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Comment by NotSammyHagar | Hacker News Reader

Explain what you mean by 2,3,4x more please. You can look at levels.fyi and if you are in a big tech see what the big companies are paying, that sets the market. In my experience the amounts of sometimes shockingly high, but eliminate a few crazy outliers and I see accurate rates. I'm a 20 year experienced principal engineer, and I see rates that match what I get.

So what would 2,3,4x mean. Do you mean that much over your current salary, or over the 'market rate'. If someone paid me 2 or 3x my market rate as a principal backend infrastructure engineer, I would take it, but a year ago when I was interviewing, the offers from the big guys were not that different.

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What I mean is in my firm grads with 2 years experience are on $140k, and can make multiples in MANGA. If you already have a good SV tech salary you aren't going to make 3x unless you luckily hit a RSU jackpot.

Is principal engineer typical for 20 years experience where you are? Or are they typically stuck at senior engineer? Because if you're ahead of the average already like that, then indeed it will be hard to do better elsewhere.

Having said that, yes I agree it does seem that at higher levels companies are a lot better about fitting compensation to that of competitors.

Where I'm at, which is a near faang, previously I was working at one and had offers from them, it's not about time, it's about working on multiple projects with significant accomplishments, a mixture of leader and IC usually, but you can still code today. Even if I admit to myself it's harder to code these days :-)

I also see people really early in career 10;years getting principal jobs and I think that's just from competition.

It's not completely about time you mean. Time is just a rough proxy for experience. It's not just about significant accomplishments either, but rather significant accomplishments that are recognized by your employer. For all you know that senior engineer was single-handedly key to their last company's success, but their manager got all the credit while the engineer got a 1.5 multiplier on their annual bonus.

But sure. My question was more about the meaning of principal where you are. At some places it's more like just another grade of senior engineer. While at others it's equivalent to a decent rung of middle management and part of a different salary range, to which the current discussions about tech employee pay may not apply so much.

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