But a FAANG Staff Engineer will get a similar base, and then $1mil in stock for 4 years.
-- Are there people outside of FAANG and Big Banks / HFT firms making those kinds of monies?
-- if So who are they? and what do they do?
These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
If you aren't a shoo-in at FAANG and you want to make that kind of money, your best bet is to learn how to start and run a business. I don't mean try to launch a billion dollar social app that needs venture funding. I mean a SAAS that solves a boring problem for other businesses with money to spend.
Because the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5.
Especially if you start hiring other people, your liability then increases 10 fold as now anything can happen with them (sick leave, absenteism, low performance, sabotage, etc) but you're still bound to the same deadlines you agreed with your customers or you'll get sued for damages by them.
As an employee you have some basic rights and protections from the state on the limits your employer can squeeze from you, more or less, depending on where you live. As a contractor or company however, you don't, and can be fully liable in court for your failures to deliver regardless of your personal circumstances. Unless you know what you're getting into and have the know-how, experience, or mentorship, it's not worth it in most cases.
And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.
Your liability is. Worst case scenario is you don't get hired, or you get hired, and then get fired. That the worst that can happen. FAANG isn't gonna come after you for damages if you accidentally brick something in production or are just lazy and incompetent. As a business, your customers might.
Let's watch how the Crowdstrike scenario unfolds in the coming months, when they'll probably get lawsuits up the ass for the damages they caused. Get your popcorn ready.
>And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.
Sure, but not everyone can get there, the same how not everyone can become a successful football player despite so many successful examples. There's too many variables. Usually, the right connections are your most valuable asset as one man company, and not everyone has them.
The likelihood of a one-person SAAS getting sued into oblivion is pretty low, especially if you aren't providing something as fundamental as security services to banks and airlines.
Im not saying any of this is obvious, but if you are applying to work at a FAANG, I will assume you are both smart enough and ambitious enough to do a bit of research.
First, you don't really know whether that'll hold up in court until it happens.
Second, by the time you're done with the court case, you'll have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy. Not only is that stressful by itself, it's also a big distraction from running the business, and every day you are busy with the court case you'll wish you were spending time working your business. The smaller you are, the more impactful distractions are.
There are two types of people who sue:
- rational actors who have acted in good faith, exhausted all avenues of recourse, and feel like the courts are their only hope for some sort of resolution.
- irrational actors who sue for weird personal reasons, can’t be reasoned with, refuse all attempts to come to a reasonable settlement, etc.
You definitely want the first type of person as a customer.
Again, nothing is stopping anyone from suing you personally right now.
So? Worst case, the business folds and you start it again.
This is like being worried about being fired, and people telling horror stories about so-and-so who got fired. They’re fine. You’ll be fine.
The whole point of an LLC is to prevent people from going after the corporation’s owner. They have to go after the corporation itself. It’s in the name: limited liability corporation. And sure, if you end up harming someone physically then they might have a case against you, but most of us don’t run into that problem.
Must be great having infinite ideas and capital.
Nobody but scammers is this chill about their company going bankrupt.
A better example is simply having your business evaporate overnight while you have a building/offices to pay for, employees to pay, etc. Which happened to someone I know back in the early days of Windows NT: his servers and desktops that he built, worked under NT but then a service pack for NT 3.51 broke everything; overnight his contract with a large local hospital went away; that a few months later the next service pack fixed the issues, meant nothing to his former customers. He went from making the equivalent of $250K today to approximately zero.
I suppose I should have qualified my comment by saying it's if your primary aim is to maximize income.
I guess you can say I could maximize further by switching to finance or starting my own business, but the amount of extra stress is just not worth it at the moment, personally.
> I get that...
> Sure, I get that...
I've done both. Working FAANG is way easier than running your own business. Orders of magnitude less stress. That's why some people can "rest and vest" at FAANG.
The most you'll ever make at a job is based on one conversation you had months or even years ago. Your income will only ever increase at steps every 6 - 12 months and, in the best case, linearly and in the worst case never increasing beyond inflation.
With a business, yes your income may be stagnant or slower, but your income isn't capped, can change rapidly, and can change on a dime rather than waiting on the next review cycle or whatever.
If you have the stomach for it, a business will long-term always give better returns for your work than a job.
Believe it or not you get over this. It’s kind of like the fear of going up on stage to give a presentation. Some people get an addictive rush, these are usually serial entrepreneurs who just love to be in charge because they have no problems with risk/stress tolerance (mostly). You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera. Hiring/firing is hard for people but you have no choice and certainly you’re not beholden to give people jobs. People are there to work, do their best at the moment, your job is to ensure them they’re looked after adequately and your door is always open to them if they have to talk to you.
Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig. Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well. The CEO will shit test you in almost everything you do and say and this is the grilling you will need, because they expect you to be capable of running things in their stead.
Utter horse shit. I want to earn enough to live without too many worries, and spend time with friends and family.
Being able to leave at 5 is irreplaceable
I do work late, and over my career have absolutely pulled all nighters and weekends and been on the redeye, but that’s when I stretch or flex, and it’s simply not sustainable.
Isn't socialism great?
I don't work for free and neither should you.
With an employer not offering remote, you can set your own rules around it. You can work from Bali, if you want and your customers are OK with it. But i agree , the small business route is certainly not for everyone.
Some people, but not many people...
> Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig
Why?
> Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company
Why?
Why take time out of your day to tiger parent strangers on HN when you can just have your own children and damage them instead?
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
More accurately, they have made enough money from a successful venture that they can afford to fail and their risk/stress is lowered. I know serial entrepreneurs who failed several times in a row. Without some form of safety net along the way (an exit, taking money off the table in a later round, simply nice cashflows they were able to bank for a few years), they all seem to burn out.
You can get over it if you dig the day-to-day of running a business. But not everyone digs it.
Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig.
No they shouldn't because as an endeavor it just doesn't appeal to lots of people.
The "everyone should try and become good at the stuff I think is fun" tone of this response is just weird, and grossly out of touch with observations of human nature.
If your business succeeds. But if your business doesn't, you either enter zombie mode or you find yourself in the bread line.
> Believe it or not you get over this.
This screams either a lack of experience or a lack of meaningful social relationships. Many people never get over this - it is incredibly risky and stressful being a solo founder.
> You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera.
Again, not true. Some people can do this and others can’t. Fundamentally, it depends on actually providing value, being aware of the value you provide and being able to quantify that. Those are three difficult skills and many people cannot acquire them.
> Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig.
Absolutely no. Many people should not attempt this. In fact, I’ve been doing this for around thirty years and I think the majority of people should avoid it. People with young families, credit card debt and spending problems have no business going out on their own.
> Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well.
No, people should strive to make a living, pay their bills and find something approaching happiness.
Precisely.
Add to that that as a regular 9-5 worker you have one role.
As a solo business owner you have several roles (engineer, marketer, customer service, designer, etc...).
Working for a big company in the US is massively underrated. Over time, most people working in these companies will be much better off financially and with less stress/health issues.
The silicon valley/tech bubble over-romanticizes entrepreneurship without realizing its NOT for everyone.
For every 1 success story you hear about entrepreneurship, there are 50-100 that fail. The stress and anxiety is not something everyone can or should take if they have the opportunity to coast at FAANG and make $500K+.
How many businesses make $500K in revenue in the US? Not many? [1]
I am paraphrasing here, but I really agree with how Scott Galloway put it: The US corporation is the greatest wealth creating vehicle in history. Way safer and easier to build wealth working at Google.
Giving "StArt a BusZineaSs BRO" as a blanket advice is very disingenuous.
[1] In 2018, 9% of small businesses made more than $1 million. https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/small-business...
Note: Many statistics online say the number is actually fewer than 5%!
Guy running an email SaaS clearly says working full time would make him more money.
Anecdotally, I've noticed that a disproportionate amount of formally-educated people I've encountered in life are more allergic to this idea than the opposite.. I don't have any solid theories as to why, exactly, but it's curious nonetheless.
What sees you discount the obvious? That is, formally educated people end up in formal education because they have a proclivity towards not wanting to have to go out and get it. They want someone else to hand it to them. Which is, after all, what the "formal" part of formal education describes.
Profitable software-based ideas are increasingly difficult to find. Thousands of people are exploring every niche and trying to start startups in them, which is great, but competition is fierce and unexplored niches are shrinking.
And of course, it's still not straightforward even if you find a relatively unexplored niche. Most people I see who have attempted startups had extensive family support or personal wealth from exits as an employee of a company that had an IPO.
In basically all instances:
1. These stories get a ton of upvotes because they're actually quite rare.
2. The total income to the founder is still considerably (like way considerably) less that a senior dev at a FAANG.
I think there are probably several hundred HN readers who would be happy to tackle those problems. Boring is probably not the issue, but obscure is, assuming these problems exist. If they're difficult to discover that the problem exists, that's a challenge. Further, if the problems exist but are highly unique in each case, there may be a reason it's solved in a one-off way by Excel or scripts rather than a scalable product. The use of Excel isn't inherently ripe for disruption. There are plenty of problems to be solved that just can't be solved profitably. It would be no better than solving a problem that someone has but is unwilling to pay for.
There was (still is, though the website is now dead) a really cool website/app that a fmr Air Force soldier made called AFI SWiM[0] that extracted 'Shall, Will and Must' references from Air Force publications which blew up in popularity among the target demo. The dev recently(ish) wrote a blog post[1] how it surprised him to see the app[2] had gotten around ~20k downloads, though I am unsure if the app was always priced at $1.99 (which would be just under $40k).
I like the idea of developing a problem solver for a niche market, though finding and monetizing it definitely is pretty tough.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220601160702/https://swim.afie...
[1] https://willswire.com/blog/chat-afi/
[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/afi-explorer/id1564964107
the github repo: https://github.com/willswire/afi-swim
This guy found an underserved market opportunity, built something, got some success marketing it, and made a whopping total of $40k.
Meanwhile the FAANG guys are making that every two months, without all the risk.
Still risky, but the expected value is comparable to a stint at a salaried job IMO, once you find a decent market opportunity. Not to mention the qualitative value of self-employment, and that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs.
We can play this game all day, but the fact is somebody put a ton of work into a project and made about what they could have made in a month at a FAANG.
Pretty crappy trade off.
Not really. FAANG people have to show up to get that salary. It's not apples to apples to compare this to salary because the app was built once then continued to make money without additional work.
Salary requires constant effort and work. I will take working 60 - 80 hours for a week to make $40k over working 320 hours to make the same.
> that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs
You aren’t seriously comparing the risk of self-employment to the risk of being layed off by one of the most stable companies of the world during a downturn after a 15 year bullrun, are you?
They say ideas are worth nothing, but not to me. If you really have some good ideas (see definition above), I would be interested in buying them at a reasonable price.
I don't know if this is actually a market worth pursuing, but I do know that I paid some company $500 to fill in a form for me and help figure out the process. They probably spent an hour or two on my case.
With the increase of dual citizens, digital nomads, etc. this seems like a growing market to me.
I am not a professional, so seek and pay for professional advice, if that is what you need. I've been doing my own taxes as an American living abroad for ~a decade. If anyone is in a similar situation and has questions, feel free to pm me. Because financial/tax advice from strangers with no professional credentials on the Internet is always a good idea. :p
Pretty niche but IIRC he is doing well for himself.
And the problems were so important that somebody, anybody, stepped up to the plate with a digital solution as soon as it was barely possible.
Sometimes you have to admire that effort to a greater degree than a more technically advanced alternative.
I'm sure some of these are ripe for transition to a truly more effective approach in every way but often there is no fooling them trying to provide anything less.
And disruption itself can be the enemy in some things like this.
I’m working on one such problem in the healthcare space, as an outsider. In early stages, so we’ll see if it goes anywhere.
Which just proves the immense value of Excel and the relatively bad value proposition of custom-made software.
> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
1. Yes, which is why it’s increasingly hard to start a business as a pure software engineer. To put it harshly, most software engineers don’t know enough about the real world out there to solve its problems. Many choose to create software for other software engineers for this reason, and that market is fierce.
2. Another issue is that only those specific businesses might have those problems. Even if you know about them, solving them might not be a good business case. Solving them must be lucrative enough to allow for a small target audience, or the problem needs to be common enough to allow for economies of scale, which brings us to back to point 1.
There is limitless opportunity outside of the webtech/adtech bullshit bubble. Go create a hardware startup, it's never been easier. It's still harder than adtech bullshit was 10 years ago, but the turnkey manufacturing industry is faaaar better than all the "hardware is hard" weekly blogspam would lead you to believe.
I haven't read this elsewhere so it may be non-validated but you shouldn't imagine customers of a product as entirely captured nor cohesive. Inside of the customer pool are going to be people who are displeased with the product for sometimes disparate reasons but not enough to find a different product because this one is "good enough".
To make this example very simple, a product may produce orange widgets. It's good enough for most people but one group wishes it made a more yellow widget while another group wishes it made a more red widget. The orange widget isn't the ideal case, it's a compromise to serve the most people.
If someone came in and made a product that produces very yellow widgets and focuses on the yellow widget market, you could serve those people very well despite being having a smaller pool.
In other words, your product doesn't need to go toe-to-toe with the orange widget product that has a revenue of $1B, you only need to pick off the yellow widget people to get a revenue of, lets say, $10M and you are eating very well.
As for myself, I can’t wait to free myself from these chains called salaried employment. (I don’t mean to offend anyone)
Otherwise, you can contact incubators like YC. If they approve your idea and grant you money, you can then easily apply for loans at banks because you've been vetted by a well known company.
After all that energy spent, you will understand the quote :
> Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.
And you might say, "well - you'll never become a billionaire working for someone else".
That's not true.
There's plenty of CEOs (non-founders) who are billionaires.
And the chances of you running your own company and becoming a billionaire, is about the same probability as you becoming a CEO at a Fortune 500.
Being a business owner doesn't necessarily mean being the founder.
No CEO is becoming a billionaire by collecting a paycheque. They might become a billionaire by accepting the right stock offer in lieu of wages, but that makes them the business owner again.
Yes, they can and do.
Safra Catz, $2B - CEO Oracle
Sheryl Sandberg, $2B - Meta
Jamie Dimon, $1B+ - CEO Chase
https://www.forbes.com/profile/safra-catz/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/18/how-shery....
Granted, Catz seems to have recently sold off a large stake of her ownership. But the cash proceeds of that sale still came from being the owner at one point, not from a salary. Nobody becomes a billionaire off a regular paycheque.
Hell, even FAANG software developer compensation is really only notable because the total package includes becoming an owner of the company. The wage portion isn't that much different than any other random tech company.
• When times get tough, cofounders playing chicken to see who can take the lowest salary
• Giving yourself the lowest pay to prevent income loss of your employees
• Always having to hunt for sales to maintain your survival (which is typically nebulous and subject to when they feel like signing)
• HR and always trying to figure out how to not get sued
• Losing big customers or big customers going out of business
For any one of those bullet points there’s a coulda woulda shoulda, but again, just taking your 400k from a well established company that isn’t fighting for its survival every day is not inherently inferior to the heroics and cortisol required to operate a business.
There are real downsides to owning your own business. It’s probably been 15 years since I had a day where I didn’t check my email.
Most people are Indians, not chiefs, and I think that’s actually an evolutionary adaptation that’s built into us. Someone may want to be the best programmer they can be rather than the best at managing employees, setting business strategy, dealing with taxes and other paperwork, etc.
Totally get it.
I think it's very easy to start a failing plumbing business. I think it far less accessible to start a plumbing business that competes with a FAANG salary.
Put another way: how many people do you know who started their own consumer-facing, bootstrapped business, of any kind and who take home $3-500,000 as CEO? My answer is, like, two and they're both lawyers who didn't start making that kind of income until their mid thirties.
Edit: It would not, at all, surprise me if even in the trades the most common path to business ownership was to take over someone else's already existing business, which would I think cut even further into this point since it would mean the most common path to entrepreneurship is optimizing employment in a small business context.
I think getting a FAANG job is difficult, but for the median 30 year old (who has around $5,000 saved up and limited or no external safety nets), starting a business as your primary source of income is a really good way to bankrupt yourself and not much else, and valorizing that path is actively harmful.
He is smart but not a genius. He kind of knows what is going on though, he "gets it". Probably even more motivated than smart, but not insanely motivated. Motivated enough to learn how to get features done at a brisk pace, take ownership of his team's work, and to study for interviews. Didn't go to a top tier CS program, didn't come out of FAANG or FAANG adjacent, and probably took a detour working for us, but three years later his TC is over $300k. He also had the luck to jump ship before the FAANG layoffs of late 2022.
There’s just so much more responsibility resting on your shoulders. Holidays have never felt the same since I left employment in 2011.
No regrets here, just saying this path is not for everyone and not as accessible as you might think.
Except, it kinda is for people that have the right background and are well suited to it. That is, the reason I think you're getting a lot of pushback is that many folks are just inherently risk averse. There are people who are smart, know how to work hard, and know that if they have a path laid out in front of them, they can succeed.
For entrepreneurs, there is simply much more variability. You can be smart, work hard, do everything right, and still fail in unexpected ways due to things outside of your control.
I don't think entrepreneurship is bad at all, but it's not surprising at all to me that people who want to go the FAANG route aren't well suited to starting their own business.
Starting a business is NP hard. At the end of the day, you have to convince people to give you money in some form and way, and that is not a guarantee. You could land on a lucrative idea, or you could do trial and error, failing every time.
Furthermore, once you have either, maintaining a FAANG job is much easier than maintaining a business.
I do better as a consultant/contractor for a client who is a previous customer from when I had my own facility. Fundamentally I used to provide the paperwork (the deliverable/invoiceable product) and supported everything needed to generate it, including any free advice which goes along to smooth the flow. Now I'm paid to help their paperwork achieve and maintain value with none of mine in the mix at all, but I'm basically doing a lot of the same stuff when I'm on site.
As a contractor aren't you now a small business operator of a different type, perhaps much smaller?
I would estimate in more of the exact same business in so many ways very few ever come close to that.
Maybe even doing some of the same things under different degrees of ownership and responsibility, and this could be a good example of way different compensation when the only difference is the underlying arrangement.
Looks like ironc can be good :)
Get to work with excellent SWEs, PMs, PgMs, etc.
In startup land I was doing so much, pitches, recruiting, coding, landing page design, dev ops, pretty much the full stack.
In FAANG land I can just focus on existence proofs and then there’s a whole support structure helping that happen and bringing the product to market.
You could argue that setting up this pipeline is the goal of a startup, but it’s a LOONG road. The opportunity cost is immense. It’s immensely difficult to recruit. You have to effectively pause your life. Scary to have children with startup level uncertainty.
At a certain $$ where you can live a comfortable life, enjoy 95% of what you do day to day, get to be in an environment with top notch colleagues, it’s a tough sell to start something from scratch with all that risk.
How many products you have actually finished and worked on and polished over years if they produced something valuable in the end?
That defines the actual realised value of the business. Jumping from one product to another does not mean that all of them were constantly producing revenue or were success. It might look good in the CV but what was end result?
Mostly worked on internal products. One HUGE hit, a few moderate hits, and quite a few failures.
The calculus for projects at a large bigco are different from a startup though.
It’s not necessarily clear bottom line revenue, especially for innovation teams. Crypto, for example, bigco needs at least some folks working on it to build an understanding of the technology, market, pain points. Some of these projects are started with literally no intention of profitability, but as an explicit build-to-learn.
There’s a wide spectrum of SWE interest and capabilities. Some folks love the creativity of greenfield new product exploration. Others love the focus of crafting a perfectly scalable, maintainable system. These are really just points along a product lifecycle.
I understand myself enough and am unapologetic about getting “bored” easily, and need to be constantly working on creative things.
Others at the other end of the spectrum have a visceral reaction to that. They can’t do what I do, and I can’t do what they do.
Very rare to see businesses where you're sole developer and salesperson unless you are the main SME on a niche field/technology you probably developed.
Also A LOT of FAANG is immigrants who can't start a business in the US or children of immigrants whose parents put strong pressure on them having an upper middle class job.
Startups are so hit and miss. It's really really hard to make $500k a year at a startup. There's many years of zero, near zero or sub-intern salary. After that there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.
Classic businesses can get a substantial salary sooner than a startup, but do have a ceiling. If you're selling a well known need (plumbing, consulting, etc), there's competition and a ceiling at hours worked.
Having done both, a FAANG job is infinitely less effort than running a company. Also lower stress, lower risk, and immediate rewards/pay. I still have more fun starting companies though!
>there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.
Tech or not I think it usually doesn't dwarf anything but if it comes close, a little bit low or high, that's a huge milestone above failure.
In that case it might allow you to maintain readiness for an incredible bonanza which might be within reach only from beyond that point, and that can be what dwarfs the "big payout".
IOW depending on the situation, occasional big payouts that really just even things out may not be very life-changing even if they are big, but it can give you more rolls of the dice at things that can't be approached any other way.
The one has got nothing to do with the other. Running a small business is far more sales and marketing, and if you are lucky enough to get to the point where you need to hire someone, then HR, managing suppliers and fuck me don’t get me started on fucking customers.
To me it's always been a matter of personality. As an introvert, I can't picture myself doing the kinds of social interactions required to sell a business on my own.
It's also unlimited as a gambler. That doesn't mean everyone should start buying lotto tickets.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/holy-heck-this-is-hard-8eb...
Granted, this is Indie Hackers, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the general idea still applies. Getting to $10k a month, let alone making $250k a year (so ~$20k/month) is really hard, probably about as hard as making $250k a year as an employee, maybe even harder.
I can't do that as well while starting and running a company.
It seems like you are vastly underestimating the effort (and risk) it takes to start a successful SaaS that brings its founder $500k+ annually.
You're right about everything if you can actually start and grow that business, but you're glossing over how difficult that actually is to do, and the fact that you have to start from $0 income.
Being an employee is still running a business. The separation you are trying to draw isn't meaningful.
That particular line of business is one of the few businesses out there with a near-guaranteed customer base, though. That's a highly attractive trait for someone operating a business. With small risk comes small reward, of course, but it is no surprise that most businesses venture in that direction.
I like coding. I don't want to run a business, and these are very separate skills. This is like asking why an IC doesn't want to become a people manager.
I, like many others, hold a white-collar job in a technology company, not FAANG, with a salary between 300 and 400K per year, with lunch breaks, paid vacation days, good health insurance, and the opportunity to work from home at least 75% of the time.
At the end of my workday, which I have not found to be stressful in at least 3 years, I am fresh, hydrated, and ready to spend late afternoons, evenings, and nights pursuing my interests, taking care of the kids, and maybe learning French at last. I see guys running fairly successful local businesses, both physical and digital. Assuming you have a choice between the two paths, a brief look at the physical condition and a conversation with me and the business owner would quickly lead you to prefer one of the two paths.
I might be privileged, lucky, in an unusual situation. But the same is true for the successful local entrepreneur running a plumbing business with profits equivalent to those of experienced people working in tech.
You have to find a business that makes sense for you (you know it, you want to put up with it, etc). You then have to execute. All the while hoping that you don't get struck by lightning (something kills your business), while also hoping to get struct by lightning (you become wildly successful). God forbid you need job security (family, health care, etc.).
Contrast this to going into a job, where what you do is laid out for you, you just have to execute. With insurance. With job security.
Even as someone who has run a startup and still has the itch, it's a no brainer.
What about all the guys running unsuccessful local plumbing businesses?
It’s not like nobody wants that, the scarce thing is having a good business idea unless you want to go into consulting.
> And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
That’s kinda stretching it. Higher FAANG-level salaries are enough to reach financial independence, which is pretty much „unlimited“ territory for most normal people. On the other hand, most businesses are not hyper successful. It‘s not like becoming a millionaire entrepreneur can be taken for granted.
It’s interesting that you don’t seem to understand this. Survivorship bias or something else?
I know a guy who ran a successful plumbing business around Northern VA.
Took home around 300k per annum. I used to bang his daughter.
He worked hard, though, and had a couple of other guys working jobs independently under him, on top of his work. He was mostly corporate and construction work, but a couple of those guys under him also did residential, and he mostly supervised.
I'm far less than his TCO but also don't have to get elbow deep in shit and work remotely from my basement. Respect the hustle, but I think I'm winning in terms of work-life balance and QOL.
Maybe people want to be developers, and not managers/CEOs/business owner/entrepreneurs?
They're completely different jobs. Why would you expect everyone to aspire to the same thing?
We don't look at nurses and say "its funny how so many nurses have an aversion to become a multinational pharmaceutical CEO"
To anyone exploring starting a new business I would keep the day job and suffer until you get to a point where the business is on a good clip and you can dedicate all your time to it. Otherwise spending 20 years at FAANG and enjoying your life is really not a bad way to live, in fact its a dream to 99% of the planets population.
Plus running a business takes a lot of money and luck...
It’s been a LONG time since that’s happened.
Just remember that.
My base salary is $150k/yr. My cash bonus maxes out somewhere around $80k/yr, and typically falls in the $50k - 70k range. I also receive equity worth roughly $12k - $15k per year. Counting in the value of benefits, my comp package is worth roughly $280k - $300k/yr.
I am extremely well paid for the area I live in. It's very unlikely that I could make more money without moving to a different metro, getting lucky with a remote position, or going into niche contracting.
Just throwing this out there, because a $250k salary (plus bonus) is doing well even in a HCOL area.
That used to be the case where I live, just a few years ago. Now what used to be a starter home is over $400k.
One other nice thing is that instead of restricted stock you get actual money.
And generally the money will be locked up for less time than the 4 year vesting that these companies often follow.
And on top of that you can usually invest your money fee free in your own fund to help juice your returns.
The downside is that there is almost certainly going to be more stress on you and probably no where to hide if you want to just rest and vest.
Your team and company will likely be pretty small and everyone will be very aware of what everyone's contribution to the company's success.
I think you need to be a pretty unique individual to succeed in environments like that. Most people I know break down under intense pressure when shit hits the fan, even if they're wildly competent. I can only assume it's that much more intense when tons of money is at stake.
While I've done zero attempts to work at any hedge fund, I know plenty of people who both had success when wanting to join one (even though some of them were under-qualified) and people who failed (some who were over-qualified).
I'd disagree about your perceived upbringing mattering at all.
I don't know of any fund that hires technical staff like that. I mean we're here to make money, if someone can do that, no one cares what their social upbringing is, I mean like at all.
Now the school you went to matters, though it matters about as much as it would at a FAANG company.
And as to "how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, "
I would hope that all companies hire based on how someone presents themselves and would we want to work with them. Everyone should base hiring on how the candidate acts and presents themselves, that seems like an incredibly positive step, no?
> The technical pieces are pretty far behind.
Which specific fund are you referring to here. This seems very uninformed from my experience, but i'm willing to look at your evidence that hedge funds don't really value technical ability.
Perhaps if you could name those funds, we could have a talk since I know the industry very well.
"Rest and vest". What a luxury. Some of us are trying to tread water with an anvil chained to the waist. That's what I get for choosing to work for something I'm passionate about. What a world
Are you passionate about working for your current employer or passionate about your career?
I’m passionate about my career (programming/software development): I love reading the classic tech books out there (TAOCP, DDIA, etc.), I love working on side projects, sometimes I contribute to open source, etc.
On the other hand, I couldn’t care less about my employer. Not because they are bad, but I just don’t care about most of the tech companies out there. I do what I need to do to get paid, but i’m not passionate about deadlines, conversations with other engineers about subjective topics, daily standups, on call, etc.
My home hobbies resemble work within my area, but not my current job function, but I'm keenly aware my employer may try to take advantage of my other talents and do I guess the only thing that saves having an alternative hobby is that I'm so diversified that whatever my work task is I can work on an orthogonal hobby at home. It's kinda nice, I've got both really.
In my mind if I "sell out" (in terms of trading in for that sense of purpose in my work), and just work for the paycheck, then I would go for max. Work an HFT quant firm as a senior or principal engineer or research analyst. $$$. Or some other juicy gig. But I would hate myself if that became a slog and I had no time for my interests at home.
Err...4-year vesting doesn't mean the money is literally locked away until you hit 4 years' tenure. A $1m stock grant vesting over 4 years might pay $250-350k every year, depending on the vesting schedule and stock performance.
If a hedge fund pays $1m every 2 years then they're just paying more period. It's not the vesting schedule which causes the difference in comp.
No one said it did:)
My point was that a typical bonus is about 2/3's employees at the moment its granted and 1/3 held back for a year sometimes two, so you get money faster than a typical 4 year vesting schedule.
Does that clear things up?
(BTW FAANG pays bonuses too. They're 100% the employee's when they're paid)
Stock at FAANG is basically equivalent to cash. You can sell it as soon as you get it.
1) Be better than the overwhelming majority of your peers, and be noticed for this. You are quite likely to find interesting opportunities come your way. I do mean overwhelming though - small fraction of a percent.
2) Specialize in something most people can’t or won’t do. This includes difficult, obscure, and unpleasant work.
In both cases some of the biggest $ comes from independent consulting, once you’ve built up a network and a reputation for fixing a particular pain point corporations have (bill for value, of course).
To offer just one example, I'm aware of a software company that does nine figures in ARR making high performance computing software for very large financial institutions. There's basically no chance you've ever heard of them. They're very low key. The company hasn't grown headcount much in the last decade, and their employees don't really leave. But some of their people writing really low-level code are certainly making multiples of representative peers at FAANG.
Unless you’re the low level wizard you’re just going to make an industry standard salary, maybe a bump but nothing special.
Frankly you probably want a PRC, and at those admin levels much, much save or die. Probably got so many server pokes per minute you're gonna be furiously holy wording your file system all day long. Team members? Rez? Please. You solo that.
Low level wiz? "Welcome to name brand, and lack of female desirability, here's your special hat..." "Why aren't the lights on?" [1] "Help, I lit my own hands on fire!" [2] "Ah, every threat one hits me!" [3] "Man they target me bad at conferences, how'd I draw DARPA as agro..." [4] "Holy s*t there's a lot of documentation to write!" [5]
High level wiz? "Computation hates all magical ideas and their very implication!" "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal of my trust, our own company is secretly controlled by Orcus and seeks the death and slavery of all life on Earth" [6] "Join me in the bag within bag abyss together and we shall quest to Jubilex for glory and honor across the eternal battlefields of tomorrow!" [7] ITGETSOEPIC::THEYWONTLETULEAVE::ALREADYATWARP::AUTOLADDEREJECTED::HOWDIDRAWULTRONASAGRO::MIDASTOUCHISHORRIFYING::AHHHHHHH [8]
[1] https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/light.htm
[2] https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/burningHands.htm
[3] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SquishyWizard
[4] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShootTheMageFirs...
[5] https://www.d20srd.org/srd/feats.htm#scribeScroll
[6] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FaceHeelTurn
[7] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-...
(Of course, the original question was "not FAANG or HFT", so this still may not be what they were looking for...)
I think you mean "respectively"
Those awesome salaries tend to be paid to mercenaries and not the lifers.
The only companies that could beat my current comp are other big tech and finance, but there were a couple of surprises along the way.
For example, a Tier 3 (i.e. you never heard about them) company offered me 450k TC for a Staff level position. This compares to the 500k TC for a senior level position at FAANG. I also interviewed for a Startup that offered 650k TC for a Principal level, although the stocks were paper money.
To your point, "random" companies can come close to FAANG salaries for high enough levels, but it's far from a given. In fact I'd say most random companies probably top in the 200k range.
If you are interested just start every conversation with a recruiter asking for their comp range. I found these days almost all recruiters answer, and then you can decide if it is worth your time to go ahead.
I documented my process of getting job offers here, you can check it out in case it helps
https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-experience-getting-offers-...
Staff PM, around $250k base, 20% bonus, and $150k RSUs per year so pretty much on the money with yours, $450k TC.
I've also spent large parts of my career as an independent consultant -- similar compensation most years.
1. they don't hire often & usually have small teams 2. they make so much money, that they don't make noise about it. & you won't hear about them, unless one day you randomly run into one of their employees saying they're hiring on reddit / hn 3. they work in unsexy industries or high risk stuff e.g gambling 4. they're usually located in places you wouldn't expect
I know things went bad and I had something in my contract that I'd be immediately dismissed if I was found to have pornography on my laptop or any other computer belonging to the company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_betting
On one level I can understand the thrill of having some money riding on a game but I am baffled by the prop bets. Fixing a whole game is not so easy and rather risky, but influencing the silly little events some people bet on looks easy and hard to stop. It's particularly crazy that people bet on decisions by individuals and small groups as opposed to the outcome of a contest.
Unlike porn it wouldn't really be an embarrassing topic on an interview. Lots of interesting technical stuff to deal with in such a job.
When I worked in the office before 2019 we had all kinds of people there. It was kind of beautiful in a way. Straight up communists discussing stuff with conservatives without any heat. Isolation breeds extremism.
It's true that it would close doors but man until the market takes that choice away from me I don't want to open those, and I say that as a guy who never worked with any of this even indirectly. And to be fair - not having experience with those things also closes doors, just different ones.
If you don’t take a job that would pay more you are also hurting your income opportunities. Turning a job down because of some hypothetical problem at some future date isn’t rational imo.
If you genuinely believe certain industries would hurt your future job prospects, you need to quantify the risk. And I have a hard time believing the particular industry would matter at all to an employer. If you can build CRUD apps for a gambling company you can build CRUD apps for a pediatric cancer charity.
While I agree in an ideal world, individuals should all stand up against unethical employment options, I am also mature enough to know not to penalise someone who might be otherwise meritorious based on what could be situational.
We should take a stand against predatory companies that attack the vulnerable, but this should be done at a government level, not an individual employee level, because it’s a much more efficient utilisation of resources for a large organisation with teeth to be subdued by another large organisation with teeth.
I would hire someone who used to be in gambling (if they were a good fit culturally and technically of course) because that would take a skilled developer OUT of the gambling industry, implying that you shouldn’t hire someone who used to work in gambling is a sure way to make sure that predatory industry keeps enough developers to keep shirking the poor
Actual LOL - who? I’ve worked at enormous orgs, Google, to medium sized orgs, to startups over my 20 year career, as a senior dev, engineering lead, CTO and now founder, I have hired and mentored hundreds, maybe close to 1000 engineers, hiring managers, project managers, and this has never ever been an issue, in one case we hired 20 engineers from Betsson, a huge (~400M/y) gambling company in Malta into a much larger organisation (non-gambling), and nobody from senior management, middle management or engineers ever even raised this point.
I think you are uncomfortable with it, and are projecting that starry-eyed wishful and naive thinking onto others by saying “a lot of people aren’t going to be comfortable with that”
I have 20 years experience working in 9 different countries, all with very different cultures, that says otherwise, nobody has ever mentioned it.
I wouldn't even thought to think about people coming from gambling companies differently.
Also, you're actually expected to work 40 hours a week and generally not more, and you're expected to take all your vacation.
It takes a while to get to that level, or you need to get hired directly into a GS-15 equivalent position. But it's doable, especially at an agency that does technical work (eg NASA, NOAA, DOE, parts of the DOD, etc.)
GS-15s aren't particularly common (fedscope data says 3.1% of federal employees are GS-15) and overwhelmingly they are supervisory positions (or more commonly supervisor-of-supervisors). Even if you do find a non-supervisor GS-15, the federal government mostly contracts development, so it's exceptionally rare to find a federal engineering position that does something other than contract oversight (generically called acquisition). I'm not saying those positions don't exist, they are just rare, and typically reserved for promotions from within the agency or federal government. Also, since GS-15 is so senior in the federal government, even if the position is technical it will start to be political.
Pay is pretty low for new grads and experienced engineers, but decent when you're in the ~3-8 year range of experience. Most agencies are hiring new grads at GS-7 or GS-9 (in SF that's $61k to $75k to start) which is a joke. So even if you can get on at a federal agency as a GS-14 or GS-15 level, you'll have an exceptionally hard time hiring new engineers. Pay at the high end, especially in HCOL areas, very quickly hits the congressional limit and makes it pointless to seek promotion (Look at the SF are GS-14 table: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... ). You can theorhetically bonus up to 20-25%, and I've heard that some intelligence agencies just do that across the board, but most agencies are probably giving a 2-3% bonuses each year.
This is a sad and interesting factoid: Long ago congress passed a law saying they need to track federal vs private sector pay and adjust the pay to federal employees to match that. Of course, there is an exception that allows the president to disband this requirement in case of national emergency. So now every year the president literally writes a letter declaring a national emergency and manually decides what the pay increase will be, which is always significantly lower than what is recommended. Here are the national emergency letters from 2023 and 2022, but they have been issued by every president for decades now:
2023: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action... 2022: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
Benefits are good, but not amazing. Yes, there is a pension and a wide variety of health insurance options, but they're mediocre compared to what a lot of high-paying tech jobs offer. TSP is basically vanguard with lower fees and a 4% match. You can look at the healthcare options here: https://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/plan-inf...
The 40-hour work week it completely true. If you're trying to work overtime, you'll actively be discouraged and told to stop it and go home. There is generally support for telework, but it's very political, and who knows if it will get killed in the future.
Lots of agencies, especially the agencies that need a lot of technical work, will require you get a security clearance and that comes with it's own considerations. Drug use and foreign contacts are a big problem and makes recruiting even more difficult.
It's possible to find a job at some agencies working on stuff that feels very rewarding and very important, but you will always constantly feel like the bureaucracy is constantly fighting you.
This has not been my experience, my agency hires new PhDs at the GS-13 level and BS/MS graduates at the GS-12 level. But YMMV.
"It's possible to find a job at some agencies working on stuff that feels very rewarding and very important, but you will always constantly feel like the bureaucracy is constantly fighting you."
Concur.
Of course, government jobs are very stable, which can be an advantage or not depending on what you want out of life. We find that most of the engineers we are able to recruit have been to industry or academia and found the instability and poor life balance to be incompatible with having a family. So my "new" recruits tend to be a little older, married, with a child or two. On the other hand, many of my actual younger hires eventually get headhunted and leave for industry to make 2x more than I can pay them. Then they find out that on an hourly basis they're making roughly the same amount, because their new jobs expect 20-40 hours of unpaid overtime.
Most FAANG engineers are NOT getting $1M stock grants.
That is the stock grant for Google L6-7, Amazon Principal SDE, and Microsoft L67.
These are engineering levels comparable to Director of Engineering or Engineering Manager and extremely rare.
> a Staff Engineer at an avg startup might get $250k base salary, in a HCOL area and maybe a 10-20% bonus
This is the norm at FAANG as well. Just add a $60-150k/yr stock grant, which is normal at other public companies in the Bay Area and Seattle tech scenes as well.
Companies give the option to either go Management Track (Manager, Director VP) or Technical Track (Principal/E6, Fellow, Distinguished Engineer)
In public companies, most Engineers will peak at the L5/L64/SDE3/E5 level by their 30s.
> Plenty of data on other companies offers there
Plenty of companies offer that kind of compensation, but the competition is intense as the number of roles paying that much are limited, and WLB is atrocious as it's basically a Architect/Team Lead role.
If anyone thinks they deserve a L6/L7 role with less than a decade of experience at peer companies they need to adjust their expectations or remain unemployed
I think a lot of HN commenters simply assume that every role at these companies is L6/L7+ and pays $1M/yr or whatever the meme is currently. Like it's the default for "Software Engineer" at these companies. In reality, these roles are exceedingly rare. You won't even often see them publicly posted, simply because there are just not many of them.
People see one example of this kind of compensation and declare, "See, it is possible to make this money at a FAANG." which is true, but in the same sense that it is technically possible to get struck by lightning. Your median FAANG employee is probably L4 and not making $1M/yr in compensation. They're probably not even making $150K, depending on their location.
While OP overestimates salaries, you are doing the opposite and underestimating salaries for most mid-career SWEs working a Software companies in the US.
Most L4/5 equivalent engineers across the US will end up earning around $150-250k Base, 10-20% Bonus, and around $50-150k/yr in stocks assuming they are working for a Software Company as a SWE (eg. Salesforce in Indianapolis or VMWare/Broadcom in RTP or Denver - let alone the Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, and NYC scene).
Having worked in the finance world, where the wheels are made out of software at this point, I never got the feeling that the old guard that still ran the place fully understood how crucial software was to their business, and how much it saved in labour costs.
The software department was generally seen as a cost center, with the salaries and outsourcing of projects reflecting that.
So I agree with the sentiment, just saying it doesn't always hold up.
You could also make these amounts in adult/gambling marketing but that's another can of worms..
Interested. Tell me more.
It’s not just salary.
The "not just salary" bit is very often used as a mirage intended to fool employees to take a lower compensation than what they can get, and then tag a bunch of conditions that can't possibly or realistically be met.
TBH that's one of the reasons I chose the company I'm at now. I had other options, but having a team that I love and very healthy PTO won me over. To each their own!
Instead of being indentured by spending company scrip at the company store you're staying because of health insurance that would otherwise be unaffordable to you.
For people with family, I believe a good insurance plan and flexibility in hours also mean a lot. Especially hours.
Can be purchased with money.
> flexibility in hours
Hard to not get flexibility if remote is on the table, which it usually is for these jobs.
That's not to say that job insurance is automatically good -- the job I had before being a consultant had worse health insurance that was a little worse than the plans I had as a consultant.
I had about 12 months of buffer, but several unplanned home and auto repairs ate into that.
Healthcare is one of those things that's a perk in the US, but is not such a big deal in most western countries. Hopefully the US will be able to benefit from that someday.
You still have to interact with the insanity of the American healthcare system, but you're not being financially ruined by it.
If it’s coming from a peer, especially one whose been round a few more blocks than you, may just be an observation about life.
The only difference is that I get paid out any remaining PTO, should I leave, whereas with unlimited, there was no expectation that it will be paid out on departure.
My current company recently made a rule that you have to apply for time off through the HR software. Not make it harder to take PTO—all requests are auto-approved-just so HR can track it. At the next all-hands the CEO said something like "You guys work really hard... we're, uh, worried." My manager has been bugging me to take a proper vacation instead of my usual day off here and there.
There are certainly awful, exploitative workplaces out there. But there are also great companies run by good people.
More recently, someone I know who worked at a well-known unlimited PTO company told me that a newly hired head of corporate communications quit in short order because the CEO would actually go radio silence on vacation and they couldn't deal with that.
At one place I worked at, they only gave 3 weeks, but with the option to "buy" a 4th week with a slight salary reduction that effectively made that 4th week unpaid, but with the loss of pay spread out over the year. It was nice, though I actually wish I could have taken more, especially since the company did a shutdown between Christmas and New Years and forced you to burn a week of PTO at that time, which meant that you really only got 2 or 3 weeks throughout the year to do what you wanted.
10 years later, the car is paid off, you've got a sizable savings, and your increased salary over the years means your mortgage payment represents a much smaller portion of your salary, and you're already capping out the 401(k) contribution limit. At that point, you're ready to start relaxing a bit. You'd rather have the PTO. Alternatively, your savings account is now a decent safety net and you're ready to take a job that has a lower salary in favor of more stock, or even play the startup lottery.
At FAANG you will definitely make exactly as much as a FAANG salary.
That's like saying "a tech job". Most jobs that require those things pay poorly. Big defense contractors like Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, etc. pay worse than most tech companies. I have over a dozen friends in defense (I used to work for a defense contractor) and none earn comparably to big tech. It's not a matter of clearance, to be clear - most of those dozen have TS/SCI and had to go through a full polygraph.
Unless you meant working directly for the government, not a contractor. That would put you on the GS payscale, which does not have carveouts for SWEs, meaning it won't pay as well as any private developer role.
Maybe that's just the state of the job market, no desirable jobs left, only thing we can hope for is a high salary?
Getting rent raises that are 1000% higher than annual salary raises, childcare costing like renting another apartment each month, per child, has become the norm
Spend enough time in a major US metropolin and you figure its about 50/50 people with very high income, and people who's family is funding their lifestyle
With the way compounding works, highly paid years when you're young and can invest much of it sets you up for financial independence and much less money stress for the rest of your entire life, no matter what you want to do. I don't worry about getting fired or laid off or the stress of finding the next job because there is no financial stress about it.
Plus in my career so far, the best paying jobs have also been the best culture and WLB. People incorrectly think these big tech jobs are a constant long hours grind. IME, the absolute worst working hours and culture have been in startups and small businesses, with lower comp and equity lottery tickets with an EV of 0.
I'm not a maximize comp at all costs robot, but it's a big big factor. I'm selling my time and labor and I want to get a good value for it while I can. There's no guarantees these 300k+ years will continue. Get it while the gettin's good.
And to clarify, I'm not saying it's greedy or wrong, just that you'll be happier in life with clear goals beyond a salary number. I found that what I wanted was attainable with lower salary and not working for FAANG or living in Bay area
A common retort is "stop working for FAANGs, then maybe you won't be in such a rush to get out". I completely disagree. I don't care who I'm working for, even if it's myself, it's the fact that my time is controlled by some outside force that I'm trying to escape.
Side note: The difference at Staff Eng is slightly more wide. Eg. IBM Band 9 pays TC ~$250K while Meta E6 is ~$640K.
Side note 2: From what I understand, Big Tech often brings in Staff Eng from smaller companies to a Senior Eng role. Reverse is also true, Sr Eng at Big Tech are often able to join Staff roles at smaller companies.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/leaderboard/Software-Engineer/Entry-L...
For example at your avg startups you worry about which latest GraphQL technology to learn. As Staff at a FAANG you realize how the graphQL engines work and can pretty much critique the design choices made in each. A Staff at avg startup is more like L5 at Google or L6 at Amazon.
Having said that, relaize that if you become that good at the craft, its better to found a tech startup. Take the example of DGraph if you are looking for a blueprint. You have got founders advantage because of your deep expertise. And tbh, its in the Faang's interest to keep you on the payroll.
I encourage the downvoters to provide evidence to the contrary.
The non-FAANG big and mid names offer dramatically higher comp than Shopify, and it's pretty sad.
In France its basically like they don't want a tech sector. Employee's rights are skewed so far to the left that Employers are often hamstrung and startup-culture is completely stagnant. Even running a Cafe you can end up paying an employee for a year or two who literally can't or won't show up for work.
In short though, Ireland/UK/Belgium are the highest paying areas for tech in Europe outside of a few select Financial/Banking enclaves in Geneva and Zurich, with the majority of non-FAANG Seniors capping out at €120k or thereabouts without going into the niche areas like SRE or Algo or Cloud Architect.
Not if you're less than 2 years in the company (in the UK). Which probably applies to a large proportion of software engineers.
The major one is an unfair dismissal claim against the company on the basis that the redundancy is not a genuine one - you can't just re-hire for the same or an equivalent but differently named position.
The other ones relate to fair procedures and fair selection. The Twitter Exec in Ireland who got an injunction is a good one;
https://www.irishtimes.com/technology/big-tech/2022/11/25/du... {Incognito or no JS for paywall}
Or the Wix developer who was paid out €35,000 compensation when she was fired after she labelled Israel a “terrorist state” on social media, because the manner in which Wix had dismissed her had been “procedurally unfair.”
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/israeli-tech-firm-ordere...
I think you are taking it in the wrong way. A startup has lower mean income but can have a much higher return in the future. Most startups are also cash strained, so you won't get as much cash for your income. I'd suggest you look into the expected return of your startup instead, and the take into at least the following situations:
- Your peers. Do you get to build lasting relationship with truly amazing peers? With such peers, you won't regret it even if your startup fails as you will have great experience, let alone your career will likely take off in the near future.
- The problem space. Does the problem you solve inspire you?
- The potential of your startup. You get to to evaluate the potential continuously, as the situation of a startup changes constantly. The good news is that a startup is usually quite transparent. You get to know how your company performs easily and how the founders lead too.
- Know yourself. How much risk can you take? How optimistic are you? And etc
- Your expected income. Take your equity into consideration, but multiply the value with a probability of success in a given time frame.
Those are just golden handcuffs! How many of the hired employees get to complete the vesting period?
I do pretty well doing my own thing. But there was a ramp-up, and it wasn't overnight (much like some LI influencers would have you believe). Regarding the effort of creating your own thing, yes, there is a lot of non-sexy stuff that no one talks about because it is non-sexy.
An additional benefit for me is flexibility. Being able to go to my kid's school function or help coach a team is more important to me than professional accolades.
As far as the work. Yes, it is a lot of work. But theoretically, you are doing your own thing because you like it. My work is generally self-motivating. I can't say the same about when I worked for others.
That said, some folks in consulting pull off those numbers and it is, theoretically, possible to exceed those numbers on a good year in presales (at a place where commissions are uncapped).
She decided to accept the offer from the not-sexy credit union software company, knowing she could've earned at least 30% more elsewhere. She kept using the word "genuine" when she talked about the people she met during the "interview" process, and that's what attracted her.
Well, about 2 years after accepting the offer she was diagnosed with breast cancer. (tl;dr = dealing with cancer sucks. constant doctor appointments. chemo treatments. pain. vomiting. life/death uncertainty. and so on.) She said her company was unbelievable during her cancer battle. She didn't work for almost a year (her bosses wouldn't let her), and they never even talked about sick leave or FMLA or disability - nothing. They just kept her on the payroll like normal, for almost a full year! She said her bosses would call all the time, asking about the latest test results, how she was feeling, did she need anything, etc. And, to her surprise, after about 2 years of treatments, almost the entire company showed up to watch her ring the bell.
Moral of the story: Money is great, but it's really not everything.
I had an offer recently where it was online, it had gone through one of those ridiculous LinkedIn recruiters and it had been completely “missold” (not sure what the English word for misleading a “sale” is) to me. I figured this out after about 5 minutes of me asking them questions about their place and the work they wanted me to do, at which point I flat out said something along the lines of “I think I’m the wrong fit” to which they agreed, but they wanted to offer me another type of job in architecture and management. I didn’t want that, but the process of them being very open to me interviewing them helped us both out immensely in not picking each other.
It’s obviously only something you can really engage in if you don’t “need-need” a job.
The signs I've picked up so far:
- Privately owned by the founders (engineers)
- A sense of carefulness when hiring
- Few employees quit the company at all
- Either entirely engineer-run or a few soft-skilled workers with high EQ and social status
- The people you speak with have been at the company for a long time
- The fairness and quality of the interview process (especially w.r.t. the tech screen)
If multiple people you speak with have been with the company for more than 10 years, it's a great sign. And if the interview is really high quality and fair (such that it is an accurate representation of your skills), it's a really great sign for company quality in the intangibles.
The company I just joined is like this, and I can totally understand why people don't leave to try to continue up the total comp pyramid elsewhere.
I'm guessing working for a credit union is a textbook example of a stable company.
It would be nice if the pay is around 120k.
Money is the same.
> "yeah, but person could have made a more money-optimal deal elsewhere."
I mean, this entire post is about how to maximize money so I shouldn't be surprised, but this response just made me shake my head in sadness. Hope you're able to find joy and feel you have enough with your choices.
I would rather have the money upfront. And it shouldn't bring you sadness, it's a reality that sadly many of us had to face.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pretty good because they offer huge comp packages, but many of the others are mediocre because there's limited upside to their stock (rather than raising at a $50m valuation, they might raise at a $1B valuation. A $4B exit is much more life changing when you own 20x as much of the company. And they're very risky.)
Anecdotally I've heard that the larger chinese tech companies love exFAANG, because 'American engineers are better'. Maybe the Silicon Valley Mythos is another export?
Why pay easily 50-200% more for US talent when they can often get solid talent in Japan / Europe / China / etc. Outside of a small business and localization team, why bother?
I suppose the point is, these jobs exist but it's quite hard to replicate as it's not common with large firms that are regularly hiring.
I have a friend who went from being the form to the latter and immediately doubled his salary, despite the consulting firm making it clear that he was at the bottom of the totem pole, despite his being 5 years or so into mainframe work.
People in these roles don't want to draw attention on their sweet comp packages which is why you won't see them crow about who/where they work.
But why should I risk being identified by mentioning the company's name for no gain other than the fleeting thought of appreciation from a random anonymous HN user?
I maxed out bonus/stock at MS as Senior my last year, still left for PeerDB. But MS pays much less in Canada I guess
They're not in the FAANG but you'd better believe they still pay well.
levels.fyi has most of these rough TCO numbers, for big orgs. SF firms pay the most but you're also paying $5900/month for an apartment with a reasonable commute in the Bay Area, and greater Seattle ain't that crazy yet.
You should check out levels.fyi if you don’t have sources from those companies.
I'd also argue that sometimes you get lower pay but in low cost places, with good benefits and work-life balance. It's more reasonable to take other things into the equation.
I can’t speak to non-public company stock though.
The trick is that it’s not RSUs, so not regular income. Instead it’s some form of option (I am not a tax attorney so I hesitate to state the type of option, there’s a variety of them that are used with different limitations). I believe they exercise 83(b) style to avoid AMT as well.
As usual, you need to already have a lot of money to make this work. Tax avoidance is amazingly accessible once you have enough money. One trick I could do, but don’t — my bank gives me a line of credit based on assets they manage for me. I could quit my job and easily live for years just using the LoC and report zero income other than passive income from rebalancing trades (which are very minimal).
Also, one thing that happened early in the dotcom gold rush is that a ton of people swarmed in, all suddenly acting like experts and professionals, with little/no prior experience. Meanwhile, Internet people who were also prolific programmers were, like, who are all these people, and why do many of them have fashionable eyeglasses like nerds would never try to pull off. I don't know how much we'll see something like that this time.
Many HackerNews readers are young'uns who are seduced by FANG salaries, and the latest AI/ML bandwagon. They dont have the perspective one gets having seeing the highs and the lows.
I can bet there will be another rude awakening around the corner which will wipe out the "pretenders". After the dot-com bust, many pretenders left the silicon valley with anecdotes of leased BMWs abandoned at SFO airport.
After the AI/ML hype deflates, there is likely to be a similar separation. Folks in it for real will be separated from the folks who came in for the riches.
And for the history-buffs this rhymes with the CA gold-rush circa late 1800s - some found it, most didnt, levis profited selling denims to them.
I'm very confident there are, but should there be?
>-- if So who are they? and what do they do?
A lot of times it will be things that are a lot less ethical than big tech or financial firms.
>Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?
As to the title question, stick around and you'll notice messages from people on the payroll of many of the biggest tech outfits who confirm that you can be quite gainfully employed there for years without having to do any real work at all ;)
With all the layoffs over recent times there may never be another message like that.
Not a single one.
I guess you would have to look over old comments if you want to re-live the experience.
Sorry to be so misleading or hurting anybody's feelings.
> a similar base, and then $1mil in stock for 4 years.
so are there firms with similar market caps and/or growth?
Eventually it will normalize closer to the lower end as my large initial grant is replaced by refreshers, unless the stock continues to go up dramatically, which is unlikely.
Controlling spending is something one can control to some extent once the necessities are paid for.
And then that’s the way to accrue and stay wealthy or become independently wealthy over time.
...
2 is easy to do, 3 is manageable. I've heard of people doing more than 3, but most I've personally seen someone do is 3.
Doing so however carries a lot of risk and one needs to have a certain mentality to be able to actually do it (I certainly don't have that).
Yes.
> -- if So who are they? and what do they do?
OpenAI, Anthropic and crypto bug bounty hunters.
Non-AI, I got a written offer (for a key T-shaped hands-on technical role in a special unit of a financial institution), for which TC was (put very roughly) about halfway between Google L6 and where non-FAANG IC TC generally tops out.
Since you're asking about "non-FAANG", a few comments about that, using one offer as an example...
First, requirements: making a lot of money now is higher priority for me than it has been in the past (since I'd previously made money way too low of a priority, and now catching up to do), and FAANG-like TC is a solution, but aspects of culture and mission are still also very important.
Some ways that particular financial institution offer was more attractive than FAANG:
1. Every single person I talked with seemed genuine, honest, smart, and down-to-earth, and like they'd be great to work with, not mercenary/arrogant/oblivious like I've seen from some FAANG people.
2. The interview process was collegial and two-way. And some asked some very good questions, including questions that I think would never occur to Leetcode interviewers to ask, and the "correct answer" wasn't in the FAANG interview prep books for people to memorize/practice.
3. A higher executive themself met with me for a substantial meeting, was very smart and straight-talking about everything, and then also brought up growth opportunity they had in mind.
In hindsight, I probably should've accepted, but three of the main reasons at the time that I declined:
1. Leadership of my then-employer assured me that a showstopper organizational issue I raised would be fixed, and I felt an obligation to my colleagues to stay and help fix it. (That was my values-based choice, given the information I had at the time.)
2. The compensation was structured in a convoluted way (more complicated than FAANG TC), and the net effect was that there'd be almost no financial quality of life improvement for close to a year. So I'd be working like crazy, like at a startup (but without a startup lottery ticket), yet, although I'd be working for a big financial institution with a gazillion dollars, I wouldn't immediately have enough money and sense of income security to upgrade from a problematic early-startup-grade apartment in a VHCOLA. Buying a fleet of Brooks Brothers no-iron dress shirts would feel like an investment towards the future bonuses, and I'd just have to make sure my old radiator didn't burst and ruin everything in my closet again, until I could find a sufficiently low-risk way to upgrade lifestyle. :)
3. Once the offer was in writing, I got handed off to dealing directly with large corporate HR processes, which had a very different feel from the people I'd been talking with, and my spidey sense (battle scars) tingled. (Not potentially Kafkaesque bureaucracy for bad reasons, like some companies, but maybe the effect of decades of evolution of highly-regulated large business bureaucracy.) Not the kind of thing you want to see, right after you see that the TC structure still isn't going to make you feel financially comfortable anytime soon. This was intuition rather than hard information, but I hadn't yet gotten that disconcerting feeling from Google (where they'd grown up with a Summer Camp for Stanford Students focus on employee happiness, and where I imagine I might be able to find a progressive policy or person who is able help with a bureaucratic machine dilemma, if ever needed).
When asking about maximizing your TC, consider whether that's your only requirement, and what qualities of FAANG or FAANG-like-TC companies you have to accept to get that money.
Of the rest, the top paying ones seem to be fintech and AI startups. Only Netflix still scores high in top salaries.
It would make sense too, as they have a lot of leverage. Lots of people joining are happy to take a cut just to have the FAANG name on their resume. And I saw someone mention the average tenure is about 1.7 years.
There's the argument that salaries are opaque so someone within wouldn't feel bad about getting a lower salary, but this is only really the case is someone is paying a L6 differently in US vs UAE vs India or something. But they know what market they're in.
Can be an apples-to-oranges comparison for some other companies with large stock appreciation (e.g. Meta), where a lot of the comp number are vested TC rather than granted TC.
The numbers accurately reflect longer term employees W2s, but not the offer you’d get if you joined today.
dont compare yourself with others. focus on your art. be a craftsman at whatever you do. eventually opportunities will beckon or not, and either is fine.
I don’t recommend it.
At least with FAANG you know barring cataclysmic events It'll be valuable down the road.