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Comment by dado3212 | Hacker News Reader

This doesn’t seem like it includes stock, which paints an inaccurate picture of compensation.

People on HN are generally in a bubble and don’t understand the bimodal distribution of compensation in the industry.

Most of the 2.7 million developers in the US are working for the military/industrial complex, government, banks, insurance companies, etc and aren’t getting stock. They are starting off making around $70K and top out at $150K.

Most aren’t working at “a FAANG” or in the Bay Area. The salaries listed are represented for the vast majority of developers in the US.

There are non-tech companies that give stock options and bonuses to software people. Many in those stodgy/established areas you mention.

Stock options are basically worth $0 statistically. But the fact remains that if you look at compensation at most companies outside of the major tech companies, these numbers look realistic.

As an anecdote, I use to live in Atlanta and every time I looked for a job, Delta airlines came on my radar.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries

This is accurate and in the same range other companies in Atlanta pay like Home Depot, Coke, etc.

I think what you mean to say is that the modal payout of stock options is $0, which could be true (source?). But even something that could typically return 0 is valuable to own.

It’s a well known statistic that only one out of ten startups “succeed” and by “success” it just means investors got their money back. It doesn’t mean that employees got anything meaningful.

https://www.failory.com/blog/startup-failure-rate

Stock options are also mostly illiquid and you don’t know the value of what you’re holding.

My RSUs in a public company are vested every six months. I know the potential value of those options just by looking at my spreadsheet and I can see the value updated almost real time (the GoogleFinance function). How long have Stripe employees been waiting on their company to go public?

Do you you think most employees are at brand new startups, or at larger near-liquidity companies?

How is that “near liquidity” working out for Stripe employees?

And a lot of companies thought they were “near liquidity” until the bottom fell out of the IPO market and the public got wise to thought that it might not be a good idea to invest in a money losing company where all of the upside had already been captured by the private investors.

And then the other out use to be getting acquired. But that’s not happening as much now because of the combination of high interest rates and more aggressive anti trust enforcement (I’m not saying whether that is good or bad).

Every startup I’ve ever spoken to has promised that they are near an exit. But when I was on the corp dev side of compensation, I valued that at $0 and made sure I was at market - which wasn’t hard as a journeyman CRUD developer living in metro Atlanta.

Now that I’m on the other side and have BigTech on my resume (cloud consulting department), startups are always trying to pull me in as an “architect” and occasionally a “CTO” (really just an overinflated title) and dangling “equity” at me. I would much rather have RSUs deposited in my brokerage account every six months.

Yeah but again, if you have those options that usually are worthless, I will still buy them off of you because I understand that something that has a lifetime value between 0 and X is not valued at 0.

Anecdotally, I have worked at companies that had ESOPs (does anyone do that anymore?), options in public companies, stock in a private start up and RSUs. Often they were worthless but at the end of the day they were also worth more than all the salary I got. You can't assume an option will be worth anything, but I think you should take them.

But I could basically assume that my four year initial stock grant would be worth something when they vested and I knew I could sell them on the day they vested and diversify.

The longer you work at a private company with illiquid “equity”, the less diversified you are, waiting, hoping and praying that an exit event would happen and you aren’t able to sell when you need cash.

>Stock options are basically worth $0 statistically.

Just saying I personally know developers at companies very similar to the ones you're listing that get stock options. While nobody is getting rich, they do exercise them when they vest, for non-trivial amounts. Bonuses are common as well.

Are we talking about the same thing?

Stock options - private companies that give you options that aren’t liquid (usually) until an exit event at sone undefined time.

RSUs - a known amount of stock granted in a public company with a known vesting date.

I know people at those companies and they aren’t getting paid nearly as much at the senior level as even a mid level software engineer at one of the larger tech companies.

I have been on both sides and spent most of my time as an enterprise dev.

I'm talking about RSUs, yes...apologies. I'm not saying they are getting FAANG level money. I'm saying that they often only report their base salary to sites like glassdoor/salary.com, and don't always note the RSUs and bonuses. Together, that's often 10-20% over what you see on those sites. Doesn't close the gap, of course.

Yes. But the gap isn’t nearly as wide as people think it is once you consider the lifestyle you can live in metro Atlanta (where those companies are headquartered) compared to making more on the west coast. Yes I realize I’m arguing both sides.

I didn’t even think about accepting the chance to apply for a role at $BigTech when a recruiter reached out to me that would have been $75K-$100K more than I was making if it meant that I had to move to Seattle.

I did take a permanently remote role that paid $60K-$75K more by doing a slight pivot from pure software development.

Stock options are not limited to private companies. Public companies do stock options too. The only difference from RSUs is if stock goes below your strike price they are worthless at vesting. You still can wait it out.

Everyone at my dinosaur financial company was getting them 15 years ago. Not a life changing amounts at my level though.

That’s quite a bit different don’t you think?

And stocks don’t always “go back up”. I would have hated for my RSUs to be worthless as my stock dropped 40% from its highs before they vested. At least I was able to sell them and diversify.

Options have higher volatility. This is not a mystery and doesn't mean EV is 0.

You can lose money in options, which means the EV can be negative. E.g. you leave the company and are forced to exercise or abandon the options. If you exercise, the company can stay private until you die or liquidate at less than what you paid.

Quite different from your previous point (i.e. that they are worthless)? Don't think so. They are a good addition to the salary plus bonus. Now these old companies switched to RSUs.

Worthless meaning. If only 1 in 10 companies ever see a “successful” exit and if even then, my equity may end up being essentially nothing after the investors and founders get theirs and it’s illiquid, why should I value equity at anything more than $0 when comparing compensation?

I am not sure you have read what I said. Already public companies were giving away stock options as far as 15-20 years ago. 100% of them had successful exit.

This, a million times. Even in the Bay Area the non-FAANG tech companies (including stock contribution to compensation) is not the "retire in 5-8 years" levels people seem to think. I worked at non-FAANG for almost 6 years in this area before I moved to a "FAANG adjacent" (i.e., a company on par with FAANG scale, salaries, engineering needs, etc.) company. My max salary, as an EM, including stocks, never got over $200k/year, even though at that time I had over 10 years of experience.

I moved from an EM role with RSU stock compensation to an IC role at the same level with only pre-IPO options and my total compensation went up.

I worked at a large fortune 50 telco company everyone has heard of and people above senior engineer (lead, principal, etc) made well above 150k, there was discretionary stock, large bonuses etc.

You don’t see it at the lower levels but key employees make a lot more than what you are saying.

I’m not dismissing your compensation. I spent most of my career on the enterprise dev side.

But looking at Levels.fyi for compensation at AT&T, the top level software engineers in LA make a little less than $200K all in. That’s less than a mid level software engineer makes at BigTech.

This gets back to one side on HN doesn’t know the scale of compensation on the other end.

i'm well aware of the compensation on the other end, I'm a senior at FAANG now. I was just pointing out plenty of non FAAMGULA/unicorn companies top out well above 150k.

> people above senior engineer (lead, principal, etc)

And how many of those are there relative the general software engineering population?

I think a majority of people with 15+ years of experience are at that level. Only the really talented and/or ambitious move up to that level quickly, but most people do make it to a lead level given enough time.

Because of both poor career choices and later path dependencies, I did the move up in enterprise dev grind until three years ago.

Why would I tell my younger family to grind for 15 years instead of “grind LeetCode and work for a FAANG (tm r/cscareerquestions) and start out making in the mid 150s and in three years end up in the mid 200s?

I worked for a government contractor before moving to FAANG. We had transparent salaries at the contractor (it was a small company). As a senior engineer in FAANG, I make more than the president of the government contractor.

After a slight pivot as a mid level employee in the cloud consulting department (ie I make about 10% less than the equivalent developer). I make more than my former CTO at a startup.

We were talking at lunch one day after I left and we started talking about. Don’t cry for him. The prior company we worked at together, had an exit that was 10x revenue and he left soon afterwards.

He is in his 50s and said he was just working now because he “didn’t have anything better to do” since his wife who has a VP of data analytics at a telecom wasn’t ready to retire.

He did say that he has never made that much at any of the smaller companies he worked at. Again, he’s doing well for himself. It doesn’t take that much money in the grand scheme of things to have a good living “only” making in the mid to high 100s in most metro areas in the US.

I had my first house built in the burbs (2500 square feet) making $70K in 2002 and my second (3500 square feet) making $135k in 2016.

I bet these numbers are total compensation. They are averages across the industry, not "the top comps for the top talent at the top FAANGs".

Whenever there is a Tech Salary article, commenters on HN comes out of the woodwork to point out that everyone in tech makes $400K and drives a Tesla to their second home in Tahoe. Everyone seems to know at least somebody's brother's cousin's roommate making $1M/yr at Facebook or whatever. They trot out levels.fyi as if that's the norm across a huge industry. These huge figures are not happening anywhere but a few top companies, or for a few top roles. Most of the tech industry plugs away at ~$100K which is still great and well over the average and median comp for jobs in general in the USA.

I know stock grants are ubiquitous in some parts of the tech world, but as someone who only gets paid in cash I have always wondered what percentage of tech jobs actually include significant stock compensation.

Any public “tech” company should include stock as compensation for SWEs.

Startup equity is mostly worthless unless you get lucky.

The higher paying jobs skew heavily to stock, especially at FAANG. As you get more sr, stock grants can be 50-80% of comp. So looking at salary alone massively understates comp.

While that’s true. Only a tiny minority of developers work at the well known public tech companies.

Not to mention there is no indication of typical statistical metrics that might help one assess the quality of the sample.

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