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Comment by eyjafjallajokul | Hacker News Reader

100k is below starting salary in the Bay Area or Seattle. Most senior folks make 300-450k with Staff level engineers making 600-800k.

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I don’t know if that’s true. I live in Palo Alto and know a fair few people at a fair few companies. Outside of a handful of companies they’ll only be hitting those with illiquid highly-valued stocks - not with base & bonus.

Sounds like someone who invested in property in the Bay Area or Seattle and is trying to get its value to go up. I would need to see numbers on that.

Most? As in over 50% of all senior folk in the Seattle industry make 300-450k?

Definitely not. Total comp of senior engineers at Microsoft in Seattle is nowhere near this. (I am one of those at this point in time)

It is an unfortunate truth that Microsoft's pay between entry level to somewhere around principal is not competitive with a substantial number of companies. That is not to say that Microsoft doesn't provide other benefits, but top tier compensation is not one of them.

I don't mind. When I look at the vast majority of software engineering jobs out there even Microsoft compensation is good, and perfectly fine for Seattle.

I used to work at Google too (in Mountain View). Believe it or not I liked working at Google and I also like working at Microsoft.

I don't need to chase top tier compensation. I just do things I enjoy where I'm learning and my career can progress. Right now I'm mostly writing in Go working on an OSS project managed by the Cloud Native Compute Foundation.

As an aside, early retirement is not a goal of mine.

to be clear i don't think you should mind if comp-maximization isn't your sole focus now (or ever).

The point that kinda got lost here is that outside of the big tech circles, equity packages are basically non-existent. So, whereas in, say, Google Canada, you might make CAD 150k salary + 100k equity, in CGI[0], you might only make a CAD 120k salary with no equity grant for a similar level of seniority.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGI_Inc.

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