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Comment by rawtxapp | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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