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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

That number is insane to me. What companies?

That kind of number is more or less mandatory to survive in SF. Something like 150k is considered as "low income / needs assistance" by Housing and Development.

Agreed. Though in the unlikely event you don’t happen to want/have kids, you can make bank. I lived 10 years in the Bay Area, renting, without spending more than $40k post tax per year (I diligently track all my expenses and make sure nothing can escape from my account balance flow, so that’s accurate) and saving the rest. Always lived within walking/biking distance to work, by renting modest one bedroom apartments.

With kids you’re mostly screwed and have to pay for top notch housing, schools, cars for transportation, …

500k$ after tax is what, 300k$? Subtract 40k$ living expenses which is very much on the low end, and you end up saving 260k$/year. Assuming 5.5% real world market returns, takes 12 years to get to 4M$.

Stripe recently offered $550k to a generalist backend developer who is a dear friend of mine, with about 7 years of experience.

Another close friend joined Google recently as a generalist UI developer for $490k. 6 years of experience.

Last FAANG offer I personally got was from Facebook a couple years ago, for an SRE role at $450k (believe it was top of E5 band).

My current comp at a hedge fund is > $1M/y, as a tech lead working in infra SWE. Would prefer not to reveal my current employer.

https://www.levels.fyi is pretty accurate in my experience, maybe slightly pessimistic because offers have really picked up over the past year or so (not counting equity appreciation, I’m talking about entering offer).

That's incredible! Curious what kind of skillset / velocity you would define as "average engineer"? I consider myself "average" but I've only been working for about two years and have no clue how I'd start to fetch salaries like that. However, on the opposite coast in NYC.

By average I mean average, so you’re probably already good enough!

After two years it’ll be a stretch to get a massive comp like that, but you can easily get close to $300k total comp now at a tech company, and maybe $400k at a hedge fund. My suggestion is to apply and interview at both and see what you get.

I am always very active in these threads because I want fellow SWEs to milk opportunities while they are there, one day the market might turn against us so it’s important to make bank in the meantime.

I definitely need to sharpen up my interview skills, regarding the leetcode aspect at least. But thanks for the encouragement!

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