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Comment by the_jeremy | Hacker News Reader

anecdote: This year, I was on a team of 2 and my coworker left for Google for a little under $300k. I told my boss I was going to quit to do interview prep and said I was making onsites for companies offering $200k, and they offered me $200k to stay. That was a 90% raise for my teammate who left and a 60% raise for me.

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So your boss could afford to pay you 60% more but decided not to until he was effectively forced to, and you figure that's who you want to work for?

Getting a very significant raise to stay in the same role is a strong signal that the company doesn't value its people and will pay you as little as possible in the future. I'd bet any money that your next 2 or 3 reviews will come with no further raises because "you just got a huge pay increase".

No company is going to pay everyone the highest amount they possibly can. Is that how you buy groceries?

No company is going to pay everyone the highest amount they possibly can.

Letting someone's salary get to a point where they need a 60% raise to get back to a market competitive salary is terrible people management.

You are right in the sense that my company was underpaying relative to the market. The reasons I decided to stay were:

1. I had been there < 3 years, and was at my only other job was 1 year, and I think that has at least slightly negative connotations on a resume to some.

2. I get to be team lead (of a team of 2, yeah), which is not something I would get to do anywhere else, given my 4 YOE.

3. I like my team and WFH and WLB and taking a chance on a new company when the comp would be the same sounded risky.

4. I didn't actually have any offers. I had made it to 3 on-sites and had a few more in the pipeline, but most were for lower compensation than my counter-offer. I went ahead and did the on-site that was for more comp afterward (I told my boss I was doing this), but I didn't get the offer there either, so I didn't really have another option to choose instead.

5. 200k is top-of-band for non-tier-1 companies for my area / YOE, and more than half of the tier 1 companies in my area were over an hour commute.

> I was on a team of 2 and my coworker left for Google for a little under $300k

I had a coworker leave to be an L4 SWE at Google earning the same in 2017. I don't know if the anecdote is relevant to the 2021 Great Resignation if people were doing the same thing 4 years ago (unless your colleague got an L3 offer for that amount).

check levels.fyi

In fact levels.fyi shows an L4 Google SWE earning about $270k. GP's story of someone earning $300k in 2017 is certainly an outlier.

Is it easy to fetch Google offers from late 2017 to get a distribution? I believe it was close to top of the range back then.

Regarding the $270k number, looking at the distribution in levels.fyi for L4 in SF Bay Area: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

The 75th percentile is $290k which fits the comment I was replying to ("a little under $300k") and by definition not an outlier.

Actually, looking at the earliest data points levels.fyi still shows under the same page, $300k doesn't seem to be an outlier in 2017 either: https://imgur.com/a/hhO7dQE

Anecdotally, Google has not become any more competitive in the past few years as far as compensation goes.

I am familiar with levels.fyi (and was back in 2017 as well), what did you mean?

This was the only reason I considered resigning. I know I have to do interview prep, even for non-faang, and it’s hard to do it after a days work.

With that said, given how this is my plan no matter what, it has actually freed me from whatever circumstances can arise at work.

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