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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side - I tell recruiters immediately they have to AT LEAST match my current comp. Every single one of them so far has said they can't even get close.

If you work at FAANG - your RSUs (most likely) have doubled in about a year. You could easily already be getting paid more than the max offer for the level above where you're currently at.

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I've actually seen the opposite. I'm at a FAANG, but based in Toronto. For the first time, recruiters are saying to me that yeah, they can do better than that total comp. Often much better.

I like my boss and team, but if someone offers me enough money and a fully remote job, well, it's going to be hard to say no.

FAANG outside of USA/SV is basically any other tech company, this is not surprising.

My understanding is that FAANG pays very well in India and Japan and Canada. Is this not true?

They pay top-end for the local market. However, if a competitor comes in paying Bay Area salaries for remote work, that can be a lot higher than local wages.

After extensive research, I've found that almost no companies are paying Bay Area salaries for remote work outside the US.

Honestly, no in the tech field at all, I would be surprised anywhere is paying Bay Area salaries in US besides maybe NYC or some other high COL area.

> After extensive research, I've found that almost no companies are paying Bay Area salaries for remote work outside the US.

That doesn't seem surprising -- why would they?

My anecdote is the impact that GitLab's hiring in New Zealand is having on applicant's salary expectations.

https://nz.linkedin.com/jobs/gitlab-jobs?position=1&pageNum=...

The thing, specifically with Canada, is that they don't have a big home grown VC landscape and a few home grown firms. This, coupled with their out of control immigration quotas, creates a market where there's an oversupply.

Now, that creates two markets, those who can't move to the US (won't pass the higher bar for US immigration) and those who won't. I've seen SV comp for the latter. But we're talking O-1 tier engineers.

Salaries in Japan are 65-70% of SF Bay Area (for FAANG, local is much worse)

London, U.K. is about the same as Japan. I don’t have experience with India, and my knowledge of Canada is too far out of date to be useful.

All those salaries are very good for the local market, but are also much lower than SF.

After travelling in Japan, I was really surprised by how cheap apartments are in Tokyo. For reference, this was 3 years ago near the big main Sumo arena/dojo, at around $800 USD/month, and fast food was around $4 USD/meal.

I don't know anything about the income tax rates, but 65-70% pay seems like you'd take home more than an SFer being paid SF rates.

If you’re ok with a tiny apartment, yes. If you want some space or have a family it’s not as cheap, but it is definitely less than 65% of Bay Area rent.

In India, at a FAANG, it’s usually 40-50% of Bay Area salaries.

We should bear in mind that salaries are only a part of total compensation in U.S. mothership locations.

Actually I meant TC is 40-50% of Bay Area TC. Thanks for pointing out TC vs salary. I can’t edit my original comment.

> my knowledge of Canada is too far out of date to be useful

All I can say, is in personal anecdotal experience, I make about the same money (with better hours!) in my current factory job than I would have if I finished my degree and went into software, and with none of the stress or crunch time or deadline associated. For example, looking at Glassdoor they have Google's Toronto office reporting starting salaries of ~$90-100k - while my base pay is only ~$62k ($29.50/hr) we get double-time overtime after 40 hours, I can (and have) clear(ed) well over $130k/yr with minimal effort.

They're offering decent salaries compared to other tech jobs in the area, but it's average-at-best if you start comparing unskilled labourer salaries in as a comparison.

Glassdoor is pretty bad for salaries at FAANG. That might be the average base for someone in Toronto. But they're getting a bonus of 15%, plus RSUs usually of about ~50%+ of base - but in the last year these RSUs have doubled, so ~100%+ of base.

For years in the Toronto tech scene, Amazon paid top dollar. Not SV prices, but better than anyone else in Toronto. One or two other companies might compete, but they didn't many openings.

Now you've got Shopify, Instacart, Uber, Snap, Wish, and others, all of them strongly competing on total comp, all growing rapidly.

Always remember: your manager is right now looking for a new job too.

This is a reality. I stay where I am for various reasons but a strong one is working with strong people that I enjoy working with.I've already seen a few walk away and it wouldn't take many more before I felt like it was a different place.

A day later, but I wanted to tell you: this is a really good point, and stuck with me since I read it.

I wish this was the case in London. I'm at a FAANG and have recently done a few interview loops with non-FAANG companies based in London (as well as a few that are based in SF but hire remote in London) and all were offering <40% of my current TC. When I told them my current TC they offered 50% of my current TC.

Starting to wonder if there is simply no chance of getting even close to the FAANG TC and whether I'm stuck for the 4 years at my current job.

Tech compensation is weird in London.

Local/non-FAANG companies pay around $50-130k USD equiv total comp (£35-100k) for junior -> senior software engineer

FAANG pay $150k at least for junior positions. If you're a senior engineer in London you can get a 50% pay bump for becoming a junior at a FAANG company. (I personally went from senior non-fang to mid-level fang for roughly triple my total comp)

Even leaving aside golden handcuffs the number of companies paying top of market seems relatively small. That’s especially true once you get past entry level positions.

I feel the opposite. A decade ago, it was pretty much Google, Facebook, and some elite trading firms that could pay a ton. Now so many startups have grown up, there’s a huge list of them on levels.FYI that will pay 400k+ for senior and 600k+ for staff. I recently have interviewed for a ton and got rejected a bunch, but I joked with my spouse that there’s so many that by the time you’re done interviewing at all of them you’ve “cooled off” at the original one and can re-interview, so there’s an “infinite loop” of 500k opportunities for experienced SWEs. Despite 90% interview fail, I just accepted a 500k all-liquid offer- despite me not even being at staff level at the company. Hard to say that’s not top of market, and it’s not at a FAANG either.

FAANG is also a horrible acronym for the top paying companies since two of those companies don’t even pay that well. Companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Lyft, LinkedIn and many others will outpay FAANG companies and their equity is fully liquid.

Omg I need to up my reqs in my interviews.

Yes. Ask for 620 though, then they come back at 575 and you just minted half of a 150k salary for being shrewd hehe

Bay area?

Usually refers to San Francisco, California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area

I work at FAANG (not Amazon) and have worked for similar companies. I was rejected by multiple top tier hedge funds after 1-2 tech rounds, after getting a mid tier hedge fund a few years ago. I interviewed with multiple then pre-IPO companies that have since IPO'd. They all asked Leetcode Hard problems on the phone screen even. My original FAANG + hedge fund interviews from a few years ago were not even quite as difficult, just some dynamic programming questions and tricky recursion, mostly Leetcode medium with some hards thrown in occasionally.

I also got an offer from a crypto exchange which is a household name, but they claimed they switched to non-negotiable offers and wouldn't even match my current TC. I had to walk.

Now wondering if this is just some game that companies are playing to either make themselves seem more selective or show "growth" through hiring / headcount to make investors happy. The interviewers also seem less enthusiastic about selling their companies to me, and more like they already made up their minds that they do not like me. One kept asking me more and more questions to cause us to run out of time so that I wouldn't be able to code.

The questions I'm being thrown at all are ridiculous in difficulty now, and the interviews feel like they are designed for me to fail. Who can code a segment tree in 20 minutes? I ended up completing this one, and it wasn't even the hardest question I was asked. I even had a recruiter ask me to prepare for their company's interview by doing TopCoder Div 1 500 problems. That's absurd (IOI difficulty level). There are people in Eastern European countries who do nothing but train for these competitive programming problems with coaches and all since secondary school.

I suppose I will just remain in my relatively cushy FAANG job. Despite having very little time to prepare, being employed while interviewing can be a good thing, after all.

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