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.
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.
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.
You don’t see it at the lower levels but key employees make a lot more than what you are saying.
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.
And how many of those are there relative the general software engineering population?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Everyone at my dinosaur financial company was getting them 15 years ago. Not a life changing amounts at my level though.
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.