francisco pay.

I'm happy though and I wouldn't live out there for anything.

I'm from the middle of nowhere, USA. I recently left a local job that paid significantly more than "normal" software jobs locally (though fairly modest by by SF/NYC/Seattle/Chicago/etc standards), and I was quite lucky to have been able to work there. Truly an outlier even among outliers.

I left for family reasons (we were moving cities) and basically just assumed I would need to work remote to find comparable comp. Still, I applied to a few local places that happened to be allowing "work from home".

The offers were just depressingly low. In talks with one local place, I put down my current base pay + current (expected) annual bonus as what I wanted for my base pay. The recruiter told me they'd be very unlikely to be able to come close to that, because the number I'd put down was the top end of the range that they paid people with twenty five years of experience. I ended up doing their interview process just to get practice but due to a clerical error on their side, despite the fact that the result of the interview process was a decision to hire, they weren't able to make me an offer because all the positions had filled up. So I'm still technically waiting on their promise that "as soon as a position opens up, you're the first person I'll be calling".

Anyway, I took an offer from a coastal company for 3-4x what I suspect they were going to be offering me.

The worst part is this company was lauded as one of the best, highest-paying, most-generous-benefits-having companies in my area.

So, I dunno. Clearly whatever they're doing works for them. But I've got a fairly dim view of my local job markets. I also suspect they'll be the kinds of places that just outsource development and/or die rather than raise dev pay if widespread-post-covid-remote-work raises salaries locally.

Would be interesting to hear your experience with interviewing with and working for a coastal company. I'm in a similar situation - from and in the middle of nowhere.

I am paid very well for my locality - indeed, I have more than doubled my starting salary out of college - but I still make less than six figures after ~8 years. My current job has some big benefits (light workload most of the time, little stress, a lot of flexibility, very strong job security, easily impressed management), but...well, if I could make 250k working remote, I'd strongly consider it.

My experience with interviewing with coastal companies for remote positions is they were adamant about basing my salary on what I currently make + x%; my impression is that by hiring remotely they thought they could get a deal. I ended up leveraging this into a counteroffer, so I still came out ahead, but I'm not really interested in risking my intangibles for just a few bucks.

Bear in mind that the term "Europe" is pretty much meaningless – for that matter, so is "United States".

A developer in London makes a different salary (and has a different environment entirely) than one in say Iași.

The implication is obvious that they are comparing to the richest EU cities. It's already a huge difference. To compare it to some city in Romania. That would be insane. What is that like, about 10x the salary?

Yes, I compare it with richest cities/countries. In poor European countries it's not uncommon to only get 1000 Euro NET salary per month.

Yes. Every time this is brought up there are lots of people that say its like comparing apples to oranges due to benefits Europeans have that Americans do not.

I know my friends who have worked for European owned and run companies for branches in the USA really enjoyed it.

> benefits Europeans have that Americans do not.

work for high pay for a short time (several years) and collect the financial benefits before moving back to europe for the societal benefits.

It's not quite that simple:

https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance-if-you-go-abroad

Even if it were that simple as many people know its very difficult to "get out" of a high paying job to make a move elsewhere. Ask any of the corporate lawyer or people who work at the Big 4 with the intention of going into non profits after a few years...

Keep in mind that this is total comp, not base salary. Ie, base, bonus, and stock. You’ll want to compare apples to apples, no company I’ve worked for pays _that_ much less in Europe, depending on your definition of Europe.

Which would be my other point, you need to pick which city in Europe you’re comparing to. Kiev will get you results that match your statement, but London will not. Specifically using the EU, Zurich will not match, but Bucharest might.

The difference is most definitely there. My total comp as a SWE5 at Facebook in London was closer to what this article calls "Entry Level" in the Bay Area.

Vital word: “was”. Do you know what SWE5’s in London are being offered today? I make offers and I can tell you that it’s a discount to be in London, but it’s not _that_ big of a discount.

This was 2017. I doubt the market has moved that much in 3 years?

In general, London has been a 40-50% discount to SF.

There was a survey from 2017 about developer salaries in Europe that can be helpful here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15088840

Btw, it still accepts new answers. Maybe worth a repost.

Edit: reposted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25904318

> Senior Engineer: Typically 5+ years of experience. Typically less than 30% of employees in a company are at this level.

Where do old programmers go? Are these numbers related to companies that are constantly growing? I expect to be working for another 20 years, so I don't understand how 70% could be at less than 5 years.

retired would be my guess if i see these huge salaries

Almost none of these companies existed 20 years ago.

How much will change in the next 20 years?

> don't understand how 70% could be at less than 5 years.

70% are below that level not 70% are below 5 years.

One doesn't automatically get into that level as soon as they reach 5 yrs of experience.

Honestly, while we can debate what “Senior” should mean, what it has come to mean in the higher paying parts of the industry is that you’ve gotten one promotion. Most companies you _will_ get promoted if you stay there 5 years, even places like Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. If you haven’t been, you have a serious performance problem and they probably wish they hadn’t hired you in the first place.

There are plenty of people in all kinds of companies who go year after year of very high performance, but who do not get promoted. Companies love these employees, because they get consistent high performance but don't have to pay them at the higher level. The ones who are good at interviewing leave after a while, which is how the industry gets the reputation for job hopping.

Keep in mind that these top paying companies are all rapidly growing. That's also why the median tenure at some of these places is unusually low, even when they have good employee retention.

Levels.fyi is probably at the mercy of who gives them data, and it’s easy to tell that they get much more data provided the more junior the role. One conclusion you could draw is that there are simply way fewer roles at that level, but another you could draw is that people become less likely to share their info as they gain seniority/compensation. Or it could be that culturally people born in the late 90’s share “private” information more readily than those born earlier.

I’m not sure what the truth is, since I do not have data on the distribution of levels for the whole industry, but I suspect there’s a combination of things going on, one of which _is_ that the industry is growing rapidly. However, I don’t believe it has grown so fast that you can say 70% of employees have less than 5 years tenure in the industry. This doesn’t pass the sniff test (just look around you right now).

It says 'seniors typically have 5+ years of experience'. It doesn't say 'people with 5+ years of experience are typically seniors', which is how I think you read it?

First off, it's ridiculous to me that our industry calls five years of experience "senior." In what other industry is a twenty-something with a handful of years of experience, barely out of college, a senior? I've been at this for only a decade and I bristle at being called senior. In my opinion it's pure ego-stroking.

Secondly, old programmers become managers and consultants. Programming is a young man's game, seemingly by design. We invented a hiring process that's roughly equivalent to fraternity hazing, that only younger folks are willy to out up with. We weed out the olds by only seeking out coders who are "passionate" (have no other real world responsibilities) and that are more easily cowed by "Agile" and "Scrum" to become line workers in a feature factory. But the older they get, the less willing they are to out up with the bullshit. I, for one, realized that I wanted to find solutions to tough problems instead of bang out features that no one but the project manager asked for. And as a programmer, you have surprisingly little say over how problems get solved, unless you go into consulting. That's probably where you and I will end up.

I believe, because our industry skews so young and inexperienced, that is why continually get caught in hype cycles. Some kid comes along and "invents" some new technology that's actually been around forever, they're just too young to remember. If there were more adults in the room where happens, maybe the kids would stop getting excited over recycled tech.

But now I'm veering into oldman-yells-at-cloud.jpg territory, so I should probably stop here.

Worth noting that this looks like total comp. Which is fine, but the implication of course is that a good percentage of the comp comes from stock, which is a bit easier to manage as a form of payment than actual dollars.

And stock in many of these companies has had a very nice run. Obviously RSUs are relevant as a component of total comp but, if stock appreciation went away tomorrow, a lot of these comp lists would go from astronomical to merely high.

The website asks you to report granted compensation, not including equity appreciation. Sure, it’s unlikely that is what people are always reporting, but the Facebook numbers track with some new hire offers.

I think the amounts are set at the time of award, rather than time of vesting, so Facebook says "I want to pay you $10 but in RSU" than you get than many RSU at the current price.

What I mean to say is that I don't think the actual stock performance affects these numbers

This is true.

If you can hire into a FAAMNG during a stock market crash, you're set for life.

It depends how people are reporting it. If I'm thinking in terms of my W2 number (which is what I would use if you asked me how much I made last year), that's affected by the price at vest, not at grant.

Also, if they are reporting the full equity amount on their offer letter, they may be forgetting to divide by the vesting period. I've met a number of otherwise smart folks think that since their salary is $120K and their full equity offer is $200K then their TC is $320K. There was an HN thread about this a couple of weeks ago. Levels.fyi guy said they try to account for this though in their surveys.

What difference does this make in practice? Are there limitation on what you can do with the shares you are given?

You get fired or have a mental breakdown and quit before your shares vest.

The shares are worth less in 4 years , etc.

Yep, vesting. If I tell you I'll give you employment where you get 20% of your annual salary this year, 120% next year, and 70% for the next few years (but ofc subject to market forces), that doesn't compare well at all to someone else's base salary, especially if you quit that first year, which many do.

Except Google’s RSUs vest every month. So, other than the whims of the market, it’s the same as salary.

I think it's more complicated for Google. If you get above a certain number of shares, they vest every month. If you get a medium number of shares, they vest quarterly. If you get a few, they vest yearly.

This would be a very good counterpoint if Google was the only company in the world. Since it isn't, I don't really understand the relevance.

Suppose you get a stock grant worth X dollars, vesting over Y years. At the time of the grant, you get nothing. A year later, you get X/Y dollars worth of stock. Another year passes, and you get another X/Y dollars worth of stock, and so on for Y years in total. If at any time you leave the company, any stock that hasn't vested disappears into the aether.

Sometimes, you'll hear this described as "golden handcuffs". You get more money, but it is money that disappears if you ever leave the company, providing an incentive to stay. This is, fundamentally, a wrong way to view the stock grants. Instead, they should be seen as a temporary raise of X/Y dollars per year, that expires after Y years. The money isn't yours until the stocks vest, and until that point is nothing more than a commitment to give you stock at a later point.

Thanks for sharing this. It's embarrassing to still be a Canadian. Feels awful to know half my coworkers make so much more than me just because they live a few hours further south.

A small but growing handful of my team hired last year are Canadian and waiting for COVID to abate before moving to the US. I myself moved to the US from Canada a decade ago. The brain drain is real.

If you're open to a move, good companies like the ones on this list will generally take care of healthcare to the extent that you won't need to worry about it much, but I still do miss the Canadian model where money generally didn't even enter into the equation. They'll usually take care of the immigration as well, and pay for the relocation. Highest income would be in the Bay Area, but consider if you want to own a home and the costs involved in that; you might find another area to be a better deal (I'm biased toward Pittsburgh). I personally found the Bay Area unworkable when I was looking before, mostly due to the fact that I had a family and wanted a home.

If you want to stay, your best bet would be to join a large multinational (Big N) and work at a Canadian office.

I’m working on moving to the states as soon as I have the opportunity. Do your Canadian coworkers try just as hard? I have a lot of trouble caring about my job here because I know a few weeks of interview prep will do more to my compensation than half a decade hard work.

FB E5 and E6 look a bit mixed up and E6 is skipped completely?

There's mistake in their slides. Staff Engineer should be L6 https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

Roblox in second place for entry level positions?! I guess that makes sense as a way for them to advertise that they need engineers. I'm also curious why Netflix doesn't show up on this list as I've always heard anecdotal data about them compensating engineers highly for hard work.

I believe NFLX doesn't hire the first two entry levels of engineers that other firms have.

There is only one level across Netflix: Senior Software Engineer.

Is there a similar website which gives accurate salaries for service managers / product managers/ verification managers?

Edit - also, I am surprised not to see Snapchat in the list until level 4. They definitely pay handsomely to entry level roles.

Maybe this: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Product-Manag...

Thanks for posting this however it’s specific only to Google. I was looking for an industry wide survey like the one OP poster.

BTW, I see PM’s are on an average paid lesser than engineers at Google at all levels. Kindly correct me if I am wrong.

Are the stock grants also based on location? Something I didn’t think about till now. Wonder how different the stock grants will be across locations. The document above doesn’t have that breakdown even though it seems obvious it is.

Breakdowns available on our main site: https://levels.fyi

I cannot compare pay across locations for a single company.

For all the people saying "oh it's because they're in SV" you guys do know that majority of companies on that list is allowing employees work anywhere in the US for 90% of their comp.

Note that this data is all self-reported and unverified. Probably doesn't include the average dev. Also median household income in SF is half the top entry level salaries listed, so keep that in mind when looking at the data and thinking about reliability. I suspect all of this data skews high, possibly significantly so.

If you're having trouble loading the PDF (seems like Google Drive is being super slow), you can also view the report online at https://levels.fyi/2020

Looks accurate

the "top US metros" list does not make sense to me. median pay in baltimore is the same as in boston at $155k? I have to wonder if this is a sampling issue or simply a mistake. the actual site doesn't have any data for baltimore.

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