I've been here for five years making mostly the same amount, and five years at a smattering of other places making half or less.
Oof... "simple web developer" is not very nice of you.
FWIW, there are a surprising number of companies that pay senior contributors this well in unglamorous fields. The world is full of what we call "tech enabled service companies", and some of these do very, very well. They depend very much on their secret sauce - the software they develop that makes them special. My perception, however, is that they probably aren't generally hiring at those kind of rates, but rather promoting/raising the devs that helped get them where they are. Some of them seem like very nice places to work.
The old adage applies: you make money doing what other people don't want to do or can't do. If it's not glamorous and hip and shiny new tech, the competition is a lot less fierce and rates must rise accordingly.
Shameless plug: I have SWE roles open at every level on some small teams doing cool stuff at Indeed. Feel free to email.
Assuming these companies are morally evil, why not join to change them in a virtuous direction?
Either you can make positive change or if you can't make change, then you're not necessarily additive to evil ("do no harm").
It's really hard to make an impact (good/bad) at large firms.
Let alone my experience, I have NEVER seen an argument supporting this conclusion. If anything, it's the opposite.
And your phrasing can't reconcile why "90% of startups fail".
You're making a values judgment that's talking past this thread.
There's clearly a miscommunication.
OK, but what if we /don’t/ assume that? I understand that’s the only acceptable sentiment on HN, but it’s disappointingly uninformed.
Strangely enough I don’t see anyone railing against for profit evil companies willing to sacrifice their pay to work for a non profit or go into social work.
Ironically, for eg, most of the DuckDuckGo posts here end up with DDGers explaining how they enjoy using “!g”…
How many people who want to take the moral high ground will give up their CS pay to become social workers to “make the world a better place.”?
Only the most dogmatic critics of FAANG would argue that FAANG products provide no value. Everyone else is willing to acknowledge that they’re useful but come with trade offs - like everything else in life.
Do you apply your moralistic stance to the second order derivative? Will you refuse to work for a company that is hosted on one of those companies? That advertises on one of those companies? Will you try to get your company to block Google from searching?
Do you think YCombinator funds companies for any other reason than for profits?
A companies goal is to make a profit. If you are concerned about the greater good, encourage your government to tax the corporations and implement programs to help people.
From the top of my head - Costco has a reputation of being a better place to work in. I may be mistaken, bring your points if you want. Costco doesn't nearly have the position on its market comparable to, say, Google's, so it's a good example of the company which has to - and does - care more about society it's in.
> Do you apply your moralistic stance to the second order derivative?
No I don't. I do breathe the same air as currently alive criminals, for example.
> Will you try to get your company to block Google from searching?
If I get to define technical policies in a company, e.g. make a startup I'll try. I'm optimistic that it's doable.
> Do you think YCombinator funds companies for any other reason than for profits?
I think there are reasons that YCombinator funds companies for other reasons too, yes.
> A companies goal is to make a profit. If you are concerned about the greater good, encourage your government to tax the corporations and implement programs to help people.
I believe it's a simplistic approach. Following the "letter" of the idea "bring benefits to shareholders" usually assumes "short-term benefits". Here's the contradiction.
I would much rather take responsibility for Facebook than for the hellscape of parking lots and chain stores that dominate the environment around any home worth less than a million dollars.
I purposefully left out Facebook. I don’t see how they have been a net good for society. I also left our Apple, since they don’t focus on the “lower and middle income”.
1. I have an addiction to food and shelter and my parents seem to have a problem taking care of someone who is almost 50.
2. According to DQYDJ, I’m in the 97th percentile of income earners [1]. I am not bragging, a college grad 5 years out of school would be too as an SDE2 at any major tech company.
3. Are you independently wealthy or do you also exchange labor for money?
This shifts the goalposts towards “good place to work in”, which I would say large companies like FAANG easily qualify for.
However, this is exactly the problem. The press and social media love dunking on tech companies, so we collectively forgot about all the other industries.
If we go back to the initial concern of morality, are you claiming Costco doesn’t care about profit, has a fully ethical supply chain, pays all levels of workers fairly, treat customers fairly, etc?
This is rhetorical btw, since literally no company in our globalised capitalist world can fulfil these goals. They can only virtue-signal while committing atrocities…
> This shifts the goalposts towards “good place to work in”, which I would say large companies like FAANG easily qualify for.
This takes my words out of context.
I've worked for many companies whose goal was not to make a profit, but instead to make the world better for one group of people.
They did profit, but that was really just so they could afford to continue to help their target audience.
I've never really understood the anger toward share holders. Most people have a pension, and that's invested in the stock market. When people say "share holders" I think of teachers pensions, and nurses pensions, my welders-widow grand mother. The "share holders" are people.
RE tax.. I can't think of a better way to light money on fire. Australia recently spent nearly 100million on a Covid safe app that tracked people. It was an utter flop, and I'm not sure it tacked down even one person. 100 Million $ on a 100% predictable flop.
What specifically did the companies you held in such high regards do that caused them to forego profit?
None of the major tech companies got there by worrying only short term benefits.
Did you chose computer science over something like social work for the monetary benefits?
Howard Hughes: Well, I'm sure his stockholders would be happy to hear that.
[Everybody starts laughing]
I did, and I agree that there are possibilities. They aren't nearly always available - R&D departments in Microsoft or Google are very different than their cash cow departments. I wonder if the former justify the latter. It's not enough, say, to be a PhD to get into those departments, so only minority of engineers can indulge themselves working there.
Tesla is a luxury electric car company that is dependant on a very immoral supply chain to procure various raw materials, for their cars and batteries, i.e. pretty much everything. Of course, nobody cares about the hidden blood/slavery inherent to their supply chain.
Facebook is a social media company, that billions of people use and enjoy, while being monetised by ads (attention). It has been used as a “weapon” to create radical parties and subvert democratic process - but at a larger global scale than traditional press media could achieve.
Not everything is cut and dry, and most mainstream opinions are manufactured by the global media. Why /did/ we all collectively forget about every other industry than tech? Because the media is being replaced by social networks, and they’re facing an existential crisis, so they respond with biased coverage. Think hard about that!
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/hundred...
Tesla is as toxic as any FAANG. Every Tesla employee I've talked to has been treated worse than I get treated at AWS.
It's not too common, but it's doable.
Most programers make between 120-160 as you said.
Honestly, it's a matter of diminishing returns. Your lifestyle is probably not going to change between making 150, and making 200.
The tax rates are so absurdly high at that level, you might keep about half of that additional income.
Then again, I'm a single person so I imagine if I had a family to support the extra money would matter.
I went from $150K at the beginning of 2020 to around $225K working remotely. At $150K we could do anything we wanted (married grown children) to a point six months later we could do everything we wanted.
Meaning with $225K, we could:
- “retire my wife” at 45 so she could pursue her passions.
- max out my 401K (and soon catch up contributions) and max out my “after tax 401K” with 10% of my base
- go on multiple decent vacations a year.
- fly my wife out with me on business trips (on my dime) and stay over.
- “Date nights” once a week or so.
- stay in AirBnbs around the country for weeks at a time just for a change of scenery and work from there.
We had to balance those things before. Now we can do all of it.
If I made more, it would go toward my less conservative investments - real estate, opening a franchise, etc.
Just for clarification, we pay the employer’s side of FICA on RSUs and I am soon moving to a state that doesn’t tax income.
But why is there a belief that you work harder to get paid more? It was a lot more work being a senior dev/de facto “cloud architect” at a 60 person company where everyone look to me for guidance (in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king) than it is being a mid level consultant at a 1.6 trillion dollar company.
The downside is that the city has very little income for infrastructure improvement/upkeep and education.
Just to be clear - we have to pay the employer side.
An increased marginal rate means an increased average rate, so (looking at it in an entirely equivalent way) all of your income does get taxed more, just not as by as much as the marginal increase. Arguing otherwise demonstrates either functional innumeracy or deceitfulness.
You’re just being overly pedantic.
That’s also not how any economist thinks of it.
Because it does. Stop being deceitful by pushing the free variable over to one extreme of all the extra tax being allocated to the margin. Literally any other allocation results in the conclusion that some additional tax is taken from the baseline income.
This is the natural way to look at it. When I get taxed throughout the year, I don't see my first $X get taxed at Y% and then the next %X' get taxed at %Y'; I see the whole lot get taxed at Z%, Y<Z<Y'. And at the end of the year, I don't see that I have paid Y% or Y'% of my income, I see that I have paid Z% of my income. Marginal tax rate is propaganda with no basis in reality. Average tax rate is the only meaningful number.
Marginal tax rate provides a convenient way to define a piecewise progressive tax curve which is continuous by construction, which is a nice property, but it is just a convenience. The function is still increasing everywhere above the negative tax cutoff. Every dollar earned does result in more taxes being paid on the whole income.
I don't know the exact tier bucket that every company falls into, but if FAANG is tier 1 (300-400k), then uber, abnb, lyft, mcsft, etc are tier 2 (also 300-400k), Walmart, Intuit, VMWARE, ServiceNow are tier 3 (200-300k), etc. etc.
(I'm going off the compensation numbers Ive seen on levels.fyi so feel free to disagree with any of my placements but you get the idea).
I would say that there are plenty of jobs that pay around 200-250k cash for mid career anyway. (Including bonus and salary.) Usually in high growth startups.
For example I interviewed with a company going into series B that offered that much in cash comp + remote, and it was a smallish team of 50. Very sane hiring process, a pair programming exercise and a bunch of walking through prev projects. Had a couple startups that I ended up canceling with just b/c I got an offer I liked from someone else, but I'd assume it's the same.
If you don't like algo questions some high paying companies like Stripe have alternative processes too.
Other public startups, like Spotify, which pay about that much and have a pretty reasonable process compared to FAANG. Easier algo questions, less toxicity in hiring.
I will caution you for my anecdata, I have some FAANG experience out of college and I passed multiple FAANG processes, as well as working for an HFT in school doing backofficey work. So maybe since I was well prepared for interviews + had some branding they were willing to pay higher than usual for me.
If you or anyone else in the thread wants to chat about it feel free to email/dm me :)
The vast majority of FAANG jobs are below 200k base salary, but if you then throw in a few 10s of thousand in bonuses, a few hundred k of stocks vesting, and suddenly you get to stupid levels of income (worked a multiple FAANGs as a reasonably high level IC)
But again RSUs are a huge part(for example they make half my income in my taxes this year)
This is a problem that repeats in all the salary+wage transparency bills. Most of the intended targets already have established level->salary bands, discriminatory comp is largely through bonuses and stock (RSUs, options, etc).
Options in private companies are statistically meaningless, they are close to lottery tickets.
That’s just like saying if they agreed to pay you $250K in cash, and you lost your job in June, you wouldn’t get the other $125K.
But if we are talking about the 5 largest tech companies - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, I doubt they are going to be so distressed that they are going to not pay their RSUs.
Let’s say I get my RSUs in June. I have them set to sell as soon as I vest and now cash is just sitting in my brokerage account. At the beginning of every month, I have $1500 transferred to my main checking account. That offsets the deficit I have in my monthly budget after I have retirement savings deducted from my regular account.
If I were getting the money monthly, I would save for big ticket items every month. I know I’m getting a net around $25K in six months, so I just allocate that.
But in the grand scheme of things we are only talking about six months in the whole. It is slightly different from a bonus since statistically, you would expect your RSUs to go up over time. Your “bonus” is going to be worth more than the initial stated value. If you are granted 100 RSUs over 4 years when the stock was worth $100, even if they just go up with the rest of the stock market, the last amount will be worth 30% more when you vest.
But this also assumes we are talking about the big 5 profitable tech companies and not places like Uber and Robinhood.
So, I was trying to speak about what I will be doing because it is much more generally applicable to most places than what I am doing.
Amazon is weird in how your initial four year offer works.
Year 1: base + prorated signing bonus every pay period + 5% of your four year RSU vest.
Year 2: base + prorated signing bonus (a smaller amount) + 15% of your four year vest
Year 3 and 4: base + 40% of your four year vest.
Then after that you get more stock to keep you about even.
So out of the initial signing bonus - which if your total compensation is $200K, expect year one to be $50K distributed throughout the year and year two to be about $35K. I am using the first two years to pay off debt (to reduce my monthly expenses) and to build up savings so I could meet all of our monthly needs out of my base after year 2. I said earlier I “retired my wife”. It wouldn’t have been possible to live just on my base without getting rid of debt.
I am completing year 2 the middle of this year.
As far as riskiness. My wife is keeping her CDLs up to date so she can go back into the school system if needed. Not for the money, for the benefits. I can always do independent consulting if necessary. With my being able to say “I worked in Professional Services at AWS” gives me an amount of credibility I wouldn’t have had before.
I started taking my career seriously after staying at my second job for 9 years until 2008. I got into regularly old C# enterprise dev and I saw myself hitting a ceiling at around $150K in most major American cities outside of the west coast. That ceiling remained the same from around 2016 until the present.
I am still an enterprise dev/architect. But I just happen to know AWS and fell into the one niche position at the one major tech company that paid over $200K for dev+cloud in mid 2020.
Even today, from my cursory searching, if I had to find another job, I would probably end up firmly on the mid $100s side again without “grinding leetCode” (tm r/cscareerquestions). So, I don’t know how to find a job outside of “FAANG” that would pay me what I make now.
Not that I’m looking.
but then inflation hits, and so the money is worth less than before - so you didn't really get ahead at all.
Then I got distracted, dropped out of graduate school and didn’t think about consulting companies anymore.
Fast forward to 2020 (and a decade of letting my career stagnate until 2010), I was looking at the same companies because I was interested in cloud consulting.
I found out that consulting companies haven’t kept up with inflation…
These days, being "outside the hotspots" should be an issue since many companies (including ours) are fully remote.
The only true way to find out is to start talking to recruiters or getting offers.
By non-FAANG, I guess I mean some combination of:
1. Companies your uncle might not have heard about (by this I mostly mean not AirBnB or Uber)
2. As an extension of #1, probably b2b
3. Headcount somewhere in the 20-150 neighborhood
4. Probably something established, not seed-stage or a venture rocketship
5. Somewhat less onerous interview processes. I don't mind fun algo and design problems, but I would rather not have to prep for 4 months to have speed leetcode thrown at me for 8 hours
This is all just off the top of my head, though. And I know that all 5 in one company is a lot to ask for.
All of them have since been given the option to work remotely from (almost?) anywhere, and their pay hasn't changed (except to the extent for a couple of them, their options are now worth something, too).
Separately from that, if you're interested in finance, it's more like at least $300-500k, and some of those are now becoming available fully remotely, too.