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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

I dunno. My friend is making $250K working for Roblox. He’s 15yrs into his career - all game dev. Doesn’t seem too bad.

And some college athletes will eventually end up in a Tom Brady situation, that doesn’t mean I would recommend anyone bank on getting drafted as a career.

weird comparison since even a regular 3 year professional will make millions in their short career.

250K is not unusual money if you are regularly advancing on oppurtunities (and for the people around here, it wouldn't even be seen as impressive). Whether you want to wait a decade to move to that point or 5 years at FAANG is up to the individual. But the topic here seems to assert that you can't make good money at all in the industry, not how fast you make it.

That's great, but most FAANG eng make more than that by their 2nd or 3rd year. With 15 years of experience, they could be making at least 500k+.

edit: for the skeptical, this is what an L4 makes at Google[1], L4 is easily attainable within 3 years, pretty likely in 2 years, that's assuming you start at L3 (straight out of college or very little experience).

1: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

Citation? Even in the Bay Area the median is considered somewhere around $150k.

I've worked at one of the FAANG for 6+ years, have coworkers/friends at each one of them and people openly talk/compare their compensations.

edit: I'm not surprised about the median, big tech has roughly around ~200-300k engineers, probably slightly less of it in Bay Area which has a population of ~7.7M, so it probably doesn't affect statistics all that much.

It's simple; most bay area, like most everywhere, is not FAANG. Treating a non-unimodal distribution as if it were unimodal leads to all sorts of silliness.

I agree. Why compare game developers to FAANG at all? When deciding if it’s worth it, the main thing I want to know is how it stacks up to an average software job.

I don't entirely agree, averages are useful for decisions like deciding if I want to move to a new city, or deciding what type of job I want. But I want a great fit when I'm looking for a new job. If I have an average job that I don't have strong feelings for, I don't need to accept the first good offer. So I can wait for something I'm really excited about.

I looked into bay area jobs and FAANG was worth a minimum of $40k premium over working at other companies.

That's definitely off the mark for the Bay Area.

The median software developer nationally, with a pool of 1.47 million developers, is $110,000 as of 2020 according to the BLS. That median developer is going to be in places like Atlanta, Des Moines or Pittsburgh.

Here you go: https://www.levels.fyi/

Judging by levels.fyi it's exactly what I said, L4 at Google makes ~$157k a year. If you're talking about TC that has to be said; most people when they are talking about "making X amount" are talking about salary.

>If you're talking about TC that has to be said; most people when they are talking about "making X amount" are talking about salary.

Not in tech.

So what’s the recommended way of talking about how much you make when you are at a startup which only has stock options, where the stocks may eventually be worth hundreds of thousands but are currently worth 0?

If it's an early-stage startup, "base salary (+ bonus if applicable) + paper money". If it's a late-stage startup where you're getting RSUs and the company is likely to go public soon, people usually give a TC number that assumes equity pricing at FMV with the understanding that much of it is illiquid (I'd personally put a 30-40% discount on that kind of equity offered by late-stage startups to compensate for the illiquidity, uncertainty, and risk, but different people will have different numbers, and obviously the specific details of each situation are also important).

go ahead and count them if you work at robinhood or stripe

you could also just lie if it's that important to you

Well the question was more around what to count them as since there’s a wide range. In my experience people typically just mention salary and count stock options as 0 but everyone in this thread seems to disagree.

The answer is that it differs between public and private companies. It's exceedingly difficult to value the equity in a startup that may not IPO for years. Its exceedingly easy to value RSUs that vest each month and then are immediately sold for cash.

Total comp is what matters, and that's what people talk about. Bonus and RSUs are just cash.

L4 SE makes $266K: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

And L4 is one rung above entry level, 1-2 years at Google, right out of college.

Most FAANG eng in their 2nd or 3rd year are not FAANG anymore by their 15th year.

I've had plenty of coworkers who've been at Google or Apple for longer than 15 years, but what I've seen is people will usually jump after 4 years for even more comp or go the startup route. So those FAANG salaries are like the lower bound for most. Of course, some people will just save/invest and retire after 6-10 years, that's fine too.

Interesting hypothesis. Where do you think they go?

I’d say it might seem this way because of the hyper growth. Most people at FAANG haven’t been there long, because they haven’t been big that long.

In my network:

- early retirement

- founding their own companies

- landlording

- teaching for fun/enjoyment/fulfillment, not because they need money

Some have done all 4 of these.

I've got friends at Roblox. 250k sounds really low for a senior engineer that started pre-IPO.

Roblox is a very different kind of game company though. I've noticed the more service oriented game companies have better wages and work life balance. The more old school, content heavy ones have lowe pay and longer hours.

Ultimately it's working on game tech and companies like Roblox also hire for other roles that don't have exact equivalent in web or mobile development (art and game design roles mostly). Limiting your definition of "game development" to content heavy games with low pay and longer hours, especially when the industry is moving away from that type of game with a few exceptions, doesn't make sense.

15 years in software could get you a lot more outside game dev

Most dev in the US don't make 250k after 15years.

Yes, but I think of Roblox like a FAANG in terms of success and money. If you moved to a FAANG with that experience you would likely make a good chunk more

Most devs in the US don’t care about maximizing their career.

Pay isn’t even the main reason I’d avoid gaming, it’s the tendency of game companies to grossly abuse their workers via crunch time and sudden studio closures that worries me. The same dynamics that suppress game dev salaries also lead companies to treating their workers as replaceable, which is a pretty bad situation to end up in.

Friends at blizzard are paid well too, but a lot of them didn't start out in games - they started in devops. Lots of need for that skillset for big MMOs.

Roblox is an exception. I am in a similar situation, at twitch, where I work, but these companies are the exception and not the rule, for game dev stuff.

Epic games probably pays highly, as well as riot, and value. But I can count on maybe 1 hand, the number of actual good "video game" companies that I would want to work for.

So is he making games, or making a game platform? There's a big difference.

This is a good point. He works on the platform.

Good for him. But that's an exception.

How much does the average roblox dev make?

You can see for yourself here: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Roblox/salaries/Software-Engi...

IC1 Software Engineer (Entry Level) $221k

IC2 $249k

IC3 Senior Software Engineer $285k

IC5 Principal Software Engineer $422k

I love levels but the self-selecting group who reports their comp there cannot be used to reliably estimate the average, since they are not a random sample. I would guess propensity to report is correlated with higher TC.

I'm not sure how Levels.fyi work but those are great despite being paid in part with stock grants and bonuses.

However, Roblox itself is an exception. I'd guess the average game developer income to be much lower.

I was shocked at the pay at Roblox. I was on levels.fyi the other day and came across a list of companies with the highest pay for new grads and it was in the top five I believe.

It's a recent IPO, and a social gaming platform company rather than a game studio.

Roblox's competition is TikTok and Snap rather than traditional game companies.

This is because of recent IPO inflating TC

Their cash compensation is more like Netflix than Google.

It was near the top / at the top even a year ago.

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