Hacker News Reader

Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

I've never worked at a company where total compensation for engineers was more than $250k

To see "it's not worth it to make $420k as an L6 Amazon engineer" is super interesting

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

It's the toil. The soul-crushing expectations. The "I'm surrounded by people and yet I've never felt so alone" kinda experience, where your co-worker may be nice, but there's not enough level appropriate work to go around.

Then you learn how long it takes for that "420k" comp to manifest (typically about 2-3 years from hire if all goes well, longer if the market is down). At least your annual increase in time off is looking good by then!

Well, assuming you make it that far. Whoops, did you forget to document how awesome you are and insure your manager sees it too? Or just make a 'blameless' mistake during an oncall rotation that made everything in the UK available at a steep discount? Sorry, ______, guess it's PIP time. We hope you succeed! Just don't look too hard at the success rate.

And then, your average successful tenure of 3-5 years is up, and you get to look back at the intense stress, distrust of your boss/coworkers, impact to your relationships, and the toil on your family. Suddenly, the offers pouring in are looking better and better, even if the comp isn't as great.

FWIW, the first 3-6 months tend to be great though!

The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills.

It's like big brother where someone on your team will be pipped each quarter and you need to make sure it's not you. When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.

"When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad." Thanks for this gem, this captures the culture in a nutshell.

When I was there, they weren’t creative. They outright said that doing certain things didn’t help them get promoted.

> When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.

Yep, lots of idea-snatching, not crediting each other, teaming up to not including a particular team member to try to ensure that team member is the one that gets PIP

Regarding your last point, I’ve witnessed two different engineers cry on two different calls because they weren’t getting any support from senior engineers and were at risk of being pipped. It’s that ridiculous. And these were not incompetent engineers. One went to Meta and another went to Cloudflare after Amazon.

> The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills.

This is untrue for Amazon, at least in the US. Your total compensation is guaranteed for the first 4 years. If your total compensation in your offer was 500k, you'll get ~500k per year.

The first two years you're paid in cash so it'll match the offer exactly, the final two years you're paid in RSUs (stock based) with the stock price calculated at the time of the offer. Your salary may vary due to stock price. Historically it's gone up, not down, and this is how people have made 600k+, for example, as a senior engineer there.

Starting from year 2-3, you'll receive new stock grants that will vest in the years after 4 if you stay that long.

Source: I've received offer letters.

Presumably your comp changes if you get promoted in that time though?

It's not interesting, it's preposterous to think that you can make that money and just kick your feet up every day and twiddle your thumbs. Yeah, there is going to be fucking stress. That's why the pay is so high. My non-FAANG job is 100% constant stress day-in and day-out and I don't make even half of these comps.

People burn out and have nervous breakdowns dealing with the stress of working retail (violent customers, sick customers, terrible hours, short breaks, coffin-like break rooms, benefits like "50 cents off a bag of pistachios") for $15 an hour. I wager most would go back in a heartbeat for $400k/yr.

Perspective.

Relative hardship comparisons generally suck.

"hah you think retail is hard, imagine working for a drug gang in Africa! You'd go back to retail in a snap!"

Stress is stress. It makes you unwell. The remuneration isn't the point.

The remuneration is certainly a large part of the point, because a SWE who makes mid six figures and burns out from a high stress job has accumulated enough money to not have to work again for awhile, potentially ever, and can rest and recuperate. A cashier on minimum wage working a similarly high stress job can't ever stop working because they're never not going to be living paycheck to paycheck.

Yes but you can't demote the stress element because the remuneration element is larger. They're not dependent variables at the point the stress is felt.

Stress isn't less stressful just because you get to take a holiday afterwards. A broken leg doesn't hurt less when you break it because you have health insurance.

Sure,the duration of the stress may differ, but that's a different variable too.

Can a millionaire experience the same or higher levels of stress than a cashier? Absolutely. Can a cashier and millionaire be in a position of high, inescapable stress for prolonged periods? Yes.

Stop comparing relative hardship based on your own bias... Unless you promise to never complain about anything you eat or drink ever again because of "starving African children"

>Yes but you can't demote the stress element because the remuneration element is larger. They're not dependent variables at the point the stress is felt.

GP just explained how, though. Higher remuneration = eventual recovery period. Focusing on the stress is only human, so you can't be faulted for that, but considering the comparative situations holistically, it is objectively more advantageous to get paid more for similarly, or perhaps even more, stressful situations.

Shit to Salary ratio.

Its almost universal that we will deal with more crap for more money. Some people wont, but most will.

There is a line for everyone though where the shit is too much for any salary.

Well then you also have a crappy job. Good money doesn't need to equal high stress. You can do a good job, create positive value, and live a low stress life. Step 1: Don't work at Amazon.

From the same website, other FAANG offers more. For quite some time while I was there, my peers with the same industry experience were earning 50-100% more than myself at Google and Meta.

Also keep in mind Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, which is far from a cheap area, and of the 5 submitters to levels.fyi for sde3 Seattle new hires in the last 6 months, the range is 250k-425k.

Take into account that an L6 who started from L4 normally has the scope and competence of a Staff engineer at Google, it makes sense to me.

If all you wanted was money, you could do even better by going into finance or OpenAI and work your life away until you can't anymore. It's just not sustainable for most people long term, no matter what the pay is, which itself is less than many contemporaries in the same "class".

After you get woken up by pages enough time you really start to question the monetary value of sleep. You will also miss life events such as birthdays, helping friends move, your child’s sporting events, etc.

Being on-call at these companies is equivalent to making work your first priority in life every few weeks. That is a big sacrifice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com