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Comment by alex504 | Hacker News Reader

Engineers in the US are much more expensive but they have experience working in high scale environments that isn't widely available in the markets you are talking about. FAANG companies and well-funded startups aren't going to substitute someone else even if they can theoretically pay 5x less for someone 90% as good.

All these companies care about is being as competitive as possible. They have a pretty much unlimited supply of money, and one of the most primary things driving their business success is how good their engineers are.

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> Engineers in the US are much more expensive but they have experience working in high scale environments that isn't widely available in the markets you are talking about

Then why do the same engineers (pre and post-transfer) get paid such ridiculously different salaries between London and the valley?

Do you get special scaling powers when they stamp your visa at SF?

Are these engineers working at the same company?

Not OP, but at a former gig I was in a position to know the salaries of an engineering team spread out between North America and the UK. The UK engineers were doing the same work but paid salaries that would be considered insulting to most US engineers.

And frankly, the UK team was coding circles around much of the US engineers.

It was incredibly eye opening, and humbling.

Terrifying

Also disgusting.

Yes, for the FAANG at which I was gainfully employed for a number of years.

Well I guess I have some egg on my face.

They must know the market in London isn't competitive so they just pay a competitive rate in the market. It seems like salaries are generally going to go up everywhere for top talent but down in markets like Seattle and SV.

Another interesting aspect of London is that it is in a TZ so far away that there isnt any overlap with PST in the states, so they kind of know you are screwed if you are working there.

> Another interesting aspect of London is that it is in a TZ so far away that there isnt any overlap with PST in the states, so they kind of know you are screwed if you are working there.

Another interesting fact about London is that it has some of the highest rents in Europe.

And as someone in said timezone who works with the west coast, it's OK as long as you travel once a quarter, and both you and your west coast colleagues take meetings from home because of timezones.

> They must know the market in London isn't competitive so they just pay a competitive rate in the market

It's actually worse than this, finance companies (hedge funds et al) actually pay really really well (like US FAANG well, with better bonuses), but all of the FAANGs have decided not to benchmark against finance, for bullshit reasons.

Essentially then, the only people who work for FAANG in London work for a year, then transfer to the US on an L1/L2 to actually get paid well.

There are plenty of big companies operating at scale in those markets. You just haven't heard of them. From everything I've heard about FAANG interviews, it's more of an exercise in theory rather than hands-on experience anyway.

Yes there are tons of companies working at scale with "cheaper" engineers, in fact the vast majority of companies in my experience are doing this. But the types of companies in these specific markets where salaries are crazy need or think they need the absolute best to compete. They really don't care very much about the cost relative to other types of businesses.

For most of these companies engineering output is their entire product and they are sitting on mountains of money. A few good engineers can make a massive difference to their products and success while a few bad ones can sink the entire business.

FWIW FAANG aren't the only companies paying ridiculous salaries, they are a small subset of the SV / Seattle markets. I work for a company that pays salaries similar to FAANG. We don't interview like they do and if we did we would have a harder time hiring good people.

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