Please consider publishing your salary data like this as well.
Strong agree! I do this too: https://jefftk.com/money
Strong agree! I do this too: https://jefftk.com/money
I can't understand why any company would pay so much money for a software engineer and I especially can't understand why someone would quit such a job. That is life-changing money. It's like winning the lottery.
Between real estate, and the equities market, a few million dollars can support your lifestyle indefinitely. But also factor in that this group of people can also be limited partners in Private Equity and Hedge Funds forever and get tiny pieces of a couple big bets (and I would seriously ignore articles that say the S&P beats them. YMMV, good luck!)
Yes, and it seems they used it to change their life.
Imagine how much money can be saved by shaving 5 percent off an annual AWS bill of 10 million dollars. (dont forget to factor in present value of future year's savings!) Now imagine a company like Google that spends way more than 10mil on infra. And even if your infra is cheap, virtually every tech giant has shown that shaving 100ms off a request is a massive boost to customer engagement metrics, so maybe it _shouldn't_ be that cheap. And product teams are just as valuable, if not more so.
That explains the demand. On the supply side, people who can actually do the work are hard to find. There's a massive gulf between having a degree in CS and actually making good on improving complex software. I've watched like three teams fail to deliver on a GSLB[1] optimization tool. Two of the three iterations didn't recognize this as NP complete (bin-packing, essentially) and the third is learning the hard way that there's calculating an optimal response is only part of the problem -- you also have to change state without inducing outages on the receiving end, and a naive SAT solver won't produce that. Beyond that, bay area is expensive to live in, and is high tax. $634k becomes more like $300k, in a city where you might spend $5k a month in rent. So there's definitely a _floor_ to salaries.
Also: once all this is accounted for, retaining talent with equity grants has a side effect of accidentally pushing wages above target. Some places like Amazon seem to explicitly take this into account when issuing refreshers, others not so much. Which means to hire someone away from Google is really hard. But really easy to recruit from Meta at the moment, as their stock has fallen 60 percent so income has fallen as well. Beware of the double edged sword.
[1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/global-serv...
I've been in a startup where the product was so cool that we'd get people working for nothing but options because they were too burned out by $MEGACORP developer culture. The money developers were leaving was so ridiculous I figure we could have charged people to work for us and we'd still have gotten more applications than we knew what to do with.
disclaimer, i guess: i work at a sister project of the NAO
The real question is - why are they so high? There are literally tens/hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates that Google rejects in their hiring process. This makes the remaining candidate pool small enough that they have to offer half a mill to get them. If Google's hiring wasn't so restrictive, they could pay much less. However, since they're basically printing money, there's no incentive to go there yet.
Google's internal culture sounds awful to me*. Tons of kool-aid chugging, shadowy political battles, people obsessed with tech for the sake of tech... plus they don't generally interview for a specific position, instead you interview for Google at large and then have to find a team that wants you once you pass the bar.
Passing the bar is also obnoxious. Maybe there are a lot of transcendent super-geniuses out there who can do it without studying, but IMO the Google bar is tuned to baseline-assume that you can crank out a Leetcode Hard problem in a few minutes, then they throw extra twists in on top of that.
So you have to spend months of your precious free time cranking away at coding practice just to get an offer, and then hope that you can find a job you like once you're in. OR you can go to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Uber, etc and make just as much money.
* I can appreciate how it'd appeal to a lot of people though. One man's "Kool-aid chugging" is another's "Pursuit of social justice", one man's boondoggle is another's cool tech, one man's "shadowy political battles" are another's "Engineer-first Meritocracy"
Well, sure it is. The information asymmetry/individual motivation that you speak of doesn't make things somehow magically different, it merely helps determine, along with a myriad of other factors, the values for supply and demand.
> The real question is why are Google’s salaries so low?
Because that is where supply and demand meet, just as illustrated on the your econ 101 supply/demand curve. Quite simply, they don't have to pay more because supply is sufficient at that price to satisfy the demand.
> If he would donate $400k/year to the cause
I used to do that: https://jefftk.com/donations
I don't actually think it would be better altruistically: https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...
If the engineer earns you or saves you 1.2 million why on earth wouldn't you be prepared to pay 600k for them?
But trying to keep a larger share means you lose out on all of it, as you will get outbid.
If they can save other companies 1.2 million as well (which they will because few companies are so unique) then their price will naturally creep up towards that value as others will be willing to pay more because it's a good deal.
Google receives a huge number of applications from unqualified people. They take the very few that are Google-level.
If you're too good, they will feel threatened and not hire you. It's all politics inside these megacorps. Engineers will never allow real talent to be hired on the same team as them... Why would they compromise their position within the company hierarchy?
They'd rather only hire moderate talent; just smart enough to get the job done but dumb enough to not get in the way of your next promotion.
For example, in 2015 I was able to buy a house that would have cost ~5x as much in a comparable location (25min commute to work, 10min from a subway station) in the Bay.
Sure, you need some baseline level of smarts, but it isn't some obscene 1/1000 genius. I'd be willing to bet that at least a quarter of all programmers are smart enough to work at FAANG and make 300-600k.
Interview/Leetcode problems are a lot like mystery novels or sudoku puzzles. Once you know the basic building blocks (data structures, algorithms, sneaky tricks) they're hard but not THAT hard.
Google's a bit of a different beast from the rest of the FAANG companies. They take it as a baseline assumption that you can easily crank through a super hard coding question, and throw a wrench into it while you're working on it. IMO it's still doable to pass the bar though.
After a couple of years in big tech and exposure to the tricks of the trade, you too will be able to do stuff that blows people's minds. Such as quit to take a 75% pay cut for a job that's personally meaningful
Every time I've seen people find out what others make there is a group that always first assumes they are getting hosed and are jealous. Even for numbers as small as .5% difference.
Personally, I'm not a jealous person so I don't understand the group I mentioned. But, the emotions/reactions I've seen are always in the back of my head when thinking about opening salaries.
In general how much I care about feedback is weighted by some combination of how much I care about the person giving me the feedback and how important it seems. When someone on HN or elsewhere gives me feedback the former is low, so I'm mostly thinking about the latter. If the feedback is "you're wrong to be working on detecting novel pandemics because of detailed reasons XYZ" I'll take that quite seriously, but if it's just "you're a bad person for trying to earn a lot of money", especially without any sort of argument, I just ignore it.
And the SDE isn't the only person making the money come in, it's just (usually) very easy to draw a line between new products and revenue, or code changes and lower infra costs. There are a lot of other people - hundreds - contributing to that $60MM but everyone here likes to pretend if the SDE isn't getting 98% of it they're getting screwed by The Suits.
I never understood why people thought there was a giant leap in value between employee #1 and a founder, in terms of value-add. (And if someone can explain it to me, I would be appreciative. I understand how it makes a difference when getting seed money, but not after that.)
Meanwhile, sometimes it is dependent on lots of people. Sometimes it isn't. A programmer is the only person who has the possibility to rewrite some code and make a process take 1% the same amount of time.
Depending on the industry, this can be a 99% reduction in cost, a 1% reduction or a massive, massive increase in revenue (HFT).
I'm very lucky to be in this position, though!
I don't know how you rose above the greed, but you remain a constant source of inspiration in the hope that someday I might.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Still, one single case 15 years ago doesn't prove the whole industry is permanently tainted.
It is a lot harder to lowball folks if they have to be upfront about what they are paying.
* When I came back to Google my stock grant vested evenly over four years, creating a 'cliff' in year five. They don't do this anymore, I think because people tend to leave.
* My 2021 comp included several past years of stock grants, and the company's stock had been growing much faster than the market.
* The market overall is down since 2021.
I think I would have made about $470k in 2022 if I'd stayed the whole year.
2023 would have been higher, because it would have been my first year getting the full L6 comp.
(And I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I definitely wouldn't consider $400k "measly" -- even after donating 50% I had much more to live on than most Americans, let alone most people globally)
Here in NZ $140,000NZD would be a good wage for a software developer. That is about $80,000USD. $400k US is about $700,600NZD. That is a massive amount of money for one years work.
Edit: My sarcasm meter is broken. In reading other comments I seem to have missed the joke. Sorry.
Lots of places in the US are as far from those numbers as NZ. Google numbers should not be an reference point to almost anyone, anywhere or they're likely to be disappointed.
The median income for a dev in the US is 100k. That's going to skew down due to lots of juniors but it also includes everyone making several hundred thousand dollars a year. I am taking a pay cut down to 160 for better WLB on a product I have used for years as a customer and really care about, and I think if you ignore the outliers I am very well compensated at 12 YOE and existing domain knowledge.
Note: This is a very recent thing since the start of 2022. Salary guides from even 2020 probably show $30k-$50k less.
Pretty incredible to see how tight the market is right now.
Do they at least have some kind of redeeming character? Or is it literally at the point where being able to write some kind of code is sufficient?
(Am 1yr junior in Melbourne that should probably be looking around, it sounds like..)
1. We have to use recruiters to find candidates, we barely get any hits on our job ad, even though we are a pretty innovative company with a modern tech stack and pay quite well. The recruiters field us the most woeful candidates, but at least it's someone rather than no one. The pool for qualified senior engineers is low, so we're all competing for a shrinking pool of candidates relative to the jobs on offer.
2. Hiring for fit is important to me, so it's not so much that they aren't stellar in their interview technically, but the fact that people don't realistically state what their strengths and weaknesses are, and sometimes outright lie to you, means that I don't want to work with them. Humility is the bedrock of real growth, how can you really grow if you're lying to people around you about how competent you are? I've hired weaker candidates technically purely because they had an on honest approach to their abilities, and demonstrated a keeness for learning.
If you're at the junior level, my advice is to job hop as mad as possible until you have a few years/companies under your belt. Get a breadth of experiences at a few different places, it will help you contextualise everything you learn/don't know Once you hit 5-10 years experience, that's the time to start slowing down and really honing in on your experience and stay at places for longer. Completing projects end to end, and crucially, learning how to plan, estimate and deal with change over time.
This is in response to the ex Google employee not the author of the article.
(Also fine with they/them FWIW: https://www.jefftk.com/p/they-is-ok-by-me)
(Another thing I'd love to see more people being transparent about!)
the data out there is so bad!
Even Levels.fyi takes both nominal offers as well as actual outcomes like W-2's, which can be wildly different in a volatile market. So nobody really knows anything.