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Comment by deanmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, they do pay less for senior roles, especially the ones below 200 people who don’t suffer from politics mentioned in my original post.

I’m paid $1.2M as IC at a FAANG, not in Bay Area or NYC. To get a similar compensation I would have to get very, very lucky at a growing startup. Instead here I entered through the front door last year and got basically that comp (experienced some mild stock growth so far as a nice bonus).

I will concede the argument that a person might not need that much, but I’d rather milk it until it lasts and get a $300k job when I’ll have no alternatives. I’m actually kind of hoping it will stop so the opportunity cost of doing something else, more interesting, will be less steep to pay :-)

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This is insanity -- you get paid $1.2M as an IC?! How? Is this total comp?

Total comp with some mild stock appreciation. My entry offer was $950k+ when I joined last year. https://levels.fyi has several data points similar to mine, look at the L6/L7 IC tracks at most FAANG.

I feel we are going a bit off topic here, but I’ll say that you have to deal with a lot of frustrating situations in these large organizations, so it tends to wear you out. Startups, in my experience, are more fun if you are a person who thrives off being productive. Still to this day, I look fondly at my “early startup employee” phase, I have never been able to be so fulfilled in my professional life ever since, despite my compensation going up 10X+ from those days.

Plus, a lot of people on HN routinely and proudly state how they would never want to work for companies like Meta or Google for ethical reasons, so there’s that too.

That's funny with your use of L I figured you'd be at Google and that that tracks with my experience at FB but no one calls it meta except people at meta so I guess I'm just saying that tracks lol

"some mild stock appreciation".. quite an understatement. $250k (annual) appreciation in a year. Whew.

My perspective is skewed by several friends who made it HUGE by joining unicorns at the right time.

My network is literally filled with senior developers who are earning $5M+ a year from the successful IPOs of 2020/2021, most after having been there less than 3 years. Crazy stuff.

From that perspective, a FAANG growing 30% yoy looks like a risk-free rate of return :-)

> My network is literally filled with senior developers who are earning $5M+ a year from the successful IPOs

Most people here disdain stock options as worthless. And I guess for the most part they are with a few happy exceptions.

How early an employee do you have to be to get that kind of return?

For the great unicorns, not that early. If you join as a senior engineer it’s relatively easy to get 250-400k in equity per year, so you just need to wait for the company to do 10X in order to make $3-5M a year. The math is different from the stock options you mention, we are talking about joining very late in the game, once the companies are already in the unicorn status. By that stage they don’t even give options anymore, just illiquid RSUs. The people who joined really early of course won the lottery and you have rank and file employees sitting on high 8 figures.

There are some interesting numbers here: https://iporegrets.com/

I know several people from AirBnB, Doordash, Snowflake who all joined around 2018 and made bank.

I was an early employee at a smaller startup that is still illiquid and my stock options (fully exercised) are worth $6M. They could still all go to $0.

Just by looking at myself and my immediate network, I wouldn’t say playing the startup game is necessarily like a lottery, the odds are better (but note that I still chose FAANG lately, as mentioned above). YMMV.

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