Ask HN: Are VC startups and FANG the only places to earn large sums of money?
Other than FANG, VC-backed startups, and fintech, are there any other places to earn large decent amount of money in tech?
Base comp seems comparable to the Phoenix metro, but TC is jacked due to RSUs.
You have to sell yourself as an idiot-fanatic to those companies; you live and breathe Apple/Amazon life etc. Only to work with engineers who are by no measurable means the top 1% of the industry.
There seem to be really brilliant people who work elsewhere or just own their own business because they have zero tolerance for the absolute stupidity of the hiring and culture at FAANG-likes. They are simply scattered about.
To answer your question, you can’t answer this question without collecting lots of data. Find tech companies, and probing for their compensation packages one way or another. Working with recruiters, collecting job postings, understanding regional TC.
Its very possible to find a good team within those (with Amazon probably being easier then others since it seems that they have the best intra-company transfer program), and its very possible to be stuck on a shit team with no free time.
I would say that FAANG still wins in the metric of raw dollar/hour of actual work. You can find teams with budget to coast on, develop simple software, while getting paid at standard company rates for the levels.
1. consulting
2. IT service firms (you have to be the owner of course)
3. being experienced in a really boring but useful niche: e.g. Wordpress plugins
4. having a cousin who works for the local gov and can help you win IT contracts
I'm assuming "large sums of money" here means (at least) $250k+. I guess I start to ask "how much is enough"?
80k is a very good salary in the EU. It's a senior dev salary outside of high-CoL tech hubs.
Landing one of these gigs makes FANG look like a McDonald’s open interview. You need to be an expert in terms of mathematical theory without sacrificing the ability to be pragmatic in real world situations (ie a sociopath…)
Also quant interviews are harder than FAANG, but not because they require math. Maybe that is the case for QR or Trading interviews, but I've interviewed for SWE positions at multiple places (Citadel, JS, HRT, Optiver, IMC, etc.) and none of them asked me complex math theory.
SWE interviews (at some places) ime are harder since they focus not only on algorithmic thinking, but deep knowledge on how your program and language work. Questions like: "How does malloc work at a OS level", "implement this STD object/data structure", "how does python garbage collection work", and OS questions are typical things to be asked.
If the interviews are algorthmic focused, the questions are usually harder than FAANG leetcode and require a clean and correct solution with minimal hand holding.
I have however met a lot of very smart people.
If you're a people person and are willing to travel, you can make a lot of money in tech sales.
If you're not a people person but are (really) good with tech and are willing to travel, you can make a lot of (but not FAANG-tier) money in consulting or pre-sales.
The best part about these two options is that you can escape the need to live in a city with a very high cost of living. Many of my peers make a lot of money but live in crazy cheap cities. Just have to be willing to be near an airport (about an hour away is good).
I hear that engineers working at defense contractors can make ridiculous money as well, but you're working at the speed of the government, most of the "good" work requires a government clearance, and the tech gets older as you go up in clearance level. You're also, more than likely, going to work on things that kill people or save people from being killed, in some way or another.
To quantify, "a lot of money" to me means >$250k/year.
I generally don't like talking to recruiters, but that is probably the one question you should ask them.
I think the secret trick is being really good at what you do.
What I always aim for is to make products and not be an agency.
You can sell a product multiple times per hour, you can sell a person hour only once per hour.
FANG, VC-backed startups, and fintech have them, there are others as well, although you need to look at what the specific companies do in addition to overall industry trends. one that seems like it would fit high revenue per employee + margins is oil and gas for example.
specializing helps (ie data science, DevSecOps, etc) on the engineering side
you can also take home millions as an employee if you're in like the top 1% of salespeople and at a company with a good product/commission plan in likely any industry, although it's not for most people and if you fail you will probably make less than the pre-career transition.
levels.fyi has the salaries for FAANGs, but also other places. Plenty of juicy salaries in non-FAANGs.
Sales -- esp. SaaS -- can make crazy money. Close a big deal and walk home with 100k, and possibly residuals if they keep re-upping.
Own any business, be it in tech, or whatever. I've personally known plumbers who own their own business and make over $300k a year and only go out in calls a couple of times a week -- their guys do the rest.
Also know several lawyers -- rough field, btw -- but they have won cases and earned fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (probate issues, IIRC). Not the story for a lot of lawyers, most don't make anything amazing, but that's true for most fields: for every startup angel who makes it big there are plenty of engineers and founders who don't get shit; a lot of baseball players never make it out of the minors...
- How to optimize your comp structure (which could be fun for nerds) especially around accelerators. If you're going to land 2 huge deals in 2023 and you manage to get them both in the same quarter, you might make +25% over them being split across the year.
- Selling the value to the customer vs the features (disclaimer, I have a startup to help with this) a lot of nerds are very aware of what the product does, but a little less eager to listen to the prospect's needs.
Generally speaking, you can make a ton of money in almost any field, but there is a trade off between “guaranteed” earnings and “opportunistic” income. The latter is often uncapped but is more random and requires the discipline to sustain yourself between opportunities and quickly capitalize when one appears.
2. Make lots of money
3. Enjoy your job
Choose any two.
FAANG sets tempo for salaries for every other company. Other companies might not reach that level of craziness, but many do end up near a similar bar.