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Comment by posharma | Hacker News Reader

This is so misleading. In silicon valley total compensation is touching 400k+/year on an average for experienced professionals. They should've at least consulted something like levels.fyi before publishing and looking dumb.

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Bay area comp is massively bimodal. FAANG tier folks are certainly making that much, but they are a tiny fraction of the market. Most senior devs at smaller companies and startups are making under $200k.

Companies in the tier of Stripe, Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Robinhood, etc. pay that much at senior levels. Often better than FAANG.

AFAIK, the difference between the two tiers comes down to public companies that pay equity with real stock vs those who are not public and cannot offer comp in the form of liquid equity.

Several of those companies are not public. They are indeed offering paper money, but if you trust valuations during fundraising rounds (and given how late stage Stripe, Robinhood are) it's a pretty safe bet.

Aren't more volatile valuations also better for the value seeking employees? Let's say in 1 year there's a 50% chance of the valuation going up 3x, and a 50% chance of it going down to 0.

You rest and vest if it goes up, or find another company if it fails. The ante would be 1 year's RSU and job searching for a payoff of 3 years worth of RSUs.

Yes, from people I know, the asymmetric risk is what draws them to working for startups. Go to one, see if it 10xs quickly, otherwise go to another one.

There is also a particular group of people who seek out pre-ipo (meaning a company that is expected to IPO soon) companies, or more generally those that are about to fundraise again. Generally equity offers are given based on valuations at the last fundraising round, so playing this game properly can instantly turn $100k in paper money into $400k. Of course, doing this only makes sense if you expect the new valuation to have some kind of staying power, otherwise you won't realize those gains.

well, there's a spectrum there. There are the late stage unicorns offering paper money that is close to becoming real money, there are the pie-in-the-sky startups whose paper money may or may not be worth a damn and there are the companies that have no equity comp structure at all for whatever reason.

You're confining your thinking to well-known companies you can name. For every company you can name, there are 20 you've never heard of and they sure as hell aren't paying average developers $200k.

I am refuting the blatantly false claim that only FAANG compensate like this.

I agree that some employers lowball like crazy, and that some engineers don’t know better, have reasons to live in low-productivity regions that are worth six-figure opportunity costs to them (family, etc), or couldn’t pass the interviews. But it is worthwhile to remind people that this whole world is out there and they could pursue it if they wanted to.

The quote was "FAANG tier", which I think encompasses "the tech companies that pay outrageously above the norm for engineers".

People at these companies are super-elite tier. It doesn't even remotely represent the experience of most working developers.

Curious what SRE/TPM/security roles are making. I have turned down two different security job offers from FAANG companies because the comp was even or a net loss over my current role at midwest orgs each time, and that was before factoring in CoL.

The average is probably lower than most people think, while the 80th and 90th percentiles is probably much greater.

Remember they also include the H1B body shops. To get an idea of what these places are playing you can look at the open data:

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=Software+Engineer&cit...

Do you have a source that says the average experienced engineer in Silicon Valley makes $400k/year?

That number is too high. If you restrict to the FAANG companies, though, it is only a small overestimate. See https://www.levels.fyi/ and select Google. There an L5 represents an "experienced" engineer with at least 4-5 years of experience, and total comp is $350k. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are similar.

Yeah $400K is high L5. Not uncommon, but slightly above average. It's possible that if you average all engineers you'd get something close to $400K, but L3 and L4 salaries would bring that value down. In surveys L5 makes up the majority of the engineering workforce in these companies, and L3\L4 have a bigger representation than L6+, so it's unlikely that the average TC is $400K.

Probably also worth highlighting that L5 at google is a much wider range than other companies. For example, at Uber, there's two separate promotion tiers (5A and 5B, with the latter being far less common than the former) that more or less overlap w/ Google's L5 range, while at Microsoft, google's L5 range would overlap with a good portion of 3 separate tiers (senior SDE to principal SDE)[0]

[0] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Uber,Google,Microsoft&track=...

> If you restrict to the FAANG companies,

But then you are talking about a small minority of even SV salaries, and a tiny minority overall.

The real issue as noted elsewhere is that the distribution is at least bimodal, and many conversations get derailed by confusion around this fact.

Yea, whenever you read these insane compensations, people forget to point out that we're talking about a small outlier of senior engineers at a small outlier of companies, in a handful of cities in the USA. This bimodal distribution of a (relatively) few insane comps bring the average way above the median.

Yeah, my point is that's only true for FAANGs. Not the average engineer.

This is crazy, that is only senior managers with a lot of responsibility. Nobody is paying engineer roles that do mostly code contribution that much.

If you read it as base only, not TC it seems accurate.

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