Engineering salaries at Silicon Valley startups
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1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2495%2C000+salary+in+...
I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of anyone who has made a move like that and if they felt their increase in salary was on par, above, or below the change in cost of living.
- The sources are very vague, there's no way to
verify anything for yourself.
- There's no indication of statistical significance
- Visualizations are not accurate, such as the
"salary by experience" graph which even by visual
inspection is not to scale.
- The connected line graph from "C" to "Other" under
salary by company stage is meaningless and misleading
- The visualizations are for the sake of visualization,
not for clarity. See "Average # of companies
competing" sectionI don't understand why you would give priority to a salary figure at a startup. It's largely illusory. The startup could shutdown 2 weeks from now and nobody will pay you anything.
If you're just after a high salary, join an established corporation. If you're after equity, or working on cutting edge stuff, join a startup.
The median prices would be much more interesting.
Breaking down the "high demand" technologies by investments (Round A, Round B...) would likely bear different results.
<5 years work experience:
T20 school => $102,500
non-T20 => $123,300
... which seems to be counterintuitive, with more prestigious schools correlating to lower salaries, but stranger things have happened.
5+ years of experience:
T20 school => $128,500
non-T20 school => $123,100
In other words, the people from non-T20 schools stagnate as they cross the 5-year mark, while the T20 students improve considerably. That makes no sense, because the effect of a T20 degree is highest early in one's career.
1. They are taking jobs at very early stage start-ups or starting their own companies as that culture seems to be more prevalent at many of the top schools. On the other hand your typical university is much more focused on the traditional get a job at mega corp scenario.
2. In my limited experience working with recently graduated interns I've found that the ones from "top schools" tend to be worse. They seem to have a chip on their shoulder that certain things are beneath them, give up easier, and are hyper sensitive to feedback. Students from more normal schools seem to have much less mental baggage in those regards.
3. The info graphic is BS and however they collected their numbers was flawed.
I'm not as negative as you are on top-school students. My experience is that Harvard/MIT programmers and quants are no worse or better than anyone else. Now, Harvard/MIT PM peoples... different story. Programming kills that entitlement mentality because the compiler does not give a shit who you are. Bossing people around reinforces it. After a few years, though, the effects of whatever school the person went to are pretty much gone.
What I think you are encountering is that, at a given level, the Ivy students who ended up there are going to be worse than the state-school kids who got to that same place. The best Harvard students are not going to be interested in a 0.02% equity slice of a mediocre startup, because they have the connections to be, if not Founders, VPs at least.
Speaking of equity, I'll add a 4th likely element:
4. Salary in startups has a relatively thin band: currently, about $110-150k in SV and $90-130k in New York. The real variation is in equity, titles, and glory if the thing succeeds.
Yes, I agree.
Essentially the argument here is that ivy-leaguers have better options when leaving college so, all things being equal, with an ivy-leaguer and a lower-tier school alum in the same job you'd expect the ivy-leaguer to be less skilled.
The point that is neglected is that the screening process for top-tier schools is substantially more difficult, so much so that it is feasible to see a student from the lowest quartile of the student body at a top-tier school that would have performed in the highest quartile at a less rigorous school. (note: less rigorous is not meant to be a comment on educational quality, only a comment on the intensity of the academic assignments). In this context it's unclear to me why the above comment makes sense. Maybe there's some anecdotal evidence that was not included but, lacking a decent sample, assertions like this are more representative of the biases of those that post them than reality.