"Hey, my valued employee, just thinking about you, and I wanted to send you these additional United States Dollars."
It's crazy how much science you can apply to HR once you are working at a scale of tens of thousands of employees. At that point people aren't people anymore, just nameless resources to be plugged into an equation. Kinda like the "a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" analogy. Stack ranking follows the same principle.
The Google Moloch seemed to have a fairest system, of course circumstances could be unfair but the process was fair. Most people who wanted promos and fed their soul to the machine would eventually get promos.
Meanwhile in the startup zoo, it’s all about earning favor and avoiding disfavor with a small group of lords.
R&R of Manager Expected to perform as full time IC
and pay of an junior
E.g. when I interviewed at Robinhood in 2020 one interviewer was already an eng manager after she graduated from school and joined Robinhood just 1.5 or 2 years before. I don't think that happens now at Google or Facebook or Apple.
Had plenty of promotions, multiple spot bonuses and equity. Not Netflix or Google level comp, but not too far off either. It is a bit manager-dependent(good managers have to stick their hand in the cookie jar whenever it is close by), but I believe that most IT companies have this sort of structure setup.
It works too - if you don't know if you are going to get spot bonuses (or equity) at the new place, it becomes far more of a gamble.
What's the workload at the typical FAANG?
Lots of working with other teams (XFN) so collaboration is almost as important as execution. Pay is good.
There was a counteroffer when I told my present company about the new offer but it was too little too late.
It’s well known among my peers that to level up or get paid more, you go elsewhere and maybe even boomerang back later.