Tech compensation in 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Tech compensation in 2021

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399 pointsmjgardner606 comments

20 years experience, two books under my belt, and lead architect (with a CTO title) on several good sized projects and most I have ever gotten in $175k... every time I see an article like this, I think I am doing something "very wrong"

I live about 40 miles outside of Boston.

Edit: Looking at levels.fyi for Boston that actually puts me above the median[1]. Why the heck is Boston so low compared to other markets?

Edit 2: Boston, MA and Denver, CO on Levels.fyi are both a median $159k but due to cost of living, that $159k in Denver is the same as $211k in Boston. I.e. adjusted for the cost of living, Denver pays 25% better.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Greater-Bo...

It seems like a lot of HN readers are continually playing the "maximize salary" game and use like articles like this one to figure out how well they're doing. If you want to play that game, then good luck, have fun. I understand the desire.

But it's not for everyone. Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year? Do you enjoy what you do and the people that you work with? If so, I don't think there should be any shame in staying where you are. Don't feel like you have to chase every last dollar.

I'm also not into trying to maximize every dollar and care a lot about other factors like WLB. But these days I'm feeling a lot of pressure due to inflation. Everything is going up and I feel like I need to switch jobs and increase salary just to keep up. Yesterday, I read a news article that Social Security benefits are increasing by 5.9% next year due to inflation. And that's from Social Security which historically was under-adjusting for inflation (usually like 1.5% per year). So if the stingy SS program is going 5.9%, what does that say about the actual inflation?

And I've never seen anything close to 5.9% for COL from any company. Most companies don't give that even for top performers. I don't think companies are prepared to give 5.9% COL, most companies are already so short sighted they would rather lose their entire engineering department instead of give raises to keep up with the market rate (even though they would be willing to pay that market rate when hiring a replacement). That kind of short sighted thinking simply does not allow a massive COL increase, no matter how much data is out there.

Inflation is not a universal metric, it's individual. Every person, every household has their own inflation rate depending on spending profile. I would not use government figures to make decisions about my financial affairs.

Everything else being the same, it's better to make 300k than 175k/year. And not everything is the same, normally in those better paid jobs you have better Engineers, a lot of challenging problems, many nice perks, etc. What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week. Also you don't get highly ethical companies, just average ones at that (and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k).

So as far as general advice goes, it makes sense to recommend trying to get those FAANG jobs if you can.

i had to read this twice to make sure i was reading it correctly:

  and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k

this really triggered me. you basically say its ok to do shady things as long as you give something to the poor. sounds so much like "indulgence" in Christian churches where you could pay off your sins. sad.

i'd say money is not a permission for you to do bad things, and it should not make you fell better about bad things you did (and continue to do) just by giving some of the money away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence

Oh sorry I didn't mean it at all like that; not condoning doing shady things at all! Slightly more ethical !== the other one doing shady/bad things. What I wanted to point out is that, people normally overestimate the impact they can have in a social cause and underestimate the impact some $ well situated can have.

To put an example with Open Source, Amazon is pretty bad considered, while e.g. Red Hat is "one of the best".

But I don't mean those extremes, I mean more mundane companies. Let's compare say Apple (neutral-ish?) and Stripe (neutral-to-slightly positive) (note: about Open Source!!). What do you think would have better impact in the OSS ecosystem, to work at Apple for $300k and donating $125k to open source projects, or to work at Stripe getting paid $175k and not donate anything?

It sounds pretty much on par for American approach to everything. It's ok to have shitty healthcare for the poor and pay less taxes, as long as you donate from time to time. Student loans? Medical loans? Shitty care for vets? No worries, Americans are the highest donating people on Earth by capita - so it's all fine. That last argument I keep hearing all the time - Americans are such good donators that they don't need a robust social net, after all if you are really in need then someone would have donated to you already /s.

I agree with you, but consider the possibility of donating the difference to a political organisation whose aim it is to eliminate shady behaviour by companies.

There's a broader spectrum to donation than just donating to the poor.

This is a very specific situation. Someone WILL fill that position at Evil Corp. and they will also get the 300k. The amount of evil done stays the same regardless of whether you take the position or not. But, if you take it and donate 100k to charity each year (especially one that works to undo harm done by your employer), more good is being done as well.

X harm + Y good > X harm + 0 good

The difference between the two options is saving 125 lives / year at GiveWell’s current estimate.

In ten years, you will have saved more than Oskar Schindler did during the entire Holocaust.

But of course you have taken one path to the Trolley problem and Schindler (who joined the Nazi party) has taken the other. Now it remains to be seen whether history remembers Oskar Schindler the Nazi Party member or user vincnetas who avoided FAANG as the more ethical.

You might have better engineers in FAAnG but it’s not given that you love your work. Many of my colleagues in those places are bored out of their minds because of how silly or numbing the work is. Part of the reason why I’ve not tried the transition yet.

Yes, of course, that's how statistics and probability work, you are not guaranteed anything. But chances are higher.

plenty of low paying silly and mind-numbing work out there too tho

>What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week

This isn't true. Google allows you to "scale" your work (eg 80% pay for 80% time).

> This isn't true. Google allows you to "scale" your work (eg 80% pay for 80% time).

Well.. sort of. My partner was doing 80% for 80% at goog for many years, which sounds like a good deal. Except the demands were more like 40-50 hours/week, with management always saying that full-timers were working way more than 50 hours, so at 80% salary you better be working 40-50hrs/wk.

Do you have a source for this? I know a lot of people at Google and have never heard of this. In fact, a few years ago I explicitly asked a Google recruiter about this, and they said it wasn't an option. Is it a more recent thing perhaps?

Okay in Google it's a official perk, bad example; my point still stands that you have more negotiation power with specific personal perks in smaller companies than in larger ones.

I'd be interested in 4 different jobs at 1 day a week for 20% of pay.

But everything else is _never_ the same. Once you're paid more, you move into a bigger house, have more needs, and without knowing it you're just as tight on money as you were before.

But then you just have more stress at work, and you just can't quit that easily bc there arent so many jobs that pay as much as this one...

Just to provide the other side of this general advice, that is really everywhere, but rarely delivers in regards to happiness.

>Once you're paid more, you move into a bigger house, have more needs, and without knowing it you're just as tight on money as you were before

This absolutely isn't a given. Lifestyle inflation to the extreme is in one's own hands first and foremost. Which is the most audacious part in this whole topic: yes your CoL is likely to be high if you earn such a giant income, but you are given options the majority of the west, let alone the world, will never have. As long as the percentage of one's income spent is roughly similar across all.

I've 4x my salary in the last 4 years and barely spend more than in the beginning, that's definitely up to every and each one of us (and TBF you would spend more at least to match the inflation even with no life changes, but in Japan there's almost none).

It's worth highlighting that this was the opposite device a decade ago when the large caps were IBM/MSFT/CISCO etc.

The marginal value of a good software engineer is very high when there is good cash flow. It's difficult to increase cash flow without engaging in some software activity. Organizations tend to find that growing a large software organization is counterproductive to effective development vs. growing a better software organization.

> Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year?

Most people can't live comfortably while holding a full-time job, esp. a demanding one. The job just eats too much time and energy.

The exceptions are people with very high energy levels and people for whom the job is their passion (but even for them, it's usually temporary - passions change over the duration of one's life).

I believe it’s good practice to think about your compensation not only as “what you get for what you do”, but also as “what you get for not doing what you would rather be doing”.

Some companies, some products, some teams, some (lower) level of stress, some amount of learning you are getting, some work/life flexibility - at some (temporary?) point in your life - might make a lot of sense to be considered together with the $ you get paid. I am all up for maximizing what you get out of your job, but you might want to optimize for multiple factors, not just salary.

Also, this discussion is very centered on yearly comp. It’s good practice to ask yourself how risk prone you are? That early stage startup equity comp might turn into much more than you will ever get paid at a large established company.

So when you are maximizing, ask yourself over what time horizon you want to maximize? One year?Three? Five? Ten years? It’s rare to get truly great things instantly.

Honestly, I make 300k TC and joined one company out of college and stayed there for the last 4 years. I live in Seattle.

I just want to show that not everyone making > 200k switches companies every 2 years trying to minmax.

How much of that is from your stock that you got 4 years ago vesting while the market has gone up? Or is your newly infused grants and cash 300?

That's both currently the amount I am getting per year towards my bank account and the amount I'm being granted per year * 4 + cash (I got promoted ~a year ago, meaning my new grants though missing the time value have a higher dollar value at grant time)

The argument is money isn’t everything.

You left after the 4 year cliff. That’s hardly an argument against keeping the same or higher TC though.

Actually I'm still there :-) Nothing against people trying to move and make more, but I just want to let people know that you don't _have_ to do that to be successful (plus refute people that might claim that it's the only way to do so in tech)

If you have a family that loves you, manageable stress levels and a purpose in life, I think you are doing a lot of things right. I am sure you are worth more! There are probably ways to increase your compensation and maintain your quality of life, but is it really worth it?

This is a great point and worth emphasizing.

Don't forget good health and time to keep it that way.

I taught my friend to code in a year and he did one of the intensive bootcamps. First job ever. A healthcare company in NYC is paying him 155 + 20% bonus. You're getting hosed

At the same time, I see mostly listings for director of data science or vp analytics at a ton of small businesses or startups that require a PhD and 5 extra years experience offering a cap of $80k.

Remote or in office?

remote, nyc based though

I'm also based in Boston, senior dev (FAANG generalist, ~10 years of experience). I make about $200k plus ~$100k RSU/year on average. Previous FAANG paid ~$140k + ~100k RSU/year. I believe my peers make more, and the info I have on CTO salaries at various startups would put $175k on the low end of the CTO pay scale.

If I were you, strictly from a financial point of view, I'd probably test the market to see what offers I get.

Fellow Bostonian here, You need to look at large cap publicly traded tech companies.

There are a few home grown publicly traded Boston employers such as HubSpot, and to a lesser extent Wayfair which pay competitively. However there are also large presences from Salesforce, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, FB, Spotify and others who pay more competitively.

I live in Boston, 6 years of experience. I just went through the big tech thing for the first time. I got an offer from two of them and ended up almost doubling my total income (salary about the same but adding a ton of RSU and cash bonus). I did not grind leetcode, but I do know my data structures and I practiced enough to code basic algorithms without googling for method names or syntax. I spent more time practicing anecdotes, which is the part of the big tech interview where they ask questions like “describe a time you identified a customer issue and went outside your role to resolve it”

From my experience no company founded in Boston pays top end wages. This job search I only considered big tech side offices in Boston and remote roles for Silicon Valley companies.

My recommendation: find some data points on Levels.fyi that match your experience/level, location, and desired TC. If there’s a bunch of data points, then it’s possible. Interview with every employer listed in these data points, and don’t take a job if it’s less than your desired TC. The market is hot and you are in control.

You are doing something very wrong. Look at that median and ask yourself: Why would you compare yourself to median income if you have 20 yoe and two books? That is far more than the median SWE has accomplished. You are paying a lot in opportunity cost for whatever you are doing now.

Of course, it could be worth it! That’s for you to decide.

The best thing I did for my career was leave Boston for an entry level FANG job on the West Coast 10 years ago. I currently make more than 10x what I was making in Boston. But it has been a grind no doubt. And probably some luck.

Sorry, 10x seems like a crazy difference when talking about salary. Could you be more specific? I’m trying to figure out numbers that make sense. Like you were getting $30,000 a year in 2011 and now getting $300,000+ in 2021? In the same field? Either the Boston salary was crazy low or fang salary is crazy high.

It's not actually that crazy, and less so if you look at total comp.

I made $55k 10 years ago, and just took a pay cut from $225k to $160k in a much lower cost of living area. I've had jobs with consistent $25-50k yearly cash bonuses, where some folks got as much as $250k of bonus in a year. And then options and RSUs are just the icing on the cake. Big lumbering public company? Starts at 100k a year worth of RSUs. Early stage at a unicorn? Easily $1M a year.

I've mostly worked at pre-IPO startups you've heard of -- forget FAANG.

East coast salaries a decade ago outside of New York were abysmal compared to their west coast counterparts, and still are for the most part, but due to the rapid growth of remote work, things are improving greatly.

I’m not the OP but if they’re L7+ the current salary (total comp, really) could be 800k+

Mostly the same. I left Austin for SFO and FAANG 10 years ago. I made so much more, that when my previous company sold and some of my friends got 1m+ in stock, i had made more simply in salary moving.

I had the chance to do that in 2009 and my wife (then fiancé) and I decided to stay close to family. I often wonder if that was a mistake...

Depends what your goals were or are. It is also unproductive to evaluate previous decisions with information that was not available at that time.

I did the opposite of you and question if I made a mistake. I’m not sad about it. Just thinking through the “what ifs” after being gone so long. It’s natural. But if you’re happy today, why change?

How many of your employers have the cash flow that FAANG companies have. The idea that non-FAANG companies should be able to match FAANG salaries regardless of what non-FAANG companies have to spend on staff seems a rather distorted concept. As the article mentions, FAANG could actually be paying their employees much more. They can afford it, easily.

Ok I have but a fraction of your experience and make more. And live in a much lower cost if living area.

I’m extremely mobile. Not like permanently move mobile. But I’ll take contracting work that require me to move to NY or London or whatever. Very job bumps my salary up. If I have to switch continents I will.

Home is always my low cost of living place, and in practice I spend the majority of time there.

I know most people aren’t like this. And most people don’t have spouses who tolerate this.

My wife is either very understanding, or maybe she just doesn’t like me that much.

But if I’m like, honey, I have to move to Austin a for six months, she’s like “Ok, just be home for Thanksgiving.”

I just landed a staff+ faang role over 700k and I’m 20 mi outside Boston.

Boston is a joke. Growing up here my whole life I thought we were right behind SV. Boy was I wrong. Seattle, NYC, and Austin have all eclipsed Boston as a tech hub. It’s embarrassing.

Apply for remote. Now you’re exposed to companies based in SV. This is the time to do it - The Great Resignation has made jobs plentiful with unreal comp.

Also study up. The best positions are the hardest to get into. Give yourself 3 months to study and these opportunities will be yours for the taking. You clearly have the skills, you just need to put yourself out there.

The levels.fyi number you're looking at is across companies, so it's skewed by the type of companies hiring SWE's in Boston vs the Bay Area, which have different pay scales. Large Bay Area tech companies (e.g. FAANG) pay Boston SWE's pretty close[0] to what they pay SF SWE's.

If you use the "Robert Half" site[1] from the original article, it says Boston is +34% compared to US baseline (vs SF's +42%, NYC's +40.5%) which roughly lines up.

[0] Google: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi... vs https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

[1] https://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guide/specialization/techn...

Just at first look it seems the 50th percentile is roughly the same (slightly higher) on the Robert Half numbers.

But either way, not everyone can work for FAANG, so I think looking at the overall picture is fair.

I'm pretty confident even with 20 years of experience and I can't even get a FAANG interview (let alone pass it), I'm just not their type.

Robert Half only includes base salary. I can't cut and paste from their pdf, but see https://www.ficpa.org/Content/Files/Docs/Futurecpas/2019%20R... , page 11.

The levels.fyi median seems to be on total comp.

The Robert Half data seems more likely to be accurate.

> even with 20 years of experience and I can't even get a FAANG interview (let alone pass it)

If you want one, I've never had the impression that getting an interview was the hard part. I participated in Google Code Jam maybe 9 years ago, passed either 0 or 1 rounds (there's a "qualification round" which I definitely passed, and later a "round 1" which I have a feeling I probably didn't pass), and every so often they offer me an interview unprompted because of that.

Landing a FAANG interview is easy (I graduated from a low-tier state school and have only done startup & government jobs). Just don’t say anything crazy during the recruiter phone screen and they’ll let you in.

I did mediocre on the interviews, they were undecided on whether to hire me or not. They sent in a take home problem. I only spent a few hours on it, but easily could’ve spent weeks perfecting the solution.

Anyways, if I had 1) prepared for the interviews and 2) spent the entire weekend on the take home project, I probably would’ve passed.

And even though I didn’t get the offer, they still ping me about every six months to see if I want to apply again.

Just try applying and see what happens!

I have been told I have an excellent resume by Google recruiters and gotten a recommendation from a manager I worked with in the past there and still not gotten an interview.

With that said, I think it is because at the time the Boston office was mostly specialists and I'm a generalist. I'm also not from a top 10 school in a city filled with top-10 schools which didn't help, I'm sure.

But that was years ago. Maybe I'd have better luck these days.

This topic certainly does bring out the shittiest commentary on this site, both in tone and content.

Congrats on making an income I could have only dreamed of as a college kid.

I've made very little money and FAANG-like money in my career. It has nothing to do with the difficulty of the work, the impact, or the hiring process. It's purely how badly the company wants "top" talent and the extent to which they want to / have to use money as a magnet.

The money is out there and $175K/yr is nowhere near the top of the market for your experience in the Boston area. That’s not to say you’re doing something wrong if you’re optimizing for the many things other than money that are worthwhile.

Not near the top, no, but according to the numbers it is median. I'm sure there are larger salaries out there but this article makes it sound like it is normal. Which in a roundabout way was my point.

Median is not a useful measure in these matters. Deciles, or even quintiles, would actually be useful.

Boston has a lot of robotics which seems to pay less for some reason (less profitable? Can't scale as cheaply?) and biotech which pays less. That could be one cause.

It's harder to transfer on robotics and biotech as ramping up a projects takes a long time and there's a lot of bespoke tooling. In my experience the jobs that pay the most are where engineers can switch and quickly be productive, as the main force actually driving salaries up are people quitting for a higher pay. The company hiring you for more than average needs you to be productive quickly.

Would you work on increasing ad click rate by 0.01% or on playing with cool tech toys and solving hard robotics problem? This is the same as SpaceX being able to pay under market - what you do matter and people are ready to take paycut to work on intersting problems.

it’s easier to offshore

why? i don’t know, it’s definitely not any easier work. but it’s reflected in the comp

In order to negotiate high compensation, you must be selling something in high demand and selling to someone with lots of cash (or cash equivalent like FAANG RSU). I suspect robotics companies’ cash flow does not look like the FAANG company’s.

You were happy a little bit ago and now you're not. You think you're doing something wrong.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Do your job.

I earn about 60% of yours with 0 YoE with no leetcode process in a state without income tax. I think you can easily do better.

How many CTOs that wrote two books are there around Boston?

Go to any little league practice in MetroWest, look over at the dads. Not the guy in the fleece vest - he works for a consulting firm or something. The two guys next to him, though? Both of them are ex CTOs. Only one of them wrote two books though.

[removed to protect identity of the author]

I mostly just like to be able to comment as a nobody and not in any of my official capacities. I'm not a troll account, nothing in my comments here would hurt my career, so really... go ahead. Not sure why anyone would want to, though. shrug

With that said I am in those search results (I checked) :-P if anyone wants to go through 63,000 people, be my guest. Everyone needs a hobby :)

There are tons of results so what's your point?

You are in the wrong place. The top salaries are exclusvively in the Bay Area and New York.

Lots of highly educated grads in Boston relative to jobs. (Compared to Denver)

>every time I see an article like this, I think I am doing something "very wrong"

there's a comment like this in every single thread like this. and the recommendation is always the same: grind LC for however long you need in order to be comfortable solving hard problems cleanly in 35-45 minutes and then collect your pay bump. the fact that the

1. data

2. complaint

3. recommendation

crop up with 100% perfect regularity means that it's the solution that simply isn't palatable to all of the people that express the complaint. to which i say: what exactly are you expecting to give among these three things?

It was data. The "I must be doing something wrong" was tongue in cheek. The specific data point was that I am not seeing any salaries anywhere near that. And Salary.com actually backs me up.

Just the fact "grind Leet Code" is a recommendation to someone who's most recent job title was CTO and has written two books may be a sign these interviews are broken.

But point taken, I'm sure if I studied specifically for interviews I could get those jobs. But the fact remains, a vast majority of people don't work for FAANG and even the "person unwilling to work for FAANG" example is higher salary than I have ever seen.

My point was actually that the article and ones like this seem well research but don't match the reality. For example, I recently interviewed at a fortune 100 company for a Director position and it was what this article says is "non-FAANG staff engineer" salary.

Fortune 100 companies don't necessarily pay well for software engineers. The bigger a company is, the more that resources concentrate to the top of the company. Besides, a non-tech company will consider their tech departments cost center, which means the pay will not be good. Tech companies pay much better, both in cash and in equity. Note a company does not have to be technical in your eyes, but needs to be technical in its management's perspective.

> My point was actually that the article and ones like this seem well research but don't match the reality

Isn't it more that they match the reality, but the reality only for a relatively small section of a bimodal (or more) distribution?

I have no data to back that up but I think you may be right. We always show salary as a normal distribution but maybe it is bimodal.

> Just the fact "grind Leet Code" is a recommendation to someone who's most recent job title was CTO and has written two books may be a sign these interviews are broken.

Well, I'm sorry you have to go through the same ropes that we peasants do, you highness.

The leet code thing is overstated. I’ve rarely seen “hard” questions asked and when they are asked, often the maximally efficient solution is not required to do well in the interview.

I'm a bit confused about what you're saying. levels.fyi is accurate and there are plenty of remote jobs available. So the 300k+ salaries are certainly available from Boston. If you're not willing to prove that you can pass system design, coding, and leadership interviews then that's a different matter. FWIW I recently interviewed for staff at a bay area big tech company and there was no leetcode-style coding interview: system design, leadership, presenting previous work, and a simple non-algorithmic coding discussion.

>Just the fact "grind Leet Code" is a recommendation to someone who's most recent job title was CTO and has written two books may be a sign these interviews are broken.

This comment and those further down (particularly doubting the data) suggest that you're experiencing strong cognitive dissonance. There are, I'm sure, hundreds of engineers on HN that can testify to exactly how much FAANG pays and in which metro and how little experience they had (not including LC) before they started.

The claim that hiring is broken has been constantly repeated since ~2010 and yet all of these companies somehow, despite hiring all of the wrong non-CTO people, are still alive and are in fact thriving. Like I said: given how consistently these mantras are chanted I'm just curious what you're expecting to have changed since the last time a post like this was made (you did say "every time I see..." so you've certainly seen many). It's a little like that episode of parks and rec with the reasonabilists where they keep predicting and amending the date of the end of the world.

Don't take this the wrong way, but, having helped several people through the interview loop at FAANG, my experience is that it is frequently the ones that see themselves as above grinding LC, that have the hardest time making it all the way through. And I don't mean wrt wrestling with how tricky some LC problems are (most everyone struggles with eg DP) but with marshalling the discipline and patience to actually do enough to do well during the interview.

It has been said before but my personal experience reflects this: it is of absolutely no surprise to absolutely anyone that those that can grind LC fare much better once on the inside and facing the sheer abyss of complexity of FAANG systems.

> grind LC for however long you need in order to be comfortable solving hard problems cleanly in 35-45 minutes

Which is more difficult to do for people who have a lot of non-work commitments, like say raising a family. So this method of hiring introduces some biases. Not that I have a solution.

•Boston area •7 yoe •Staff level •Full remote •Co is SF-based •$250 total comp

I expect a promotion and ~20% increase next cycle. Interview was no leet code (I’m terrible at it!) - my strategy was to interview at public companies with levels on levels.fyi but not FAANG

7 yoe at FAANG is double that and they're all permanent remote now (except Apple). Diminishing returns n all regarding TC but you didn't hack the system or anything with that strategy.

By no means did I imply I did. I offered an alternative to “grind lc” to somebody who is underpaid. I did not say this was how to get the maximum TC

I was interviewing at Amazon and they're certainly not permanent remote going forward.

I've heard the same about Google and Netflix

I think they're permanently WFH flexible but that's very different from remote (I don't have to move to take a job that's remote)

What's "grind LC"?

Do practice exercises on LeetCode.

You should have negotiated for equity. That's where all the real money is. RSUs/ISOs/NSOs whatever. If you were CTO of a revenue generating project and didn't get a % of the business, that is what you did wrong.

As someone who works in an Eastern European country, i also did a writeup on how much i've made over the years and how that figure has changed, while working for a local company: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings

In short, this year i'll probably make around 18k Euros, in total.

I guess that just goes to show how different the situation is depending on where you live and where you're employed.

You are grossly underpaid, even for eastern europe. Guys just across the border (or two) from you make 2x+ more, while paying next to nothing in taxes (5% I've heard, as faux contractors) and enjoying some of lowest CoL in europe - https://jobs.dou.ua/salaries/dynamics/

Why are these numbers so massively different across the world?

Do European companies generate that much less revenue? Or are labor unions in Europe just that much less effective at bargaining? Or is productivity that much lower in Europe? (I'm not sold on any of these)

Engineering salaries are somewhat trimodal, and this piece helps shed some light on the completely different spectrums the three different categories companies can fall under: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

You're probably being underpaid even for Latvia. The first thing you should change in your analysis is that you should compare your salary to other software developers, not the general national average for all people. I would hope that the Central Statistic Bureau of Latvia provides this data, but you'd have to search for it yourself.

I'm from Estonia (immediate neighbor of Latvia with a similar history) and the statistics here [1] paint a healthier picture. The median software developer salary in Estonia for Q2 2021 was 3300€/month (39600€/year), with the average being even higher (3460€/41520€). These are national level statistics, so the numbers are even higher if you work for one of the local unicorns or Microsoft.

You should probably start demanding more money. Not US levels of compensation, but at least figure out the local Latvian median for software developers and aim for that to start with.

[1] Search for "Software developer" at https://palgad.stat.ee/en

It's crazy to me that you can basically make a lifetime of earning doing the same job in Silicon Valley for one year

> i probably should mention that these are the net salaries

Definitely, I know in many parts of EU it's common to discuss net (specially when talking about monthly salaries) but in an English article targeted at the international community you'd be way better off sharing the gross, which is the expected way.

Wouldn’t you make more as a remote contractor? Even on Upwork?

> Chris can expect to make $300k at a non-FAANG company, but nearly double that if they’re willing to compromise on that “no-FAANG” stance

Ok but aren't the expectations for a Staff+ way higher at FAANG than at non-FAANG? Or we assume Chris already got the offer from FAANG for a Staff+ role and so it's just a personal choice? Those articles and discussions about salary always assume everybody is able to work at FAANG, or that a title at non-FAANG automatically transfers to the same title at FAANG.

Exactly. Someone saying they are Staff+ because of their current role at an Akron startup and actually getting an offer for Staff+ from Google or Facebook are very different situations.

what does staff even mean when in his previous example someone with 5 years experience is "mid career"?

At many of the large tech companies, most technical employees will reach a title along the lines of "Senior Software Engineer" or "Senior Member of Technical Staff" and struggle to get promoted past that. At those companies, that title is considered an acceptable "terminal" career level, meaning they wouldn't be considered as stalled or be pushed out. They'll still be plenty productive and generally considered as senior developers. However, to get promoted from there requires a slightly expanded set of skills and experience. That next level is often "Staff Software Engineer".

The highest technical titles that exist at most of those companies are "Principal Software Engineer" and "Distinguished Engineer". Typically, much less than 5% of technical staff reach that level (I'd estimate 2%, but unsure). However, ~75% (random, plausible number - not actually sure) are "Senior Software Engineer" or below.

It is a measure of skill. Senior is when you are good enough to lead a team with your technical skills, staff is when you can lead a team of seniors. Typical people reach senior level after 5 years and never reach staff level, so a typical engineer would still be senior even after 20 years.

It is a bit silly to label those senior, but that is how the industry decided to label things. If your company is more strict then it just make their engineers look worse than they are, it is a great way to make engineers less likely to get poached but it isn't great for those engineers since it will look like people with 20 years of experience and great track record stagnated after 5.

Spot on, maybe just an explanation of what "skill" means here: it's not just technical skills, beyond the "lowest terminal level" political skills matter more and more.

Grades are not the same in different companies. I can be on a senior grade in firm A, but will have only middle grade offer from company B.

I'm a Staff engineer are a small company with about 15 years of experience in Denver. As a full time employee I've never made over $160K base. As a contractor I've made over $250k (but with about $40k of that going to taxes and benefits virtually paid by an employer.)

I have a feeling I'm underpaid but I'm also very happy with where I work and the team I work with and I'm not currently willing to sacrifice that for a higher paying but probably much less enjoyable experience somewhere else. I also making about $30k more than I was when I started 3 years ago.

I have enough to pay my bills, raise a family, and still have some hobbies. Happiness should always be a factor when it comes to compensation.

> I'm not currently willing to sacrifice that for a higher paying but probably much less enjoyable experience somewhere else.

my coworker lives in denver and works remotely for my company in NY. You can easily make 250k+. We have good work-life balance ect ect.

> I'm not currently willing to sacrifice that for a higher paying but probably much less enjoyable experience somewhere else.

lots of good companies with higher pay. higher pay doesn't equate lo 'no family time' ect, it has been the opposite in my expreience.

Happiness should always be a factor, but I will argue that sanity permitting you should always test out new waters. Perhaps you might be satisfied at retirement with what you’ve got, but if you can forge new paths without sacrificing the clearly important parts of your life (sanity and family) then I believe that you owe it to yourself to do so. Not every half a mill job is fun but there are fun ones from what I hear.

That’s the whole problem with this kind of analysis. You can’t just ignore that there is market segmentation (I hate the term “tiers” but that’s really what it is).

That’s true, good piece on it here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

I'm not sure "higher" is the right word here - perhaps more specialized.

The expectations might be higher, but you have access to a very high caliber infrastructure and mentors that increases your productivity. So onboarding might be a big leap during the transition period. But I think that explains more of the difference than a skill gap. Lots of great Staff+ SE decide to work at non-FAANG.

The point they're making is that someone who is "staff" at a random company might not get hired as "staff" at Google. Anecdotally, I know people who have been "principal" or similar at other places and come to Google as L4 or 5 with a raise and interesting work.

If you're offering fabulous compensation packages that exceed the President of the United States for common software engineers with a little experience... wouldn't you want to use that to your advantage in your job postings?

Every time I read an article like this I go looking for official numbers to validate what is being said. I'm not saying companies compensate poorly in SV. I just find it difficult to differentiate fact from fiction (or gossip) when I go looking into it. Its really not that hard to post your price/ranges directly as a company. I've always posted compensation and benefits when I've posted listings. My wife has always posted compensation and benefits when she's posted them. I'm not sure which of us has interviewed or hired more. I've probably interviewed more as a software engineer and she's probably hired more as a clinical director. (nurses, so many nurses... and then doctors!)

I'd apply for a lot of positions if people would list compensation ranges in their postings. I just need to know we're somewhere on the same page before focusing my energy on it. Nothing is worse than going through interviews only find out we've wasted each other's time. I've been there, done that, far too many times. It usually results in an offer at the top end of what they're approved for and that is either not enough to leave, or its less than I'm making at a position I'm happy with.

Just looking at the raw numbers they all seem outrageous. But if you take a look at some of these companies it makes a lot more sense.

The FAANG I work for makes a PROFIT of $2 mill/year for every employee. So it's easy for them to think, lets pay this lot $300-600k and use em to keep our advantage/keep them away from competition. For all I care they could be paying all of us $1 mill and still be making a good sum of money.

Right, it is a bit dumb that company compensation is so opaque. But these salaries are correct, I read about them online, saw enough people verify they are correct to trust, did the work to get in and got these high numbers. They aren't fake.

> If you're offering fabulous compensation packages that exceed the President of the United States for common software engineers with a little experience... wouldn't you want to use that to your advantage in your job postings?

The US President earns millions per year in total compensation. You cannot ignore all the post employment benefits, least of all the $200k+ inflation adjusted per year annuity.

www.levels.fyi will get you a salary range for most companies. Based on my own compensation and that of trusted friends the real numbers are actually a bit higher than what's on levels.fyi right now. (Seattle)

When you apply the best thing is to just be clear to the recruiter what you will accept. If you tell them you won't accept less than $200k any good recruiter would tell you whether that's reasonable or not. If they lie to you, please come back to HN and make an angry post about it. You'll get my upvote.

This. levels.fyi is quite accurate both in first-hand data and when discussing salaries with folks that are coming from companies represented on the site.

I speculate that one of the things that makes it hard to square with market data is that levels.fyi leads with total compensation which will include stock based comp. afaict people report their stock comp differently, sometimes it's the original offer value and sometimes it's the value at that time (which might be years after the grant was given). Since things are really going up right now... it can lead to some big numbers. These numbers are still real, but not necessarily what you would see in an offer.

The salary numbers, however, are spot on in my experience.

[Disclosure: I work at Google]

I've asked decision makers about this (or similar enough) before, and the answer was that they considered compensation to be a bit of a competitive advantage. I can see two reasons for this, first it being secret makes it harder for employees to effectively negotiate. Second, it being secret makes it more difficult to accuse the companies of doing something akin to wage fixing, which some of these have done before, so being careful about the appearance of impropriety makes some amount of sense.

Personally though, I don't find either of those particularly compelling. Especially given that they're de-facto public anyhow. There's two reliable ways to get salary information even if you don't trust self reported data:

1. h1b data, which shows only base salary and is hard to tease good data out of, because there isn't differentiation by role usually. Google for example shows "software engineer" or "software engineer manager" salaries that range from like 150K to like 300K (again, base salary), because they can cover like L4, L5, L6, L7, and even L8 (director) and above under essentially that one title. It's not super useful.

2. The careers pages for remote jobs in the US, or jobs in Colorado. Thanks to a law that took effect this year, Colorado requires companies to post their salaries (again, just salaries). Companies in California are also required to give you a salary range if you ask during an interview process. This doesn't give you stock or bonus numbers, but you can use these to verify that the salaries people talk about are legitimate.

Here's some examples, all taken from the careers page for the companies (careers.google.com, https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/, etc.). In each I've included the important part of the role description and what I think it maps to in the internal levelling scheme (see https://www.levels.fyi/ to compare these).

Google:

    - Minimum salary of $132,000 (SWE III, L4)
    - Minimum salary of $183,000 ("Technical Lead", probably L6+)
    - $178,000 (Staff, L6)
    - $209,000 (Staff, L6)
    - $137,000 (Senior, L5)
    - $125,000 (SWE III, L4)
    - $120,000 (Senior Staff, L7, technically true but probably a data entry mistake somewhere)
    - $183,000 (Senior Staff, L7)
    - $252,000 (Something Director+, L8+)

Notably these are lower than salaries in SF or Seattle. Unfortunately, all the VP level jobs were in office and not in Colorado. Note again that this is before bonus (which starts at 15%+~5% based on performance, but for the higher level roles can reach like 30%+10% based on performance), and stock which starts at maybe 30-50% of your salary, but by Senior or Staff can be larger than your salary. I think some of these are also on the low side, 137,000 is below the bottom of the band for L5, my hunch here is some combination of data entry mistakes and willingness to accept L-1 for a role ("we'd prefer Staff but will take a Senior with some additional experience") so the salary requirements reflect that.

Facebook:

    - $111,000 ("Internal Software Engineer", E3?)
    - $172,000 ("Software Engineer", E5?)
    - $150,000 ("Software Engineer AI", E4?)
    - $143,000 ("Software Engineering Manager", ??? this one confuses me)
    - $206,000 ("Software Engineer iOS", E6/7?)
    - $239,000 ("Director Data Engineering", E8+)

Much like above, I believe FB pays higher in SF than Colorado and this doesn't include bonus or stock, which are similar to Google's structure.

Microsoft:

    - $115,700 to USD $153,900 (Software Engineer 2, 61)
    - $138,200 to USD $183,933 (Senior SWE, 63)
    - $148,068-$169,233 (Senior Mech Engineer, 63?)
    - $160,038-$183,933 (Senior Hardware Eng, 63?)
    - $147,500 to $224,500 (Principal Software Engineering Lead, 64-66?)
    - 153,100 to 200,700 (Principal SWE, 65)

MS has a bonus structure that's a bit worse than Google and FB, and pays a lot less stock.

Amazon had one role, a Senior SDM role, with range $122,300-160,000. 160K is the max base salary Amazon pays outside of SF. They don't do bonuses except your first year, but as far as I know by the time you're higher level, their stock awards keep pace with Google and Facebook.

I also checked Lyft and Uber, which didn't appear to have roles that were Remote or in Colorado, and Stripe, Netflix, and Dropbox whose remote roles didn't list salaries. Someone at stripe should probably fix that, I expect they're technically violating the law right now. Salesforce included numbers which were oddly low. Oracle requires that you email them, which I think may also be a violation of the law, but its unclear.

Anyway, bit of a tangent at the end there, but I hope that helps to show that these aren't made up (and are sometimes publicized).

Man, every time I think I’ve finally caught up to the market rate, I find out I’m behind again

I’m a senior FAANG coder making 350k TC, and it looks like I should be able to net 400-600k at this level if I go to Apple or Google. Hoo boy, looks like it’s leetcode time again…

> I should be able to net 400-600k at this level if I go to Apple or Google. Hoo boy, looks like it’s leetcode time again

I hate studying leetcode just for these interviews, but with these numbers it seems foolish to not put myself through hell...

Yeah I know a lot of FAANG people getting 500-600K packages. Makes it hard to even think about startups.

What the... s%&#?

Half a million a year for a developer or architect is bonkers.

That's the equivalent of AUD 800K a year. That's more than what the Prime Minister and a cabinet member put together make here!

How can that possibly make sense? For that kind of money you can easily hire 4 senior developers here! Any company "hiring local" at those prices isn't exploring their international staffing options properly...

Depends on your definition of Startup, late stage companies like Stripe and Databricks are definitely matching/beating these offers.

Mid-stage companies like Convoy are also going very high, but there is an upside with those companies.

Don't know much about early stage, but a few of my acquaintances are moving from FAANG companies to early stage companies to play the lottery.

Yeah that's not a "competitive" difference any more, that's approaching levels of annual compensation nearly a full seed round for a whole startup.

I used to buy into the whole risk vs reward of startups, but the numbers are far too biased towards founders and big tech salaries now for any individual contributor actually paying attention to the market to think about a startup job.

I see these mind boggling sums in the Valley, $300.000, $600.000, can you please translate: how much does that net you per month, after taxes, reasonable healthcare and rent, ideally no further than 1 hour commute and free of black mold?

Is your TC number including the stock appreciation from the time of award to the time it vested? Because if it doesn't (and I think that's how we should talk about TC), it looks to be pretty good to me.

500K is the new 350K in 2021.

I wish I could get a company to just give me 15 weeks of paid vacation instead.. alas

> looks like it’s leetcode time Haven't searched for a job in a few years, but would consider based on TC.

Are all these good-paying software jobs behind the "leetcode firewall", even for non-FAANG? I guess my willingness to practice on leetcode would be partly driven by potential TC reward, but I really would like to be judged on the merits of the development I've already done for previous companies instead of having to memorize solutions to esoteric problems I'm never going to have to solve on the job.

Interview problems that are stripped down versions of real problems faced on the job are gaining popularity. All of Stripe, Coinbase, and Google gave me interview questions that were recognizably related to their business when I interviewed with them last year. I've always tried to give interviews distilled from my actual job when I interview candidates at Google, but it's hard in a 45-minute block. Some companies are moving toward fewer longer interviews for that reason.

Leetcode will only cover the easiest part (IMO) of the interview. For senior roles, expect to spend half or more of the interview on “system design” and “behavioral” interviewing.

350k TC sounds not bad to me if you're E5 at Facebook or L6 at Amazon. It goes up another 150-200k at the next level (E6/L6 at Facebook/Google, L7 at Amazon, or ICT5 at Apple).

One reason discussing those numbers is hard is the variable compensation section: RSUs.

An E4/L4 (the level right below senior) easily makes 400k right now depending on which company they joined. Their typical offer was 160k base and let's day 82k RSU (325k over 4y).

With the usual (~15% of base) bonus, that's 160 * 1.15+82=266.

But now let's assume they joined 2 years ago, so they got refresher of stocks that are roughly 20k per year extra (80k vesting over 4y), 266+20+20=306k.

Here's the catch though, the 82k/y from the in-hire grant are now worth 160k/y: it's {stock price today} * 1/4 * 325k / {stock price at join date} , and look at FB, GOOG, AMZN etc trajectories.

Same for the refresher, the oldest one is probably worth around 40k/y, and most recent one probably worth 30k/y,

So this year exact TC could be (bumping base with 2 usual raises to 170): 170 * 1.15+160+40+30 = 425k.

That's ignoring extra (~10% of base) for on-call compensation.

That E4 doesn't need promo to E5. The math can be repeated for E3 or E5, the higher the stock number was, the higher the effect.

That's the effect of stock compensation and alignment of employee compensation with company performance. Of course if those share prices go down, so does the TC. There's a company in FAANG known for their frugality famous for not offering refresh "because the stock price is doing so well", but even without the refresher, someone's initial stock award from 2-3 years ago is worth a lot more today.

Some companies are starting bad trend these days due to them offering only 1 year vesting stock awards, instead of typical 4 years (smaller on-hire awards but bigger refresh), where an employee cannot benefit from the compounding effect of stock growth anymore. The employee can "hodl" their vested shares, but the vested shares are usually less, since ~1/3 is removed to pay for the tax the vesting represented.

Last year I was offered almost 500k TC from Facebook for E5 in Seattle.

Google did not bother to match at the same level. I guess Google is not drowning in money anymore (in comparison).

Ask yourself this: what are you missing out on right now? A number? What will you do with all that money? When is it enough?

What are you missing out on right now?

Money.

What will you do with all that money?

Retire comfortably.

When is it enough?

When I can retire. Why not change jobs to earn 30% more for the same amount of work? You're essentially speeding up your retirement every time you increase your total compensation.

A good question for CEOs, board members and investors to answer, perhaps? They should be pursuing passion, not money!

In other news, if you aren't in the valley or working for one of the big tech companies, you're probably making 100-150K as a mid/senior developer. There's a pretty sizable leap.

Yeah I just wrapped up a job search m after hearing how hot the market was. 5YOE, in a relatively large state with a shockingly weak martlet. The highest number I heard was around 140k. I did have some Amazon recruiter reach out, which potentially would have been higher, but I cannot relocated atm, and they would not offer a high enough relocation bonus.

Just a few observations from my job search.

1) I was targeting remote roles, but almost every recruiter that reached out was local, at least to the state I was in. This probably greatly affected the numbers available to me. Again, Amazon was the exception.

2) Basically all of the jobs I applied to directly either screened me out or never got any response. This makes sense, as I very much find myself stuck in the “enterprise” world, and even worse the legacy section of it, and the only companies that are interested in me are those. I attempted to put some non-work projects on my resume, but people are uninterested in those even in interviews.

I ended up settling once more (I really didn’t want to settle again, but it would take too long to even figure out my way out of this issue) for $121k with even that being a significant increase over my current comp (non-tech too 100 F500 company local to the area)

Probably but not necessarily. Don't aspire to be most software engineers if you don't want to get paid like most software engineers haha.

I'll add a data point. I live in a 90 COL index city(I don't live in a 90 area though) and will clear >300k this year total cash comp at a non-FAANG company working remote. Earlier this year I had a 200k base salary offer for a staff full stack eng role at a startup(that just raised a bunch of money). The money is out there.

Agreed, there are plenty of people, clearly, that are doing significantly better. My data comes from my own experience, and it may vary. I have been in management, and with that I had access to comp information for a variety of engineers in our organization located at offices across the U.S. I also have a network of former coworkers and friends throughout the Pacific Northwest and we share (roughly, not specifics) how we're doing for comp.

I'm getting old enough to worry about ageism myself (mid-40s) and my total comp is just a bit over 200K this year. That's not bad for Portland, but when I see the numbers tossed about on HN it makes me want to take Facebook up on their interview requests. Probably amount to nothing, but I'm thinking I really ought to open up and start renewing my interview experience before it gets any harder.

How many YOE do you have? Any suggestions for finding these re mote jobs?

How much experience do you have and what sort of work do you do?

Yeah no kidding. I was shocked at the numbers in this article. A 15-year engineer in aerospace gets you ~120k.

At my first job in financial software, one of my coworkers was an MIT-grad aeronautical engineer with ~5 years experience in aerospace, ~6 months software. He took a pay cut (though not much of one - I think he went from about $90K -> $75K) to get into finance, because aeronautical engineering doesn't really pay you enough money to have a decent life in the Boston area. Within 2 years he'd jumped ship to a hedge fund and was making about double his aerospace salary.

And people wonder why we don't make things in the U.S. anymore...

Coincidentally I currently work in aerospace (in a software engineering role) and I have 15 years experience.

I wish I made $120k/year.... :(

I'm not surprised. I'm guessing the aerospace industry is relatively stable in size (we don't suddenly need a lot more planes, spacecraft, or weapon systems than in the past), so employers in that industry don't need to offer big compensation packages to lure away scarce employees from competitors in order to enable that growth.

I don't know if this was anomalous, but I was making a smidge more than that in the aerospace industry with 5 years experience

I've seen fpga engineers pull down $150k

Real drought of senior talent in that area

There's a huge difference between early stage and mid-late stage private companies. For the latter, you are almost always getting RSUs rather than options, so you don't have to pay taxes out of pocket to exercise them. It's also wrong to automatically consider all stock grants to be worth $0 just because you can't immediately sell them. If Stripe or Databricks offers you a million dollars worth of shares today it'll be foolish to say no.

Yes! This advice to value shares of private companies at zero is buried deep in the article, but I think it renders the article quite misleading.

The right thing to do is to use your own judgment to estimate the value of the stock. A small stake in a promising early-stage company really is worth something. There just isn't a clean formula for how much it's worth.

When you really think hard about it, this will push you toward working for companies that are more likely to succeed. If you treat all stock offers like they are worth zero, that will push you toward working for companies that don't offer their employees stock, and that are not likely to succeed. Over time, those companies just don't attract the best coworkers. So you're really hurting your career if you decide that you don't care about the stock, even besides the direct financial hit.

Important tip for people considering startups: only join ones that recently raised an A or B round from one of the top VC firms. VCs get to see all of the numbers and won't invest unless there's some sign of upside.

Agreed - Silicon Valley exists in part because of 500k-5M$ payouts to employees happening all of the time from private options.

Not trying to value that is a mistake.

That's the myth that keeps the whole thing going. For every successful exit that makes employees rich there's a 100 failures and acquihires.

You should judge these deals based on expected value.

So there are all these people in these threads who are like "I only make $175K/200K/150K, I feel like I'm grossly underpaid when I read these things."

I got you all beat.

I have 15+ experience. I am a really good coder. I can be very not humble because this is a throwaway, but everyone who has ever worked with me or gone to school with me or worked on open source with me would agree, I am very good at designing and writing and maintaining software, including understanding what software should be written, let's just accept that for the sake of discussion.

I only make around $90K.

Now, I work in the non-profit/academic sector, and have my whole career. That's what I wanted to do, and I make more than most people in my social circles even at $90K, but the work is getting old, it's not actually that "meaningful" in the end, and especially when people keep saying that I could be making literally 4-5x what I'm making.

I also these days mostly only know ruby and Rails (but that's not un-marketable right? And I certainly can learn other things, I have before. And I know ruby really well).

People here are like "Sure, but don't you want good work/life balance, maybe $175K is just fine for that." Yes, and $175K would be a fortune to me!

I literally don't understand how I get into that market. Because I have worked in academic/non-profit industry my whole career. (which I don't know if that leaves me out now. And I'm in my mid-40s, does that doom me?). I know how to get more jobs in the industries I'm in at about what I'm already getting paid, and have several times...

But I don't understand even the first step to this world where $175K is considered low-paying. I believe I have the engineering skills of anyone at that level. I don't know how to get into it. Help me out?

Stupid question but have you actually ever tried? Your tech stack seems modern enough that I'd be surprised if you couldn't get some offers from startups. New grad level at a startup generally pays 90k+ in my market so you shouldn't have a problem at least matching your current comp but I think 150-200k is probably reasonable but you might need to work remote for a company in a major city.

I left tech at the university as soon as it started feeling like things were "getting old." And at that point I realized I should have left maybe 4 years earlier to get on with my career.

I think I will try to get back in when I am ready to retire, maybe a nice IT management position for a few years.

I don't know if it's right for everyone, but the way I did it was to practice a bunch of leetcode style questions and send out resumes go for job postings at big companies.

That was for my first tech job. Once I had that one advertised on LinkedIn (and some open source participation, and some talks at conferences - not sure what generated interest), I started getting a steady stream of unsolicited emails from recruiters. Next time I was ready to switch jobs I just responded to the ones from FAANG companies and went back to practicing leetcode.

You can probably also just reach out directly to recruiters at big companies, or ask someone you know who works at a big company to put you in touch with a recruiter or recommend you.

If you know Ruby really well you might want to look at Stripe. You might be able to just apply and get an interview and see where it goes.

I think there are many straightforward answers. Try to get the $500k jobs. If that doesn't work and you don't want to grind LC for 6 months, go for $150-200k jobs like startups. If you are as good as you say you are, you could probably study/talk your way into a job or at least figure out what you need after applying to 100 startups.

Where do you live, and where have you been looking for work? Try applying to some companies that specifically do software.

Rails isn't dead and can demand high salaries.

> I don't know how to get into it. Help me out?

Go to levels.fyi and apply to those companies’ job listings.

These articles always undershoot the top end comp. I’m staff+ with ~15 years exp at a FANG like big tech company. I currently make low seven figures. I don’t think I’m unique among my peer group. When you add in refreshers and stock appreciation it gets even higher. Currently remote.

It's because they are estimating new offers given out today. It's understood that people with a few years' tenure could be making a lot more due to stock appreciation, but if you are in the job market today that data point is useless and only messes up the expectations.

Most people aren’t eligible for top-end comp so focusing on it is pretty niche. The 300k jobs are a lot more accessible than the 1m jobs.

Do you have a lot of old RSU? I think that’s worth more now?

I’m wondering if I’m just not worth as much money or if I’m not paid as much because I don’t work in California or both, lol. I work for an enormous company. I’ve got about 8 or so years experience. As of right now I’m a sr architect and I work on enterprise-level systems - either designing or enhancing existing processes and platforms. I don’t really code much these days, though I do write a lot of sql, build lots of diagrams, and build a lot of sample requests for various groups when they aren’t quite getting something from the docs. I make 180 TC and live in the north east though not NYC or Boston. That said, I also have a two floor plus fully finished basement home with three bedrooms, four bathrooms, a nice yard, garage, and a nice deck that I can work on when the weather is nice. So, I’m not complaining, I feel like I live comfortably. But man if I had an extra 200k to just throw into savings and investing? Whooo boy…

Writing SQL and drawing diagrams for enterprise systems inside of a huge company is not what the highly-compensated senior engineers tend to be doing. If you want to make more money, move out of being an “architect” and into being a principal engineer at a tech company (one whose business is making software; not a company that just happens to employ software developers).

You can use a CoL converter to see if you're getting paid what you're worth in the Bay.

But if you're content, you're content. I wouldn't worry about it too much if that's the case.

Just for comparison, I'm a staff ~ level engineer not at FAANG, not in California, similar experience to yours and this year I will make about $400k.

COL is part of this, but I think the things to consider are that software engineers are worth more based on the scale of our work, and network effects can drive up our market price. I believe the scale argument is self-evident, so I'll expand on the network effects:

By being in the bay area you meet a lot of software engineers and provide value to companies you work at by referring good software engineers. This ends up being worth a lot of money to companies (more than they pay in bonuses).

By being an engineer in the bay area it's also harder to be retained. Engineers here are pretty transparent about compensation and working conditions. If someone I know is working 50 hours a week or being underpaid, I make sure they have referrals to good companies as soon as they want them and they get a good job.

Speaking to engineers who've moved here from other markets, that kind of culture and network just doesn't exist in most other areas.

That sounds amazing! pretty rich to me

For someone who is way out of this loop, what does a typical day look like for someone who make $300k at a "tech" job? $600k? Is it actually programming intensive? Like the guy who wrote the default calculator app on the iphone was making that kind of a salary? Or are you managing teams of programmers? Architecing? Is it something like 16 hour days are the norm?

Honestly it is not too different than working at a small product shop or consultancy. Except: - typically less stress and fewer hours since everyone you work with is much more competent on average (def still have some dumb dumbs or the occasional psycho though) - You have a deeper “bench” so if you are an elite performer (which you tend to be if you go small tech co to bug tech co) then there are more like you and you are not single threaded on everything. (Downside: you are much more replaceable and being “the guy” is much harder, very noticeable at the Sr/staff/+ levels) - You code way less. Much fewer “at bats” a lot more reading, researching, working across teams, figuring out the best solution, having it reviewed and then a relatively quick implementation.

Note: the 300k to 600k jump can happen shockingly easy (without promo) if RSU grants appreciate well and refreshers are generous. Doing it the “hard way” (assuming RSUs stay flat) is hard. You need to design, convince others to build, and help build truly impactful systems AND make sure you get a big chunk of the credit.

I worked at Google. $300k is a few years out of college if you do ok and get promoted once. You write code and maybe onboard a junior now and then. 8 hour workdays, but nobody checks so you can work less if you want. So it is just a regular coding job.

Your mistake is thinking these are substantially different jobs than any other. Don't fall into the Just World fallacy where you try to justify why compensation is so high by assuming there must be some hidden tradeoff. The tech job market just isn't very efficient.

At Google making 300k total comp means you're probably a high-performing L4 or a new L5 (senior). Your day can look like absolutely anything.

I know people making 300k that are writing hundreds of lines of high-quality code in important systems every single day for years in a row and also doing code reviews, system design, etc. Very productive engineers doing traditional tasks.

I also know people at that level who spend their days watching YouTube videos and hoping nobody notices. On many teams, nobody ever does. It's easier to hire one extra person at these big companies than to fire one.

All these two people have in common is that they can pass an interview and they know how to write an email.

(Aside: the latter category makes me pretty angry because I know so many good programmers in India, Eastern Europe, etc who could change their whole families' lives with that kind of money but can't get it from a lazy American)

He’s taking the tail end of a distribution in one geolocation and translating it to another geolocation, but then associating it with the median of that location. This is a mistake and his estimates are inflated. Of course it’s always easy to sell “you’re underpaid” because everyone likes to hear it. If you’re feeling inadequate, realize this is likely way off the mark.

The beauty of remote work:

I make, let’s say somewhere between 100-200k. But because of where I live, this is enough to fill two college funds, pay off a mortgage, let my wife follow her dream of being a full-time mom, and retire by 50.

Absolutely need more remote work in this world. There’s so many wonderful places to live that aren’t ridiculously priced.

I've been remote for 5 years. I have been happy to take a 50% reduction in what I could be making. In the past, I would wake up in the morning and find myself willing to pay more money than I would make that day in order to not have to go into work. The economics of that didn't work out. I also work for a mission driven organization that is on a tight budget. I make enough money, but more importantly, I have not had a single day in five years where I didn't want to go to work. That's pretty priceless.

Are a lot of these 300k-500k TC positions putting in 40 hour work weeks or more?

I think that's worth bringing up because it's a huge factor at the end of the day. For example, getting 400k TC but you routinely put in 60-80 hours a week is much different than 40 hours a week.

Personally I would much prefer working 30-40 hours a week for X vs 60-80 hours a week for X * 2. The amount of taxes you pay in the X * 2 range are so massive you end up not getting anywhere near a true 2x amount in your bank account but you put in a true 2x amount of hours. Working 70 hours a week as a typical employee role isn't sustainable in my opinion.

I work in the bay area at a large company.

Generally, people at big companies work less than at small companies. Most software engineers I know making more than 400k work ~30 hours a week.

Things get different at the super senior levels making several million, usually a lot more meetings, hard to speak to their specific hours. But on the other hand, they get to retire after two years if they want so...

I think plenty of these people are lying on the internet and um, rounding up a little.

How many people go into programming now simply for the money? More than 70%?

What percentage of programmers would still be programmers if competitive salary was not a concern in life, and people were free to simply pursue their passions?

This is the most depressing/soul-crushing thing you discover if you're passionate about programming your entire life and then finally break into the industry.

You realize you're the weirdo, and after years of everyone else being blatant about really not caring, it starts to wear on you.

Honestly, I prefer to work with people who are in it long term for the money. Much more rational, much more pragmatic, much less bike shedding and holy wars, much higher degree of professionalism.

“How do we ship things that make us rich” vs “how do I scratch this nerd itch/play with new shiny thing/assert my passion purity”

That explain why CV-driven development has been aggressively overtaking good development.

Similarly, a lot of the original FLOSS culture has been overshadowed by the "github-is-my-showroom" model. Optimizing for github stars and so on.

My informal poll last year of my friends suggest a 50-60% drop rate. I asked about 30 friends who are still coding for work. Almost 20 of them said they would not code anymore if they can find equivalent salary.

Outside the US this is more like 10-20%.

Americans care about money a lot. American SWE care about money even more.

I got into programming because I love computers and messing with them. I took a job as a professional Software Engineer because the job market was excellent and I could get paid for doing what I found fun. The money was good but I'd have done it for less at the time.

Now why did I _stay_ at a FAANG company doing mostly boring low-stakes work? For the money. I say that with no shame and I encourage others to consider doing it for the money.

It's life-changing money and the job is still pretty good! I still get to write code and talk about code for a living. I also have to go to some really stupid meetings and deal with bureaucracy and use strange tools but ... so what? It's still a good deal. Who knows when this market for our talents will disappear.

If competitive salary wasn't a concern in life, I would make my living casually playing video games. And specifically for the exact amount of hours that I would like to allocate toward it every day (because hours are part of the competitiveness of salary, and 40 hour weeks aren't a permanently fixed standard).

I mean, didnt working at it 2000+ hours a year beat the creativity and joy out of it?

i think if people can afford houses in alot of these areas, the competition to keep increasing tc no matter what will lower.

Wow! That's so much money for senior/L6 FAANG.

10 years ago my last non-contractor gig as a Grade 8 Intel Senior Staff Microprocessor Engineer (or 9? just below principal. I forget.) in Santa Clara pulled $200k including bonus and options, 170k if it was a shit year for bonuses. And that included a 4 year stretch with 0% raises for everyone in the early 2000's. That's with -15- years experience.

I guess in 2010 that was pretty good? I dunno, they routinely fucked everyone except the principals and above, who have very strange compensation systems, but no one had the guts to leave: this was during the no-hire collusion for which I got a settlement check of $10k, which was peanuts compared to the impact.

Yeah, all of the above. The market was a lot less hot in 2010 on the back of the 2008 financial crisis; Intel is just kind of a shitty employer all around; and illegal no-hire collusion didn't help.

> Chris can expect to make $300k at a non-FAANG company, but nearly double that if they’re willing to compromise on that “no-FAANG” stance

Is that really a good rule of thumb? FAANG pays double non-FAANG?

I think there are many other companies now paying or exceeding FAANG. Some of them are - Stripe, Databricks, Coinbase, Dropbox, Uber, Lyft, Twitter (to some extent), DoorDash, Airbnb, etc

We no longer live in a FAANG only world. FAANG companies are now trying exceptionally hard to hire talent. A lot of the FAANG perks were in-office, as the world continues to accept the remote first worker, they are only going to have a harder time.

As I work from home, I've come to appreciate different aspects of my work, than what I enjoyed in-office.

The reason the poster arrived at this is that they are valuing stock options as $0. Of course there are non-FAANG companies with liquid stock, but this seems not to enter the calculation. If you were to consider those, you'd find that while FAANG pays well, it's not _that_ much of a premium.

What's certainly true is that stock is a significant piece of the total comp at a FAANG and a startup is unlikely to make up much (if any) of that difference in base salary. For instance base salary for me as an L8 at Google is roughly 1/3 of my total comp.

It's not a good rule of thumb. There definitely are some tech companies that pay less than half of FAANG (especially among small startups and eng roles in less tech centric companies), but there are also a lot of companies that have similar salaries to FAANG.

Base comp probably... but the OP is discounting equity almost entirely:

> and those are likely to be the kind of complex instruments that I treat as a gamble, not guaranteed salary

Idk, opinions vary, but the majority of my early startup total comp in my career has been equity payout. Maybe I just got super lucky, but I think this is too firm a stance and tips the scales against non-FAANG too heavily.

Kiiiiinda? If you put the unicorns also on the FAANG bag, which I think you should because the type of work you do on those is very similar.

Post-IPO you have a liquid stock grant that on FAANG is usually a second salary, bit less bit more depending on the company, role, tenure and performance. Some startups will give you a stock grant that's equally as fat or fatter after IPO, but you have to sit and wait on them to IPO.

Non-FAANG public companies in my experience helping friends with offers give slimmer stock grants, like 30% to 50% of your base.

Not really. I'm sure Google is paying double the salary of some companies, but there's a huge number of companies in the middle of the two as well.

Last time I checked a really good rule of thumb is that FAANG pays double the median salary for software engineers, no matter where in the world you check. There are however companies all over that spectrum so it isn't like there is a cliff between FAANG and the rest, but it is true that most developers would massively increase their salaries by joining a FAANG.

No, it is not a good rule of thumb. Many non-FAANG tech companies pay at least as much as FAANG; I think it is more the case that FAANG pays a small discount to market based on reputation.

For non-tech companies the compensation landscape is more complex and diverse but I know of several cases where software engineers are on top FAANG-like compensation, sometimes straight salary, in unexpected companies and geographies. There is a much larger appetite across industries and geographies to selectively pay top wages for key engineers than there used to be. The median wage may still be lower than FAANG in these companies, they aren’t nearly as profitable, but they are finding significant value in making point investments in engineering talent to lift the level of the organization rather than spraying money at everyone with a money hose. If you can be one of those key engineers, you can ask for the same kinds of money as FAANG and sometimes more (on the basis that working for a non-tech company is less attractive).

The off-the-charts FAANG money has been rapidly spreading across the US and also starting to very slowly globalize. It has been crazy to watch.

I honestly find it hard to believe that there are a lot of jobs available offering those kinds of salaries. Especially when we are talking about working remotely from outside the Bay area and for average size companies.

I think there are multiple tiers as far as salary. He is really describing the top two tiers. But the majority of jobs are not quite in those top two tiers.

While I don't have doubts about this being a good way to find rough outlines for compensation, I'm yet to find a reliable source of data for Europe. Has anyone else had better luck?

in the UK, junior is £20-40k, mid-level is around £40-60k, lead can be around £60-100k. Very rough numbers, and adjust upwards slightly for London. The big money is in contracting in the UK, which would be our accessible FAANG-equivalent.

Don't a lot of countries in Europe make salary info completely public? Seems like it should make creating aggregates even easier.

You may want to have a look at salary surveys from headhunting firms or placement agencies like Michael Page or similar.

I work as a "tech" guy at a school, and earn WAY less than what anyone in this thread would probably consider a liveable wage, but have good health and retirement benefits.

Earning a modest, but reasonable living and having some stability is not an entirely bad way to go.

As long as you understand the trade offs and are doing it with your eyes wide open, more power to you.

I'm in Russia and I make just $5000/year as a full-stack web dev (4+ years). I threatened to leave, and they found 10 more people who work for even less. I tried to get hired outside of my country, but no one bothers to respond.

Don't give up.

I am sorry. Hope you’re doing still fine with that salary.

Co-Founder of Levels.fyi here. As Jacob points out, the market is extremely hot right now. It feels like salaries are inching up slightly each month. We're working on improving how numbers are updated and working on weighing recent salaries more heavily. Would really encourage everyone to submit their compensation on the site. We also have some relevant discussions with recruiters from FANG type companies on our team in our community.

What's the consensus on the tech market being really hot right now? Does that imply a potential crash in the future, or simply a "cooling down" or plateau-ing? Can anyone point to some commentary on future expectations, beyond the immediate salary bumps we can get today?

Thank for your work! I’d be really interested to see YoY trend data for the aggregate and for the same level. Also if there is ‘level inflation’ happening over time.

Heya, question: Have you considered including h1b or Colorado job data to help benchmark stuff in addition to self reported data? Its obviously imperfect (referencing my own post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28875365), but given that y'all have the resources to figure out what the locations are (like, how much more companies pay in SF vs. Seattle vs. Colorado), providing the Colorado data scaled based on that would be another neat resource.

I haven't been able to get a clear answer for this so hoping you can help – what are companies' appetites for matching existing stock grants for senior hires? Say someone gets a FAANG or "hot startup" offer, but has $800K worth of stock (mainly due to price appreciation) at their current company vesting in the next year, is a direct match out of the question?

Based on the data, do you foresee a correction or dotcom-esque bubble situation?

Do you have any forecast for SWE salaries over the next few years?

Hey, thanks for levels.fyi! It makes this kind of accurate compensation math possible in a way that really wasn't before y'all came along. Thanks again!

levels.fyi is a great resource, thanks for putting the time in to build it.

How long will these last? I'm just in the beginning of my career and am deathly afraid of a dotcom type situation where my earning potential is harmed over the rest of my career.

dotcom was a completely different situation. VC money flowed to companies that had no meaningful revenue. FAANG, on the other hand, are printing billions of dollars per month.

Full disclosure: I work for Secfi (https://www.secfi.com) and we help employees understand and unlock the value of their startup equity.

The OP's point of view on equity compensation is quite common and - I believe - in principle a great way to think about an investment that one does not fully understand.

However, especially for somewhat later stage startups, a substantial amount of your wealth can be locked up in your equity or option grants! Valuing them at 0 might not be accurate and actually quite risky: you take the full risk of the startup succeeding or not!

Secfi offers a financing product for your equity that is non-recourse. It basically works like this: Secfi pays for the exercise of your options and transfers a - sometimes very substantial - part of the value of your equity to you to use as you see fit. For example, you can use the money as a down payment on a house or get that crazy Lamborghini your crypto-millionaire neighbour recently bought, too. :)

In exchange, you pay Secfi a small percentage of interest on the amount and a small equity fee if, and only if, the startup succeeds (read: has a successful exit). If the startup fails - and this is crucial - you get to keep all the money and Secfi takes the loss!

So, in this scenario, your equity has a much, much greater value than 0!

Secfi's website has a lot of information and tools to help visualise and understand the value of startup equity and might be a good way to start learning how it all works. (https://www.secfi.com/academy)

> Adjusting [$400-600K] to Chris’s current location (Bay Area: +42%; Akron: -11%), they might expect to make about half that ($200k-$300k) staying in Akron.

That’s not how the adjustments play out. Taking $400K in a 142% market is a $282K unadjusted figure, adjusted down 11% for Akron yields a $251K figure. So call the equivalent Akron range (if there is a such a thing) $250K-$375K which is 25% higher than TFA’s calculation.

You're right - I was doing my math wrong. I'm fixing it now. Thank you!

The actual pay isn't going up. The value of the dollar is dropping very quickly.

I don't think 4-5 years experience is Sr level, as used in the Robin example. $100k with 1% of the company seems... OK? The salary is a mid level software engineer is closer to $150k, Chicago should down adjust a bit, so maybe $130k salary in big tech. Realistically, you are looking at $162.5k with bonuses and stock. How much is the startup worth now? She's probably passed on (very roughly) $300k of comp, so if that startup valuation is sitting above $30M she might be close to even and if it provides an exit above $100M she'll have done well. If not, well it was a lottery ticket.

As for the other person, Staff+ does not necessarily translate between companies, and especially does not translate from companies in very different cultures to the big tech space. It's not impossible, but just because someone got the title of Staff engineer in one market does not mean they will be able to get that title in another market.

I'm currently working as an architect, equally skilled in coding, design, and communication, making around 225k TC remote, for 4 days a week, which I scored from being here for a while. 25 years experience. Are people in their 40s and 50s able get these higher paying jobs? Is it possible to negotiate working 4 days a week instead of 5?

Yes, and the most important thing is getting equity. Plus, good companies will pay probably more than 225K cash a year plus a ton of equity.

Cool to see Levels.fyi mentioned here – a lot of people don't know about our verified salary stream newsletter as well, but it's a neat way to keep tabs on the market: https://levels.fyi/verified/ as well as our community (in beta): https://levels.fyi/community/

Last salary stream issue: https://email.levels.fyi/t/v/93ecf861-3d0c-47e9-84af-757bcc9...

Thanks for building this product. I used your compensation negotiating service and you helped up my offer by more than 100x what I paid y'all. Keep up the great work!

Say you have $400K of public company stock that vests over 4 years. How much is this worth? (ignoring time value of money for now). $400K? But if the stock tanks then you likely have the option to get another job, so you are less affected by the downside than the upside. How should that factor into your calculation?

Conversely, it can work out great for you.

For example, Amazon stock used to go up 30-40% a year reliably. Compensation model was "conservative" and estimated 15% a year.

So if you stayed at Amazon for a while, you could be paid very very well, thanks to stock appreciation.

For the risk adverse, a strategy is to sell the stocks as they vest, effectively treating it as cash. Companies will also issue additional RSU, if stock tanks too badly, as they'd be losing people otherwise.

Personally, I worked for Amazon and Microsoft for a number of years, and have kept all my RSU. It has worked out great for me (at least on paper).

It would be hard to find a job that pays $400k cash (yes I'm aware of Netflix) so there isn't much need to put a specific cash value on the RSU component for comparison. You're typically comparing two job offers which both have an RSU component.

RSUs have a volatility component (so discount the value for that, depending on the value of the grant vs your net worth), but also RSUs generally appreciate over the vest (it's not too common for a stock to be down over a 4-year period) which is a plus.

It depends how frequently it vests and what percentage vests every period. Amazon is notorious for vesting more of the grant towards the latter part of the vesting period with yearly vesting, while companies like Google are actually frontloading the grant and vesting monthly.

Tech stocks have done really well the last 10 years and will probably continue to do so. People who joined Snapchat a few years ago made over a million a year thanks to the appreciation.

Wow I work in NZ and with about 9 years exp I'm only just above the equivalent of $60k USD.

I think I need to move.

That's pretty low for that long experience even in NZ, what's your role and tech stack at the moment? Maybe I can find a referral for you if you want to stay in NZ. There are also Australian companies hiring remote that pay much better than that (e.g. Atlassian and Zapier,).

Ah haha are you me? My situation is exactly the same - your comment makes me feel much better that I'm not the only one!

A few weeks ago I talked to a recruiter who confirmed that I'm being underpaid. Since then I've struggled to stay motivated, but I also really hate job hunting/interviewing etc. I'm technically self employed, working for a single client, so I'm considering telling him that I'm going to take Fridays off. If he doesn't like that idea I'll start job hunting for real.

The "... in rat models" here is of course, "in the usa"

If you aren't in the USA your salary expectations should be significantly different.

Is hiring outside the US remotely so fraught with difficulty it’s worth paying extra 100,000s?

Are you talking about hiring a remote team and managing them? The answer may very well be yes for organizations that don't know how to properly communicate and utilize tools and methods to manage them. There is an entire middle management class in Silicon Valley that exists to manage engineers in person. Their day consists of many meetings, meetings with their team, cross-functional teams, visiting you and your co-workers in your office/cube and managing your work flow. Their work is not without value. This model has produced most of the software and hardware that we use daily. When you introduce remote teams, you introduce a type of friction that does not work with this model. All of sudden managers are not able to call an in-person meeting. They have to get up early or stay up late to coordinate. There is a perception that the remote team is slow, or not responsive. I have been in meetings at Apple where Steve would excoriate teams in France for not moving as fast as he wanted. This was not the case, but he could not micro-manage them in person.

The future is going to belong to companies that can master processes and technologies to coordinate teams across time zones, languages and countries. Warehousing employees in Mountain View, Cupertino, South Lake Union, Manhattan, Frankfurt, etc. seems ridiculous once you begin to understand how to co-ordinate dispersed teams. There is value in having teams work together and I like working in person with other people. The whole company town aspect of Apple/Facebook/Google/Oracle/etc. campus' seems so bizarre to me however. I just can't understand the benefit given the toll on the lives of the workers.

It's honestly remarkable just how much money the FAANG companies can throw around.

What on earth can relatively small private tech shops that can't dangle heaps of RSUs possibly do to compete?

Quality of life improvements may be some of the only levers they have available to pull.

Generous time off (for NA standards at least), beyond four weeks could lure people.

Permanent, flexible WFH and remote work options will be a new one that they can use to differentiate from big public companies that want seats in desks.

Lastly potentially 4 day, 32 hour work weeks could be an effective tool. We've seen stories of Eidos Montreal implementing this recently.

The biggest draw is to not evaluate candidate based on Leetcode, that way you don't have to compete with these top companies and can therefore get quality talent for cheap. It is however much harder to evaluate candidate without leetcode, so you need to be really good at that or you'll end up with a mediocre workforce like most other companies that pays mediocre salaries.

> What on earth can relatively small private tech shops that can't dangle heaps of RSUs possibly do to compete?

I would gladly accept a lower overall-career comp at a smaller tech company to work on something I personally had a ton of interest in.

Those places are few and far between and don't want to hire me anymore than FAANG does. In fact, FAANG would probably be easier.

Can someone describe what a Staff+ is and how it compares to architect? I think I know but my employer doesn't have that position, or an IC track - it seems that everyone is an engineer, architect, or manager, and a few years ago anyway it seemed like Architect was the senior position to aim for if you didn't want to be a manager.

I'm an architect now but I don't code as much and I suspect I could add more value if I did more self-directed coding.

https://staffeng.com/ is a great resource on this. It describes Architect as one of the possible archetypes[1] of staff engineers, though staff engineers can take on other responsibilities as well. It's possible that the Architect track in your company is just simply their name for this role.

[1] https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes

Threads like this kill all hope I have of making a real living if I stay in the tech industry, because I'm stuck in a hole where I need therapy for my social anxiety, ADHD, and depression to maintain the work, but can't afford it due to my wages and can't get my foot in the door anywhere offering the pay and insurance to cover that therapy, which keeps my job prospects dire and leaves me without the ability to afford school. And now that I'm in my mid-30s, that door is about closed forever. Even just 60-75k/yr would be life-changing for me, much less the 300-400k/yr people in this thread are throwing around.

I've dedicated my entire life to this industry and working for startups has left me with nothing to show for it except for drowning in mental health issues from the abuse suffered at the hands of terrible clients and bosses and my lack of any kind of support network, something I struggle build at my level of anxiety and don't get from family. At what point do I throw in the towel and just take some shitty minimum wage job?

The best way of doing this is to just use levels.fyi and ask on Blind (which is a toxic place, but a bit of toxicity is needed to maximize tc).

Blind is a real hive of scum and villainy, but at least you can get real numbers from real people

Those really only cover giant tech co's though. Clearly it would be better and more accurate to get real data points, but I think the approach the article describes works well if there isn't a bunch of public data for a company already.

Why is this being downvoted? Levels.fyi and Blind are great tools. Blind is toxic because posters are obsessive about their TC, but I feel that's a side-affect of not letting people talk about money in their real lives, so they need to be anonymous and vent.

Maybe Glassdoor.

FYI: Show off your TC Timeline

https://www.teamblind.com/post/Show-off-your-TC-Timeline-qqi...

Two things that jumped out at me: 1. It’s 2021. You can get a remote job for a big company that pays 10-15% less in Akron, not 40%. If you don’t want to work remote, you can still use BA remote salaries as leverage for local negotiations. 2. What “ggregoire” said: Engineers vary in quality EVERYWHERE. Many people holding onto CTO-type jobs in Akron or in BA startups can’t always move laterally. The salaries for everyone are rising in 2021, but for the truly strong (or for those who can nail an interview) they are rising even faster.

“I’ve been a software engineer about 5 years. […] I’ve been with a startup about 3.5 years, have taken over Product Management, and I manage other engineers who work on customer-facing projects. … At Robin’s level of experience, they’d be mid-career or senior-level at most larger companies – so that would be something like an L4-L5 at Google, ICT3-ICT4 at Apple”

5 years of (mostly) engineering work at a startup and you’re saying this is on par with an L5 at Google or L4 at Apple? I find it hard to take anything else in the article seriously after that

The article doesn't make the claim that you're refuting (i.e., this is a straw man). From your pull quote:

> something like an L4-L5 at Google, ICT3-ICT4 at Apple

I half agree with his math on private stock, though some private stock is like having the same access as the ultra rich to underpriced off market stock..

I don't follow the stock grants math at all. AFAIK what is usually given is a mix of low priced and ultra-low priced options vesting over 5 years. One might end up getting 300K a year of profit in vesting options by year 5 but is anyone getting $300k in pure stocks given to them in year one?

I'm not sure if its good to get in now while the market is hot or wait for January when it'll really take off.

What's happening in January that would make things take off?

> Content note: this piece discusses money, quite directly, with specific numbers and examples. Discussions about money can make quite a few people uncomfortable; if that’s you, you might want to skip this post.

Is this ironic?

> Is this ironic?

No.

I wonder how having so many companies moving to remote-work are changing this equation.

I've been asking people how much they'd take a pay cut to go for full-remote and most people say 10% is a no-brainer.

Nah! I wouldn't take a pay cut to go remote. In fact, I'd expect the following: 1. Yearly stipend to upgrade my workplace. 2. Quarterly paid trips to meet my teammates either at off-sites or conferences.

it's weird it looks like I make half of what I could as a senior, espcially in a 'hard' algorithm heavy domain

but I still oddly don't want to work for them, half the pay is still decently middle class and I'm very happy overall

there's also the internal argument I've had in that most of them don't really do anything interesting (usually things that were good ideas years ago)and even if they did odds that I'd be near what was are slim

I’d honestly like to see a concrete definition of ‘tech work’. This kind of (somewhat arbitrary) data is so problematic.

Has anyone gotten rich from their salary alone? If your salary goes up, so does your spending/lifestyle?

Lot's of people can get rich from their salary alone. I know many Silicon Valley workers who chose to live more frugally, invest in properties like duplexes, town homes, etc. and then rent and improve them and increase their net worth that way. When I was at Apple, they would do a 100% 401k match. Is being really rich at 65 good enough for you? That is one way to do it.

Rich is relative, right? How rich is rich enough? Spending seems to find a way to consume the income of a lot of people. There is always a nicer BMW/Audi/Tesla/Mercedes to buy. You can spend $300 on a pair of jeans. Spend a few hours at Neiman Marcus in Palo Alto and look at the prices. You can buy better and better seats at the ballet, symphony, baseball game. Business and first class plane tickets become mandatory. Look at the watches people wear. This is what happens as your income increases. There is always a way to spend and consume more and you will find a way to justify it. Believe me, I know.

These compensation amounts reflect what I am seeing in the market. Whenever I see these amounts, like many others, I am somewhat amazed, but then I stop, look at my own history and reflect on the environment that supports paying a Staff engineer $300k a year.

Here is my story, which may or may not shed some light on working in high tech in Silicon Valley. I was part of a couple of successful startups in Portland, OR and was convinced by a venture capitalist to join a software company as VP of Engineering in 1997. I was paid $225,000, given a bonus schedule and a percentage of the proceeds of the sale should one occur. For a while I flew from Portland to SFO and took a cab to Foster City every week. I eventually moved, trading my unique, top floor apartment with a view of a park for a generic stucco box apartment in Burlingame that cost three times as much. The work was brutal and involved lots of lay-offs, restructuring, working with vendors to avoid defaults and the usual joy of dealing with a company in crisis. It was soul crushing, but the company finally sold and I took my bonus and started another software company in Burlingame.

I did various startups, some good, some bad and ended up at Apple at what was called Engineer/Scientist (some number here). I can't remember what the number meant. I was making $145,000 and received 27,000 options priced at $9.00 a share. I bought a really boring townhouse off of Lawrence Expressway for $300,000 that cost $57,000 in 1967. It is jammed into an already dense neighborhood totally devoid of any personality. The very same townhouse just sold for 1.1 million because you can walk to Apple Parc from it.

Living in Silicon Valley, especially as a young engineer making $185,000 means living either in San Francisco and commuting, or living in one the fairly identical communities all along 101 in a fairly identical apartment building or renting a house. Maybe you can find a situation that is more unique, or boost your commute time and live in the periphery. The commute is no fun, because you and everybody else is arriving at your various mega-campus' around 9:00 and leaving around 18:00.

I often felt like I was going insane. I felt like people were piled on top of me. I would go on two-hour bike rides at lunch everyday into the hills to escape. I was making good money but the "nice" houses in Palo Alto or Woodside were extremely expensive. The cost of living was quite high, so even though one might make a lot, you can expend a lot. When I went out to dinner, everyone around me was talking about their startup, IPO, options, explaining how they were going to tell their early investors to "go pound sand", etc.

This is my experience and of course your mileage may vary. You may love the "hustle" the energy and all that entails. I don't know how people manage to raise kids or have a peaceful life there. I am sure it can be done. When I personally think of having to go back to living in Mountain View/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara and commute to the GooglePlex/Apple Parc/Facebook Hacker Way I am overcome by a deep sense of anxiety, dread and nausea.

Once again, this is my experience and I understand and value people who love this environment. Please don't be blinded by these high dollar compensation plans. I promise you there is more to life than making this amount to work in Silicon Valley. Please factor in all of the environmental values when you decide to move to Gilroy with your family to work at Facebook. There is definitely a cost.

Thanks for sharing.

We should also keep in mind how privileged we are to be in the right place (US) at the right time.

A lot of my high school friends (in Queens NY) are turning 30 and still living with their parents, unable to move out because they have to help with rent and bouncing from one dead end job to another.

I visit my friends at Google, who spend half their time doing yoga, and come across contracted security and cafeteria workers who remind me of my old classmates.

My significant other, who spent 3 years getting a graduate degree to work in healthcare is now deep in debt and trapped in a job that has her waking up at 4 am for 12 hour shifts that usually end up tuning into 14 hours, under constant stress taking care of patients on the verge of dying.

SV is what happens when you take typical American suburban hell, and then throw literally trillions of dollars on top without changing anything. Yeah, you can afford a Model S. But you're still sitting in traffic on 101 for hours every day. I don't understand how anyone lives there. It's boring as hell. The weather is "nice" but everything is so brown. The only people left are tech people, like you said.

Brilliant read, thank you for sharing. Looking back, would you have stayed in Portland?

> Bay Area salaries, according to levels.fyi, for these levels range from $190k to $350k.

> According to Robert Half, Bay Area salaries are 42% above the national average, so that range translates to $110k-$205k unadjusted.

can someone explain the math here? wouldn't this imply an unadjusted range of $134k ($190k/1.42) to $246k ($350k/1.42)?

You're right: I was doing my math wrong. I'm fixing the math in the article right now. Thanks for the correction!

> What should Robin, Chris, or you do with this information?

Work at a hedge fund.

Some big tech company salaries are higher than equivalent hedge funds salaries. Also, work life balance is better.

I know some folks more senior than me at top hedgefunds making less than I am.

I'd also add https://tldroptions.io/ as a quick and dirty potential options valuator. That being said, I agree with the author's default assumption that private options should be valued at zero, especially for financial planning purposes. At the same time, it is this hockey stick that is a strong part of the allure of smaller startups. There's an entirely separate levels.fyi equivalent that needs to be made for the amount of equity employees get at various stages of a company. It should also note that the size size of the exit is inversely proportional to the odds that it'll happen.

Thanks for the pointer - that's a great resource. I'm adding a link to it to the article.

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