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.
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.
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
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.
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!)
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
> 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-...