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Comment by googlethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

As a point of data, I work at Google and am at a similar point in my career. My base salary a year ago was $136k, but there was a companywide 10% raise last winter, and now my base is $150k.

You get a cash bonus each year that's around 15% of your base, but if you're a superstar it can be double that, or if you're a total disappointment, it can be nothing. But if I perform as expected, that's another $22k.

Finally, I was granted 300 shares of stock that vest annually over four years. So each year, I get 75x the value of a Google share. GOOG is trading around $600, so that's another $45k.

So my total annual compensation this year will be $217k. If I were bragging to an ex-employer, I'd probably round up to "a quarter million" too. :)

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Adding to the data pool:

I'm also an under-30 engineer making ~250k in the Bay Area (at a publicly-traded gaming company, not at Google). My company has six pay grades for pure engineers; I'm at the second highest. My 2011 comp breaks down as follows:

* 166k base

* 45k bonus

* 35k stock grants (RSUs)

Note this does not include 401k matching, stock purchase plan, healthcare, or any other quantifiable perks.

When I took this job a year ago, I had a similar offer from a prominent NYC startup: ~220k (150k base, 30k bonus, 250k options over 4 years using offer-time valuation). I was 26 at the time.

For added context, I did not attend an elite school. I did not complete my undergraduate degree. I'm smart, but not extraordinarily so (800/710 math/verbal SAT). I interview well. I have a "disruptive" skill (cloud expertise).

> I interview well

Any tips or techniques outside of the standard behavioral based interviewing techniques (like STAR)?

Also, I suspect you may be underselling yourself here, you very well may have excellent communication skills (like presenting complex ideas clearly to senior management) or even just social acumen.

Brushing up on your standard CS algorithms and concurrency school problems, a favorite of SV interviews. And being skilled in whatever area you are being interviewed for.

what kind of work do you do - what programming languages you can write in and what type of tasks you do

Isn't a perfect math score very hard to get, something like the upper 1%ile? Do you know your IQ? I'm scandinavian and could do a traditional finance/consulting/management/accounting thing in my home country but the software industry seems far more fascinating. I'm afraid my 120 to 125 iq means I'm too stupid to do well in SV though.

all your iq score really measures is how well you do in iq tests. if you have an interest in and a basic aptitude for programming, you should be fine.

(also, a perfect math score in the sat isn't impossibly hard - the level of mathematics is probably lower than your last school exam. it just takes a lot of practice to do that many questions fast and accurately.)

IQ is a good test, but at 120-125 you are still far smarter than most people on earth.

Just look at the normal distribution of IQ scores: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg

Sure, a lot of people are in the 120+ range on Hacker News, at top management consulting companies etc. but if you are 110+ IQ you are probably smart enough to do almost any job on the planet.

I'm not a programmer, but I imagine that like business, there are plenty of terrible programmers with 140 IQs that believe they are entitled to not working hard or being good with people.

They will always make less and even their high IQ will not allow them to figure it out.

No, you are not. The more damning trait would be believing you are not qualified because of a test administered when you were 8 years old (or worse, believing the results of any IQ test administered after that).

There are certainly brilliant folks around in the valley, who can grasp concepts faster and more deeply than seems human, but they are a significant minority.

The prime requisites for success as an employee in the valley are still:

1) Good judgement (which tends to come from accurate self-reflection and critique)

2) Love of learning (so it takes you a couple hours or even days to grok redis's failure modes instead of 20 minutes, who cares -- the question is are you going to learn it (and every other useful thing that comes along, for years))

3) Basic sociability (the valley is a small world, everyone knows each other, if you are a jerk life will get more difficult).

For a much more eloquent description of how to thrive as a programmery type in the valley, consider http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html but translate research into "generally useful skills for building stuff."

"You and Your Generally Useful Skills for Building Stuff." :-)

I don't know if things were different when he took the SATs, but I know several people who got 800s in math last year. It's not that hard, especially if you're reasonably intelligent and study a bit. (I myself got a 770 and a 780 for two different tests without really studying for math, and I think those were both just one question wrong).

I had that 155+ IQ and 800 SAT-M score, and honestly, the best thing it's done for me is take away my excuse for failing.

Once you get to a high enough intelligence that you can understand what the people around you are telling you and follow their train of thought, intelligence really doesn't matter all that much. Other characteristics like perseverance, social & communication skills, and emotional stability become dominant. There's nothing "magical" about getting an 800 SAT-M (or working at Google, for that matter), it's just that the effect of having a large body of knowledge that we spent thousands of hours acquiring to draw upon.

800 SAT is upper 1%ile among "potentially college bound high school seniors", AKA the sort of people who go on to earn a CS/Math/Science/Engineering degree and then join a prominent tech company.

If you haven't seen the SAT math, it is a slightly creative twist on 10th grade math (Algebra and Geometry). Scoring an 800 means you could get an A grade in high school math, and are not so slow at solving the problems, and are careful enough to avoid sloppy mistakes in your work.

"120" IQ is supposedly 2 standard-deviations above the "(human?) population mean", which is ~98%ile of the population, which is well within the margin of error of these sorts of measurements.

Do you know if the 10% raise is automatically applied to the base salary of new hires as well?

I'm looking for a new job, and strangely, Google's base is about 10% lower than the base from my other offers (Apple, Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn), rather than 10% higher.

Also, to add my own datapoint: I'm four years out from undergrad at an elite school, and Google offered me $120k base and 500 stock units over four years. My recruiter said that given the way annual bonuses work (15% bonus if you perform average, all the way up to 15% * 3.5 = 52.5% if you're extraordinary), I should haven't have much trouble getting about a 30%-35% bonus. So my expected annual salary from base, stock, and bonuses is about $120k + 125 stock units * $600 (which is what Google is currently trading at) + 30% * $120k = $231,000.

If I'd joined Google right out of school, I expect this would be even higher, since I would have received the 10% raise last year (and also, I've made a series of poor career decisions to join no-name startups that I think have kept my current base salary lower than normal and made me a little less desirable). Pure speculation, though.

Yes, it is. They just increased their pay scales by 10% across the board forever.

The 10% is factored into new offers.

Tell your Google recruiter about your competing offers, especially if you're considering choosing another job on this basis.

Ah, I did, and he slightly more than tripled my RSUs (from 150 to 500), but left my base the same. Which is also weird since that base is lower than my current one.

That's about $50K/yr, assuming a 4-year vest and today's price range. Nice job.

I assume they give out RSU more than cash because it's a better-aligned incentive (both in motivations and risk profile), and it makes your x% raise cheaper next year.

I'm at another large valley company, at a similar point in my career, and I have almost the same base / equity compensation. Added up I hit around 220k.

I've had offers from other shops in the same just-over-200k ballpark, and I know peers at google pulling in around the same. I don't doubt 250k for a second.

I'm web developer, 25 years old, I'm raising 21000 euro/year. What I'm doing wrong? :/

Working in Europe?

Welcome to the club, I'm also from Europe and make few percents more and I'm 31.

Looks like Poland/Czech?

> What I'm doing wrong?

You're not applying to visa-friendly startups in Silicon Valley right now. :)

>>So my total annual compensation this year will be $217k. If I were bragging to an ex-employer, I'd probably round up to "a quarter million" too. :)

That last part about "a quarter million" made me crack up. Awesome stuff!

Now, down votes, come to me.

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