20 years experience, two books under my belt, and lead architect (with a CTO title) on several good sized projects and most I have ever gotten in $175k... every time I see an article like this, I think I am doing something "very wrong"
I live about 40 miles outside of Boston.
Edit: Looking at levels.fyi for Boston that actually puts me above the median[1]. Why the heck is Boston so low compared to other markets?
Edit 2: Boston, MA and Denver, CO on Levels.fyi are both a median $159k but due to cost of living, that $159k in Denver is the same as $211k in Boston. I.e. adjusted for the cost of living, Denver pays 25% better.
It seems like a lot of HN readers are continually playing the "maximize salary" game and use like articles like this one to figure out how well they're doing. If you want to play that game, then good luck, have fun. I understand the desire.
But it's not for everyone. Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year? Do you enjoy what you do and the people that you work with? If so, I don't think there should be any shame in staying where you are. Don't feel like you have to chase every last dollar.
I'm also not into trying to maximize every dollar and care a lot about other factors like WLB. But these days I'm feeling a lot of pressure due to inflation. Everything is going up and I feel like I need to switch jobs and increase salary just to keep up. Yesterday, I read a news article that Social Security benefits are increasing by 5.9% next year due to inflation. And that's from Social Security which historically was under-adjusting for inflation (usually like 1.5% per year). So if the stingy SS program is going 5.9%, what does that say about the actual inflation?
And I've never seen anything close to 5.9% for COL from any company. Most companies don't give that even for top performers. I don't think companies are prepared to give 5.9% COL, most companies are already so short sighted they would rather lose their entire engineering department instead of give raises to keep up with the market rate (even though they would be willing to pay that market rate when hiring a replacement). That kind of short sighted thinking simply does not allow a massive COL increase, no matter how much data is out there.
Everything else being the same, it's better to make 300k than 175k/year. And not everything is the same, normally in those better paid jobs you have better Engineers, a lot of challenging problems, many nice perks, etc. What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week. Also you don't get highly ethical companies, just average ones at that (and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k).
So as far as general advice goes, it makes sense to recommend trying to get those FAANG jobs if you can.
> Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year?
Most people can't live comfortably while holding a full-time job, esp. a demanding one. The job just eats too much time and energy.
The exceptions are people with very high energy levels and people for whom the job is their passion (but even for them, it's usually temporary - passions change over the duration of one's life).
I believe it’s good practice to think about your compensation not only as “what you get for what you do”, but also as “what you get for not doing what you would rather be doing”.
Some companies, some products, some teams, some (lower) level of stress, some amount of learning you are getting, some work/life flexibility - at some (temporary?) point in your life - might make a lot of sense to be considered together with the $ you get paid.
I am all up for maximizing what you get out of your job, but you might want to optimize for multiple factors, not just salary.
Also, this discussion is very centered on yearly comp.
It’s good practice to ask yourself how risk prone you are? That early stage startup equity comp might turn into much more than you will ever get paid at a large established company.
So when you are maximizing, ask yourself over what time horizon you want to maximize? One year?Three? Five? Ten years? It’s rare to get truly great things instantly.
If you have a family that loves you, manageable stress levels and a purpose in life, I think you are doing a lot of things right. I am sure you are worth more! There are probably ways to increase your compensation and maintain your quality of life, but is it really worth it?
I taught my friend to code in a year and he did one of the intensive bootcamps. First job ever. A healthcare company in NYC is paying him 155 + 20% bonus. You're getting hosed
At the same time, I see mostly listings for director of data science or vp analytics at a ton of small businesses or startups that require a PhD and 5 extra years experience offering a cap of $80k.
I'm also based in Boston, senior dev (FAANG generalist, ~10 years of experience). I make about $200k plus ~$100k RSU/year on average. Previous FAANG paid ~$140k + ~100k RSU/year. I believe my peers make more, and the info I have on CTO salaries at various startups would put $175k on the low end of the CTO pay scale.
If I were you, strictly from a financial point of view, I'd probably test the market to see what offers I get.
Fellow Bostonian here, You need to look at large cap publicly traded tech companies.
There are a few home grown publicly traded Boston employers such as HubSpot, and to a lesser extent Wayfair which pay competitively. However there are also large presences from Salesforce, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, FB, Spotify and others who pay more competitively.
I live in Boston, 6 years of experience. I just went through the big tech thing for the first time. I got an offer from two of them and ended up almost doubling my total income (salary about the same but adding a ton of RSU and cash bonus). I did not grind leetcode, but I do know my data structures and I practiced enough to code basic algorithms without googling for method names or syntax. I spent more time practicing anecdotes, which is the part of the big tech interview where they ask questions like “describe a time you identified a customer issue and went outside your role to resolve it”
From my experience no company founded in Boston pays top end wages. This job search I only considered big tech side offices in Boston and remote roles for Silicon Valley companies.
My recommendation: find some data points on Levels.fyi that match your experience/level, location, and desired TC. If there’s a bunch of data points, then it’s possible. Interview with every employer listed in these data points, and don’t take a job if it’s less than your desired TC. The market is hot and you are in control.
You are doing something very wrong. Look at that median and ask yourself: Why would you compare yourself to median income if you have 20 yoe and two books? That is far more than the median SWE has accomplished. You are paying a lot in opportunity cost for whatever you are doing now.
Of course, it could be worth it! That’s for you to decide.
The best thing I did for my career was leave Boston for an entry level FANG job on the West Coast 10 years ago. I currently make more than 10x what I was making in Boston. But it has been a grind no doubt. And probably some luck.
Sorry, 10x seems like a crazy difference when talking about salary. Could you be more specific? I’m trying to figure out numbers that make sense. Like you were getting $30,000 a year in 2011 and now getting $300,000+ in 2021? In the same field? Either the Boston salary was crazy low or fang salary is crazy high.
Mostly the same. I left Austin for SFO and FAANG 10 years ago. I made so much more, that when my previous company sold and some of my friends got 1m+ in stock, i had made more simply in salary moving.
How many of your employers have the cash flow that FAANG companies have. The idea that non-FAANG companies should be able to match FAANG salaries regardless of what non-FAANG companies have to spend on staff seems a rather distorted concept. As the article mentions, FAANG could actually be paying their employees much more. They can afford it, easily.
Ok I have but a fraction of your experience and make more. And live in a much lower cost if living area.
I’m extremely mobile. Not like permanently move mobile. But I’ll take contracting work that require me to move to NY or London or whatever. Very job bumps my salary up. If I have to switch continents I will.
Home is always my low cost of living place, and in practice I spend the majority of time there.
I know most people aren’t like this. And most people don’t have spouses who tolerate this.
My wife is either very understanding, or maybe she just doesn’t like me that much.
But if I’m like, honey, I have to move to Austin a for six months, she’s like “Ok, just be home for Thanksgiving.”
I just landed a staff+ faang role over 700k and I’m 20 mi outside Boston.
Boston is a joke. Growing up here my whole life I thought we were right behind SV. Boy was I wrong. Seattle, NYC, and Austin have all eclipsed Boston as a tech hub. It’s embarrassing.
Apply for remote. Now you’re exposed to companies based in SV. This is the time to do it - The Great Resignation has made jobs plentiful with unreal comp.
Also study up. The best positions are the hardest to get into. Give yourself 3 months to study and these opportunities will be yours for the taking. You clearly have the skills, you just need to put yourself out there.
The levels.fyi number you're looking at is across companies, so it's skewed by the type of companies hiring SWE's in Boston vs the Bay Area, which have different pay scales. Large Bay Area tech companies (e.g. FAANG) pay Boston SWE's pretty close[0] to what they pay SF SWE's.
If you use the "Robert Half" site[1] from the original article, it says Boston is +34% compared to US baseline (vs SF's +42%, NYC's +40.5%) which roughly lines up.
This topic certainly does bring out the shittiest commentary on this site, both in tone and content.
Congrats on making an income I could have only dreamed of as a college kid.
I've made very little money and FAANG-like money in my career. It has nothing to do with the difficulty of the work, the impact, or the hiring process. It's purely how badly the company wants "top" talent and the extent to which they want to / have to use money as a magnet.
The money is out there and $175K/yr is nowhere near the top of the market for your experience in the Boston area. That’s not to say you’re doing something wrong if you’re optimizing for the many things other than money that are worthwhile.
Not near the top, no, but according to the numbers it is median. I'm sure there are larger salaries out there but this article makes it sound like it is normal. Which in a roundabout way was my point.
Boston has a lot of robotics which seems to pay less for some reason (less profitable? Can't scale as cheaply?) and biotech which pays less. That could be one cause.
It's harder to transfer on robotics and biotech as ramping up a projects takes a long time and there's a lot of bespoke tooling. In my experience the jobs that pay the most are where engineers can switch and quickly be productive, as the main force actually driving salaries up are people quitting for a higher pay. The company hiring you for more than average needs you to be productive quickly.
Would you work on increasing ad click rate by 0.01% or on playing with cool tech toys and solving hard robotics problem? This is the same as SpaceX being able to pay under market - what you do matter and people are ready to take paycut to work on intersting problems.
Go to any little league practice in MetroWest, look over at the dads. Not the guy in the fleece vest - he works for a consulting firm or something. The two guys next to him, though? Both of them are ex CTOs. Only one of them wrote two books though.
>every time I see an article like this, I think I am doing something "very wrong"
there's a comment like this in every single thread like this. and the recommendation is always the same: grind LC for however long you need in order to be comfortable solving hard problems cleanly in 35-45 minutes and then collect your pay bump. the fact that the
1. data
2. complaint
3. recommendation
crop up with 100% perfect regularity means that it's the solution that simply isn't palatable to all of the people that express the complaint. to which i say: what exactly are you expecting to give among these three things?
It was data. The "I must be doing something wrong" was tongue in cheek. The specific data point was that I am not seeing any salaries anywhere near that. And Salary.com actually backs me up.
Just the fact "grind Leet Code" is a recommendation to someone who's most recent job title was CTO and has written two books may be a sign these interviews are broken.
But point taken, I'm sure if I studied specifically for interviews I could get those jobs. But the fact remains, a vast majority of people don't work for FAANG and even the "person unwilling to work for FAANG" example is higher salary than I have ever seen.
My point was actually that the article and ones like this seem well research but don't match the reality. For example, I recently interviewed at a fortune 100 company for a Director position and it was what this article says is "non-FAANG staff engineer" salary.
> grind LC for however long you need in order to be comfortable solving hard problems cleanly in 35-45 minutes
Which is more difficult to do for people who have a lot of non-work commitments, like say raising a family. So this method of hiring introduces some biases. Not that I have a solution.
•Boston area
•7 yoe
•Staff level
•Full remote
•Co is SF-based
•$250 total comp
I expect a promotion and ~20% increase next cycle. Interview was no leet code (I’m terrible at it!) - my strategy was to interview at public companies with levels on levels.fyi but not FAANG
You should have negotiated for equity. That's where all the real money is. RSUs/ISOs/NSOs whatever. If you were CTO of a revenue generating project and didn't get a % of the business, that is what you did wrong.
As someone who works in an Eastern European country, i also did a writeup on how much i've made over the years and how that figure has changed, while working for a local company: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
In short, this year i'll probably make around 18k Euros, in total.
I guess that just goes to show how different the situation is depending on where you live and where you're employed.
You are grossly underpaid, even for eastern europe. Guys just across the border (or two) from you make 2x+ more, while paying next to nothing in taxes (5% I've heard, as faux contractors) and enjoying some of lowest CoL in europe - https://jobs.dou.ua/salaries/dynamics/
Yep, that could definitely be: especially since i started work as a student, before getting either my Bachelor's or Master's. I guess i can only say that the wisdom of needing to job hop every X years is certainly based in reality, at least when it comes to the majority of companies and earning potential.
Why are these numbers so massively different across the world?
Do European companies generate that much less revenue? Or are labor unions in Europe just that much less effective at bargaining? Or is productivity that much lower in Europe? (I'm not sold on any of these)
What country? Serbia's GDP per capita is about 1/10 of the United States. Software developers make less money there because everyone makes less money there.
I would add two reasons in addition to those already discussed:
1) Some of the difference is structural. Upper middle class gets a larger share of the wealth in the US than in most European countries. An American professional in any field is paid more relative to the median income than in Europe.
2) International comparisons are often misleading. This is true even if you adjust the numbers for purchasing power and structural differences (such as benefits/taxes paid on top of the nominal salary). For middle class and above, the marginal cost of employment is higher in the US than in Europe, because you are expected to contribute more towards healthcare / education / childcare / retirement / unemployment / parental leave / etc from your personal income. An American employer has to pay a larger fraction of those costs directly to their employees, while an European employer can rely more on other taxpayers.
The second point sets American middle class salaries higher relative to GDP per capita than in Europe, while the first point sets upper middle class salaries higher relative to middle class salaries.
In a truly open market, tech salaries would converge globally, but there are currently far too many legal and cultural obstacles for that.
The addressable customer market is one big difference. American companies sell to the world. Eastern EU companies are largely stuck with eastern Europe or EU at large.
The other difference is that smaller addressable market also means fewer problems to solve and thus fewer companies.
As an example, engineers in China, India and Indonesia are making way more that $18k these days because there are many problems to solve, many more companies competing for the same engineers.
Looking at New Zealand, there are a few drivers to lower pay:
1. A business will pay the least they can to hire someone, so salary really depends on the excess availability of potential employees - if there is an excess of developers then wages remain low. The business owners sensibly wish to keep the excess profits (why share?).
2. Businesses have a figure for what a standard developer is worth, and that figure is disconnected from the value of that person to the business. I have repeatedly seen businesses lose extremely profitable employees because the business decision makers wouldn’t pay someone enough more than a “normal” salary for their position.
3. There are a lot of NZ software businesses that are simply not that profitable and they don’t generate the excess profits necessary to pay high wages. Not that many companies earn enough to pay SV wages.
4. I suspect that a lot of super-talented people move to SV, and the wages there are skewed by the excess talent (excess talent is not so common elsewhere?). I have personally seen some extremely talented developers leave my town for overseas for higher wages, because the talented have the best opportunity to do so.
If you're a European developer and underpaid, are you going to start your own company to do the same work but sell it yourself and take all the margin?
Probably not, from comments I've seen here, it takes an awful lot of work to make a legal business. In the US, it takes minutes to incorporate, and even less time if you don't care to incorporate and just want to file a Doing Business As to use a separate name. Business banking doesn't take a lot to get going either. If you live in California, your employer probably can't stop you from quitting to start a competitor (as long as you don't take IP with you)
It's all of that. European tech companies are smaller than US tech companies, have lower gross revenue per employee, make less profit per employee. Taxes are higher in Europe, which disincentivizes risk taking and ambitious individuals. Labor productivity is also lower in Europe. Finally, Europe still has a culture where software engineers, cloud architects/products/managers/etc. are viewed as code monkeys and the people who really matter in a corporation are the finance people and upper level executives.
Europe also suffers from a brain drain to the US (and Canada to a smaller proportion). Many of Europe's best and brightest software engineers have already emigrated to the US, leaving behind the less productive ones.
You're probably being underpaid even for Latvia. The first thing you should change in your analysis is that you should compare your salary to other software developers, not the general national average for all people. I would hope that the Central Statistic Bureau of Latvia provides this data, but you'd have to search for it yourself.
I'm from Estonia (immediate neighbor of Latvia with a similar history) and the statistics here [1] paint a healthier picture. The median software developer salary in Estonia for Q2 2021 was 3300€/month (39600€/year), with the average being even higher (3460€/41520€). These are national level statistics, so the numbers are even higher if you work for one of the local unicorns or Microsoft.
You should probably start demanding more money. Not US levels of compensation, but at least figure out the local Latvian median for software developers and aim for that to start with.
Salaries in Lithuania are about the same as Estonia, however I've heard of contractors getting nearly €10k/mo (before tax). Even working as a shop assistant you can get up to €1500/mo, so yes I would say OP is very much underpaid.
> i probably should mention that these are the net salaries
Definitely, I know in many parts of EU it's common to discuss net (specially when talking about monthly salaries) but in an English article targeted at the international community you'd be way better off sharing the gross, which is the expected way.
I actually used Upwork before finding the current company, which provided stable income while i was in University.
Upwork itself oftentimes feels like a race to the bottom, but i had some interesting projects as well: everything from web development (though WordPress stuff can be frustrating), to things like stock visualization, programming for video games, some physics simulations etc.
Those were all far more interesting than the CRUDs that the company developed, though thankfully i also picked up things like CI/CD, unit testing, integration testing and test automation in general, as well as many other things related both to development and DevOps.
As far as finances go, working for an European company abroad would probably be the wise thing to do, or looking for a local company that pays better, as many suggest most developers should do every X years.
> Chris can expect to make $300k at a non-FAANG company, but nearly double that if they’re willing to compromise on that “no-FAANG” stance
Ok but aren't the expectations for a Staff+ way higher at FAANG than at non-FAANG? Or we assume Chris already got the offer from FAANG for a Staff+ role and so it's just a personal choice? Those articles and discussions about salary always assume everybody is able to work at FAANG, or that a title at non-FAANG automatically transfers to the same title at FAANG.
Exactly. Someone saying they are Staff+ because of their current role at an Akron startup and actually getting an offer for Staff+ from Google or Facebook are very different situations.
I'm a Staff engineer are a small company with about 15 years of experience in Denver. As a full time employee I've never made over $160K base. As a contractor I've made over $250k (but with about $40k of that going to taxes and benefits virtually paid by an employer.)
I have a feeling I'm underpaid but I'm also very happy with where I work and the team I work with and I'm not currently willing to sacrifice that for a higher paying but probably much less enjoyable experience somewhere else. I also making about $30k more than I was when I started 3 years ago.
I have enough to pay my bills, raise a family, and still have some hobbies. Happiness should always be a factor when it comes to compensation.
Happiness should always be a factor, but I will argue that sanity permitting you should always test out new waters. Perhaps you might be satisfied at retirement with what you’ve got, but if you can forge new paths without sacrificing the clearly important parts of your life (sanity and family) then I believe that you owe it to yourself to do so. Not every half a mill job is fun but there are fun ones from what I hear.
That’s the whole problem with this kind of analysis. You can’t just ignore that there is market segmentation (I hate the term “tiers” but that’s really what it is).
The expectations might be higher, but you have access to a very high caliber infrastructure and mentors that increases your productivity. So onboarding might be a big leap during the transition period. But I think that explains more of the difference than a skill gap. Lots of great Staff+ SE decide to work at non-FAANG.
The point they're making is that someone who is "staff" at a random company might not get hired as "staff" at Google. Anecdotally, I know people who have been "principal" or similar at other places and come to Google as L4 or 5 with a raise and interesting work.
If you're offering fabulous compensation packages that exceed the President of the United States for common software engineers with a little experience... wouldn't you want to use that to your advantage in your job postings?
Every time I read an article like this I go looking for official numbers to validate what is being said. I'm not saying companies compensate poorly in SV. I just find it difficult to differentiate fact from fiction (or gossip) when I go looking into it. Its really not that hard to post your price/ranges directly as a company. I've always posted compensation and benefits when I've posted listings. My wife has always posted compensation and benefits when she's posted them. I'm not sure which of us has interviewed or hired more. I've probably interviewed more as a software engineer and she's probably hired more as a clinical director. (nurses, so many nurses... and then doctors!)
I'd apply for a lot of positions if people would list compensation ranges in their postings. I just need to know we're somewhere on the same page before focusing my energy on it. Nothing is worse than going through interviews only find out we've wasted each other's time. I've been there, done that, far too many times. It usually results in an offer at the top end of what they're approved for and that is either not enough to leave, or its less than I'm making at a position I'm happy with.
Just looking at the raw numbers they all seem outrageous. But if you take a look at some of these companies it makes a lot more sense.
The FAANG I work for makes a PROFIT of $2 mill/year for every employee. So it's easy for them to think, lets pay this lot $300-600k and use em to keep our advantage/keep them away from competition. For all I care they could be paying all of us $1 mill and still be making a good sum of money.
Right, it is a bit dumb that company compensation is so opaque. But these salaries are correct, I read about them online, saw enough people verify they are correct to trust, did the work to get in and got these high numbers. They aren't fake.
> If you're offering fabulous compensation packages that exceed the President of the United States for common software engineers with a little experience... wouldn't you want to use that to your advantage in your job postings?
The US President earns millions per year in total compensation. You cannot ignore all the post employment benefits, least of all the $200k+ inflation adjusted per year annuity.
www.levels.fyi will get you a salary range for most companies. Based on my own compensation and that of trusted friends the real numbers are actually a bit higher than what's on levels.fyi right now. (Seattle)
When you apply the best thing is to just be clear to the recruiter what you will accept. If you tell them you won't accept less than $200k any good recruiter would tell you whether that's reasonable or not. If they lie to you, please come back to HN and make an angry post about it. You'll get my upvote.
This. levels.fyi is quite accurate both in first-hand data and when discussing salaries with folks that are coming from companies represented on the site.
I speculate that one of the things that makes it hard to square with market data is that levels.fyi leads with total compensation which will include stock based comp. afaict people report their stock comp differently, sometimes it's the original offer value and sometimes it's the value at that time (which might be years after the grant was given). Since things are really going up right now... it can lead to some big numbers. These numbers are still real, but not necessarily what you would see in an offer.
The salary numbers, however, are spot on in my experience.
I've asked decision makers about this (or similar enough) before, and the answer was that they considered compensation to be a bit of a competitive advantage. I can see two reasons for this, first it being secret makes it harder for employees to effectively negotiate. Second, it being secret makes it more difficult to accuse the companies of doing something akin to wage fixing, which some of these have done before, so being careful about the appearance of impropriety makes some amount of sense.
Personally though, I don't find either of those particularly compelling. Especially given that they're de-facto public anyhow. There's two reliable ways to get salary information even if you don't trust self reported data:
1. h1b data, which shows only base salary and is hard to tease good data out of, because there isn't differentiation by role usually. Google for example shows "software engineer" or "software engineer manager" salaries that range from like 150K to like 300K (again, base salary), because they can cover like L4, L5, L6, L7, and even L8 (director) and above under essentially that one title. It's not super useful.
2. The careers pages for remote jobs in the US, or jobs in Colorado. Thanks to a law that took effect this year, Colorado requires companies to post their salaries (again, just salaries). Companies in California are also required to give you a salary range if you ask during an interview process. This doesn't give you stock or bonus numbers, but you can use these to verify that the salaries people talk about are legitimate.
Here's some examples, all taken from the careers page for the companies (careers.google.com, https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/, etc.). In each I've included the important part of the role description and what I think it maps to in the internal levelling scheme (see https://www.levels.fyi/ to compare these).
Google:
- Minimum salary of $132,000 (SWE III, L4)
- Minimum salary of $183,000 ("Technical Lead", probably L6+)
- $178,000 (Staff, L6)
- $209,000 (Staff, L6)
- $137,000 (Senior, L5)
- $125,000 (SWE III, L4)
- $120,000 (Senior Staff, L7, technically true but probably a data entry mistake somewhere)
- $183,000 (Senior Staff, L7)
- $252,000 (Something Director+, L8+)
Notably these are lower than salaries in SF or Seattle. Unfortunately, all the VP level jobs were in office and not in Colorado. Note again that this is before bonus (which starts at 15%+~5% based on performance, but for the higher level roles can reach like 30%+10% based on performance), and stock which starts at maybe 30-50% of your salary, but by Senior or Staff can be larger than your salary. I think some of these are also on the low side, 137,000 is below the bottom of the band for L5, my hunch here is some combination of data entry mistakes and willingness to accept L-1 for a role ("we'd prefer Staff but will take a Senior with some additional experience") so the salary requirements reflect that.
MS has a bonus structure that's a bit worse than Google and FB, and pays a lot less stock.
Amazon had one role, a Senior SDM role, with range $122,300-160,000. 160K is the max base salary Amazon pays outside of SF. They don't do bonuses except your first year, but as far as I know by the time you're higher level, their stock awards keep pace with Google and Facebook.
I also checked Lyft and Uber, which didn't appear to have roles that were Remote or in Colorado, and Stripe, Netflix, and Dropbox whose remote roles didn't list salaries. Someone at stripe should probably fix that, I expect they're technically violating the law right now. Salesforce included numbers which were oddly low. Oracle requires that you email them, which I think may also be a violation of the law, but its unclear.
Anyway, bit of a tangent at the end there, but I hope that helps to show that these aren't made up (and are sometimes publicized).
Man, every time I think I’ve finally caught up to the market rate, I find out I’m behind again
I’m a senior FAANG coder making 350k TC, and it looks like I should be able to net 400-600k at this level if I go to Apple or Google. Hoo boy, looks like it’s leetcode time again…
Half a million a year for a developer or architect is bonkers.
That's the equivalent of AUD 800K a year. That's more than what the Prime Minister and a cabinet member put together make here!
How can that possibly make sense? For that kind of money you can easily hire 4 senior developers here! Any company "hiring local" at those prices isn't exploring their international staffing options properly...
Yeah that's not a "competitive" difference any more, that's approaching levels of annual compensation nearly a full seed round for a whole startup.
I used to buy into the whole risk vs reward of startups, but the numbers are far too biased towards founders and big tech salaries now for any individual contributor actually paying attention to the market to think about a startup job.
I see these mind boggling sums in the Valley, $300.000, $600.000, can you please translate: how much does that net you per month, after taxes, reasonable healthcare and rent, ideally no further than 1 hour commute and free of black mold?
Is your TC number including the stock appreciation from the time of award to the time it vested? Because if it doesn't (and I think that's how we should talk about TC), it looks to be pretty good to me.
> looks like it’s leetcode time
Haven't searched for a job in a few years, but would consider based on TC.
Are all these good-paying software jobs behind the "leetcode firewall", even for non-FAANG? I guess my willingness to practice on leetcode would be partly driven by potential TC reward, but I really would like to be judged on the merits of the development I've already done for previous companies instead of having to memorize solutions to esoteric problems I'm never going to have to solve on the job.
Interview problems that are stripped down versions of real problems faced on the job are gaining popularity. All of Stripe, Coinbase, and Google gave me interview questions that were recognizably related to their business when I interviewed with them last year. I've always tried to give interviews distilled from my actual job when I interview candidates at Google, but it's hard in a 45-minute block. Some companies are moving toward fewer longer interviews for that reason.
Leetcode will only cover the easiest part (IMO) of the interview. For senior roles, expect to spend half or more of the interview on “system design” and “behavioral” interviewing.
350k TC sounds not bad to me if you're E5 at Facebook or L6 at Amazon. It goes up another 150-200k at the next level (E6/L6 at Facebook/Google, L7 at Amazon, or ICT5 at Apple).
One reason discussing those numbers is hard is the variable compensation section: RSUs.
An E4/L4 (the level right below senior) easily makes 400k right now depending on which company they joined. Their typical offer was 160k base and let's day 82k RSU (325k over 4y).
With the usual (~15% of base) bonus, that's 160 * 1.15+82=266.
But now let's assume they joined 2 years ago, so they got refresher of stocks that are roughly 20k per year extra (80k vesting over 4y), 266+20+20=306k.
Here's the catch though, the 82k/y from the in-hire grant are now worth 160k/y: it's {stock price today} * 1/4 * 325k / {stock price at join date} , and look at FB, GOOG, AMZN etc trajectories.
Same for the refresher, the oldest one is probably worth around 40k/y, and most recent one probably worth 30k/y,
So this year exact TC could be (bumping base with 2 usual raises to 170):
170 * 1.15+160+40+30 = 425k.
That's ignoring extra (~10% of base) for on-call compensation.
That E4 doesn't need promo to E5. The math can be repeated for E3 or E5, the higher the stock number was, the higher the effect.
That's the effect of stock compensation and alignment of employee compensation with company performance. Of course if those share prices go down, so does the TC. There's a company in FAANG known for their frugality famous for not offering refresh "because the stock price is doing so well", but even without the refresher, someone's initial stock award from 2-3 years ago is worth a lot more today.
Some companies are starting bad trend these days due to them offering only 1 year vesting stock awards, instead of typical 4 years (smaller on-hire awards but bigger refresh), where an employee cannot benefit from the compounding effect of stock growth anymore. The employee can "hodl" their vested shares, but the vested shares are usually less, since ~1/3 is removed to pay for the tax the vesting represented.
When I can retire. Why not change jobs to earn 30% more for the same amount of work? You're essentially speeding up your retirement every time you increase your total compensation.
In other news, if you aren't in the valley or working for one of the big tech companies, you're probably making 100-150K as a mid/senior developer. There's a pretty sizable leap.
Yeah I just wrapped up a job search m after hearing how hot the market was. 5YOE, in a relatively large state with a shockingly weak martlet. The highest number I heard was around 140k. I did have some Amazon recruiter reach out, which potentially would have been higher, but I cannot relocated atm, and they would not offer a high enough relocation bonus.
Just a few observations from my job search.
1) I was targeting remote roles, but almost every recruiter that reached out was local, at least to the state I was in. This probably greatly affected the numbers available to me. Again, Amazon was the exception.
2) Basically all of the jobs I applied to directly either screened me out or never got any response. This makes sense, as I very much find myself stuck in the “enterprise” world, and even worse the legacy section of it, and the only companies that are interested in me are those. I attempted to put some non-work projects on my resume, but people are uninterested in those even in interviews.
I ended up settling once more (I really didn’t want to settle again, but it would take too long to even figure out my way out of this issue) for $121k with even that being a significant increase over my current comp (non-tech too 100 F500 company local to the area)
Probably but not necessarily. Don't aspire to be most software engineers if you don't want to get paid like most software engineers haha.
I'll add a data point. I live in a 90 COL index city(I don't live in a 90 area though) and will clear >300k this year total cash comp at a non-FAANG company working remote. Earlier this year I had a 200k base salary offer for a staff full stack eng role at a startup(that just raised a bunch of money). The money is out there.
Agreed, there are plenty of people, clearly, that are doing significantly better. My data comes from my own experience, and it may vary. I have been in management, and with that I had access to comp information for a variety of engineers in our organization located at offices across the U.S. I also have a network of former coworkers and friends throughout the Pacific Northwest and we share (roughly, not specifics) how we're doing for comp.
I'm getting old enough to worry about ageism myself (mid-40s) and my total comp is just a bit over 200K this year. That's not bad for Portland, but when I see the numbers tossed about on HN it makes me want to take Facebook up on their interview requests. Probably amount to nothing, but I'm thinking I really ought to open up and start renewing my interview experience before it gets any harder.
At my first job in financial software, one of my coworkers was an MIT-grad aeronautical engineer with ~5 years experience in aerospace, ~6 months software. He took a pay cut (though not much of one - I think he went from about $90K -> $75K) to get into finance, because aeronautical engineering doesn't really pay you enough money to have a decent life in the Boston area. Within 2 years he'd jumped ship to a hedge fund and was making about double his aerospace salary.
And people wonder why we don't make things in the U.S. anymore...
I'm not surprised. I'm guessing the aerospace industry is relatively stable in size (we don't suddenly need a lot more planes, spacecraft, or weapon systems than in the past), so employers in that industry don't need to offer big compensation packages to lure away scarce employees from competitors in order to enable that growth.
There's a huge difference between early stage and mid-late stage private companies. For the latter, you are almost always getting RSUs rather than options, so you don't have to pay taxes out of pocket to exercise them. It's also wrong to automatically consider all stock grants to be worth $0 just because you can't immediately sell them. If Stripe or Databricks offers you a million dollars worth of shares today it'll be foolish to say no.
Yes! This advice to value shares of private companies at zero is buried deep in the article, but I think it renders the article quite misleading.
The right thing to do is to use your own judgment to estimate the value of the stock. A small stake in a promising early-stage company really is worth something. There just isn't a clean formula for how much it's worth.
When you really think hard about it, this will push you toward working for companies that are more likely to succeed. If you treat all stock offers like they are worth zero, that will push you toward working for companies that don't offer their employees stock, and that are not likely to succeed. Over time, those companies just don't attract the best coworkers. So you're really hurting your career if you decide that you don't care about the stock, even besides the direct financial hit.
Important tip for people considering startups: only join ones that recently raised an A or B round from one of the top VC firms. VCs get to see all of the numbers and won't invest unless there's some sign of upside.
So there are all these people in these threads who are like "I only make $175K/200K/150K, I feel like I'm grossly underpaid when I read these things."
I got you all beat.
I have 15+ experience. I am a really good coder. I can be very not humble because this is a throwaway, but everyone who has ever worked with me or gone to school with me or worked on open source with me would agree, I am very good at designing and writing and maintaining software, including understanding what software should be written, let's just accept that for the sake of discussion.
I only make around $90K.
Now, I work in the non-profit/academic sector, and have my whole career. That's what I wanted to do, and I make more than most people in my social circles even at $90K, but the work is getting old, it's not actually that "meaningful" in the end, and especially when people keep saying that I could be making literally 4-5x what I'm making.
I also these days mostly only know ruby and Rails (but that's not un-marketable right? And I certainly can learn other things, I have before. And I know ruby really well).
People here are like "Sure, but don't you want good work/life balance, maybe $175K is just fine for that." Yes, and $175K would be a fortune to me!
I literally don't understand how I get into that market. Because I have worked in academic/non-profit industry my whole career. (which I don't know if that leaves me out now. And I'm in my mid-40s, does that doom me?). I know how to get more jobs in the industries I'm in at about what I'm already getting paid, and have several times...
But I don't understand even the first step to this world where $175K is considered low-paying. I believe I have the engineering skills of anyone at that level. I don't know how to get into it. Help me out?
Stupid question but have you actually ever tried? Your tech stack seems modern enough that I'd be surprised if you couldn't get some offers from startups. New grad level at a startup generally pays 90k+ in my market so you shouldn't have a problem at least matching your current comp but I think 150-200k is probably reasonable but you might need to work remote for a company in a major city.
I left tech at the university as soon as it started feeling like things were "getting old." And at that point I realized I should have left maybe 4 years earlier to get on with my career.
I think I will try to get back in when I am ready to retire, maybe a nice IT management position for a few years.
I don't know if it's right for everyone, but the way I did it was to practice a bunch of leetcode style questions and send out resumes go for job postings at big companies.
That was for my first tech job. Once I had that one advertised on LinkedIn (and some open source participation, and some talks at conferences - not sure what generated interest), I started getting a steady stream of unsolicited emails from recruiters. Next time I was ready to switch jobs I just responded to the ones from FAANG companies and went back to practicing leetcode.
You can probably also just reach out directly to recruiters at big companies, or ask someone you know who works at a big company to put you in touch with a recruiter or recommend you.
I think there are many straightforward answers.
Try to get the $500k jobs. If that doesn't work and you don't want to grind LC for 6 months, go for $150-200k jobs like startups. If you are as good as you say you are, you could probably study/talk your way into a job or at least figure out what you need after applying to 100 startups.
When I go there.... I see a lot of data points with ~10 years of experience paying ~$140K.
Which is more like I expected honestly -- it's just that OP was blowing my mind suggesting $175K-$225k and up... saying they are using levels.fyi as data too... or discussions here on this post with someone making $175K being considered very underpaid... every time I see salaries discussed on HN I end up confused.
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I live about 40 miles outside of Boston.
Edit: Looking at levels.fyi for Boston that actually puts me above the median[1]. Why the heck is Boston so low compared to other markets?
Edit 2: Boston, MA and Denver, CO on Levels.fyi are both a median $159k but due to cost of living, that $159k in Denver is the same as $211k in Boston. I.e. adjusted for the cost of living, Denver pays 25% better.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Greater-Bo...
But it's not for everyone. Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year? Do you enjoy what you do and the people that you work with? If so, I don't think there should be any shame in staying where you are. Don't feel like you have to chase every last dollar.
And I've never seen anything close to 5.9% for COL from any company. Most companies don't give that even for top performers. I don't think companies are prepared to give 5.9% COL, most companies are already so short sighted they would rather lose their entire engineering department instead of give raises to keep up with the market rate (even though they would be willing to pay that market rate when hiring a replacement). That kind of short sighted thinking simply does not allow a massive COL increase, no matter how much data is out there.
So as far as general advice goes, it makes sense to recommend trying to get those FAANG jobs if you can.
Most people can't live comfortably while holding a full-time job, esp. a demanding one. The job just eats too much time and energy.
The exceptions are people with very high energy levels and people for whom the job is their passion (but even for them, it's usually temporary - passions change over the duration of one's life).
Some companies, some products, some teams, some (lower) level of stress, some amount of learning you are getting, some work/life flexibility - at some (temporary?) point in your life - might make a lot of sense to be considered together with the $ you get paid. I am all up for maximizing what you get out of your job, but you might want to optimize for multiple factors, not just salary.
Also, this discussion is very centered on yearly comp. It’s good practice to ask yourself how risk prone you are? That early stage startup equity comp might turn into much more than you will ever get paid at a large established company.
So when you are maximizing, ask yourself over what time horizon you want to maximize? One year?Three? Five? Ten years? It’s rare to get truly great things instantly.
I just want to show that not everyone making > 200k switches companies every 2 years trying to minmax.
If I were you, strictly from a financial point of view, I'd probably test the market to see what offers I get.
There are a few home grown publicly traded Boston employers such as HubSpot, and to a lesser extent Wayfair which pay competitively. However there are also large presences from Salesforce, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, FB, Spotify and others who pay more competitively.
From my experience no company founded in Boston pays top end wages. This job search I only considered big tech side offices in Boston and remote roles for Silicon Valley companies.
My recommendation: find some data points on Levels.fyi that match your experience/level, location, and desired TC. If there’s a bunch of data points, then it’s possible. Interview with every employer listed in these data points, and don’t take a job if it’s less than your desired TC. The market is hot and you are in control.
Of course, it could be worth it! That’s for you to decide.
I’m extremely mobile. Not like permanently move mobile. But I’ll take contracting work that require me to move to NY or London or whatever. Very job bumps my salary up. If I have to switch continents I will.
Home is always my low cost of living place, and in practice I spend the majority of time there.
I know most people aren’t like this. And most people don’t have spouses who tolerate this.
My wife is either very understanding, or maybe she just doesn’t like me that much.
But if I’m like, honey, I have to move to Austin a for six months, she’s like “Ok, just be home for Thanksgiving.”
Boston is a joke. Growing up here my whole life I thought we were right behind SV. Boy was I wrong. Seattle, NYC, and Austin have all eclipsed Boston as a tech hub. It’s embarrassing.
Apply for remote. Now you’re exposed to companies based in SV. This is the time to do it - The Great Resignation has made jobs plentiful with unreal comp.
Also study up. The best positions are the hardest to get into. Give yourself 3 months to study and these opportunities will be yours for the taking. You clearly have the skills, you just need to put yourself out there.
If you use the "Robert Half" site[1] from the original article, it says Boston is +34% compared to US baseline (vs SF's +42%, NYC's +40.5%) which roughly lines up.
[0] Google: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi... vs https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
[1] https://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guide/specialization/techn...
But either way, not everyone can work for FAANG, so I think looking at the overall picture is fair.
I'm pretty confident even with 20 years of experience and I can't even get a FAANG interview (let alone pass it), I'm just not their type.
Congrats on making an income I could have only dreamed of as a college kid.
I've made very little money and FAANG-like money in my career. It has nothing to do with the difficulty of the work, the impact, or the hiring process. It's purely how badly the company wants "top" talent and the extent to which they want to / have to use money as a magnet.
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why? i don’t know, it’s definitely not any easier work. but it’s reflected in the comp
Comparison is the thief of joy.
Do your job.
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there's a comment like this in every single thread like this. and the recommendation is always the same: grind LC for however long you need in order to be comfortable solving hard problems cleanly in 35-45 minutes and then collect your pay bump. the fact that the
1. data
2. complaint
3. recommendation
crop up with 100% perfect regularity means that it's the solution that simply isn't palatable to all of the people that express the complaint. to which i say: what exactly are you expecting to give among these three things?
Just the fact "grind Leet Code" is a recommendation to someone who's most recent job title was CTO and has written two books may be a sign these interviews are broken.
But point taken, I'm sure if I studied specifically for interviews I could get those jobs. But the fact remains, a vast majority of people don't work for FAANG and even the "person unwilling to work for FAANG" example is higher salary than I have ever seen.
My point was actually that the article and ones like this seem well research but don't match the reality. For example, I recently interviewed at a fortune 100 company for a Director position and it was what this article says is "non-FAANG staff engineer" salary.
Which is more difficult to do for people who have a lot of non-work commitments, like say raising a family. So this method of hiring introduces some biases. Not that I have a solution.
I expect a promotion and ~20% increase next cycle. Interview was no leet code (I’m terrible at it!) - my strategy was to interview at public companies with levels on levels.fyi but not FAANG
In short, this year i'll probably make around 18k Euros, in total.
I guess that just goes to show how different the situation is depending on where you live and where you're employed.
It really depends on job quality as well.
Considering how frugal you are, you have plenty of time to find a better gig.
Pure local companies are not going to pay much better though (and Latvian state and local government gigs are even less).
So one option is to move to one of the outsourcing companies or even better to a smaller company dealing with western clients.
Do European companies generate that much less revenue? Or are labor unions in Europe just that much less effective at bargaining? Or is productivity that much lower in Europe? (I'm not sold on any of these)
Ah yes, the famously powerful US software engineer's union.
Unions don't want "privileged" engineers to earn much more than average office worker.
1) Some of the difference is structural. Upper middle class gets a larger share of the wealth in the US than in most European countries. An American professional in any field is paid more relative to the median income than in Europe.
2) International comparisons are often misleading. This is true even if you adjust the numbers for purchasing power and structural differences (such as benefits/taxes paid on top of the nominal salary). For middle class and above, the marginal cost of employment is higher in the US than in Europe, because you are expected to contribute more towards healthcare / education / childcare / retirement / unemployment / parental leave / etc from your personal income. An American employer has to pay a larger fraction of those costs directly to their employees, while an European employer can rely more on other taxpayers.
The second point sets American middle class salaries higher relative to GDP per capita than in Europe, while the first point sets upper middle class salaries higher relative to middle class salaries.
In a truly open market, tech salaries would converge globally, but there are currently far too many legal and cultural obstacles for that.
The other difference is that smaller addressable market also means fewer problems to solve and thus fewer companies.
As an example, engineers in China, India and Indonesia are making way more that $18k these days because there are many problems to solve, many more companies competing for the same engineers.
1. A business will pay the least they can to hire someone, so salary really depends on the excess availability of potential employees - if there is an excess of developers then wages remain low. The business owners sensibly wish to keep the excess profits (why share?).
2. Businesses have a figure for what a standard developer is worth, and that figure is disconnected from the value of that person to the business. I have repeatedly seen businesses lose extremely profitable employees because the business decision makers wouldn’t pay someone enough more than a “normal” salary for their position.
3. There are a lot of NZ software businesses that are simply not that profitable and they don’t generate the excess profits necessary to pay high wages. Not that many companies earn enough to pay SV wages.
4. I suspect that a lot of super-talented people move to SV, and the wages there are skewed by the excess talent (excess talent is not so common elsewhere?). I have personally seen some extremely talented developers leave my town for overseas for higher wages, because the talented have the best opportunity to do so.
Probably not, from comments I've seen here, it takes an awful lot of work to make a legal business. In the US, it takes minutes to incorporate, and even less time if you don't care to incorporate and just want to file a Doing Business As to use a separate name. Business banking doesn't take a lot to get going either. If you live in California, your employer probably can't stop you from quitting to start a competitor (as long as you don't take IP with you)
https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
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Europe also suffers from a brain drain to the US (and Canada to a smaller proportion). Many of Europe's best and brightest software engineers have already emigrated to the US, leaving behind the less productive ones.
I'm from Estonia (immediate neighbor of Latvia with a similar history) and the statistics here [1] paint a healthier picture. The median software developer salary in Estonia for Q2 2021 was 3300€/month (39600€/year), with the average being even higher (3460€/41520€). These are national level statistics, so the numbers are even higher if you work for one of the local unicorns or Microsoft.
You should probably start demanding more money. Not US levels of compensation, but at least figure out the local Latvian median for software developers and aim for that to start with.
--
[1] Search for "Software developer" at https://palgad.stat.ee/en
Definitely, I know in many parts of EU it's common to discuss net (specially when talking about monthly salaries) but in an English article targeted at the international community you'd be way better off sharing the gross, which is the expected way.
Upwork itself oftentimes feels like a race to the bottom, but i had some interesting projects as well: everything from web development (though WordPress stuff can be frustrating), to things like stock visualization, programming for video games, some physics simulations etc.
Those were all far more interesting than the CRUDs that the company developed, though thankfully i also picked up things like CI/CD, unit testing, integration testing and test automation in general, as well as many other things related both to development and DevOps.
As far as finances go, working for an European company abroad would probably be the wise thing to do, or looking for a local company that pays better, as many suggest most developers should do every X years.
Ok but aren't the expectations for a Staff+ way higher at FAANG than at non-FAANG? Or we assume Chris already got the offer from FAANG for a Staff+ role and so it's just a personal choice? Those articles and discussions about salary always assume everybody is able to work at FAANG, or that a title at non-FAANG automatically transfers to the same title at FAANG.
I have a feeling I'm underpaid but I'm also very happy with where I work and the team I work with and I'm not currently willing to sacrifice that for a higher paying but probably much less enjoyable experience somewhere else. I also making about $30k more than I was when I started 3 years ago.
I have enough to pay my bills, raise a family, and still have some hobbies. Happiness should always be a factor when it comes to compensation.
my coworker lives in denver and works remotely for my company in NY. You can easily make 250k+. We have good work-life balance ect ect.
> I'm not currently willing to sacrifice that for a higher paying but probably much less enjoyable experience somewhere else.
lots of good companies with higher pay. higher pay doesn't equate lo 'no family time' ect, it has been the opposite in my expreience.
Every time I read an article like this I go looking for official numbers to validate what is being said. I'm not saying companies compensate poorly in SV. I just find it difficult to differentiate fact from fiction (or gossip) when I go looking into it. Its really not that hard to post your price/ranges directly as a company. I've always posted compensation and benefits when I've posted listings. My wife has always posted compensation and benefits when she's posted them. I'm not sure which of us has interviewed or hired more. I've probably interviewed more as a software engineer and she's probably hired more as a clinical director. (nurses, so many nurses... and then doctors!)
I'd apply for a lot of positions if people would list compensation ranges in their postings. I just need to know we're somewhere on the same page before focusing my energy on it. Nothing is worse than going through interviews only find out we've wasted each other's time. I've been there, done that, far too many times. It usually results in an offer at the top end of what they're approved for and that is either not enough to leave, or its less than I'm making at a position I'm happy with.
The FAANG I work for makes a PROFIT of $2 mill/year for every employee. So it's easy for them to think, lets pay this lot $300-600k and use em to keep our advantage/keep them away from competition. For all I care they could be paying all of us $1 mill and still be making a good sum of money.
The US President earns millions per year in total compensation. You cannot ignore all the post employment benefits, least of all the $200k+ inflation adjusted per year annuity.
When you apply the best thing is to just be clear to the recruiter what you will accept. If you tell them you won't accept less than $200k any good recruiter would tell you whether that's reasonable or not. If they lie to you, please come back to HN and make an angry post about it. You'll get my upvote.
I speculate that one of the things that makes it hard to square with market data is that levels.fyi leads with total compensation which will include stock based comp. afaict people report their stock comp differently, sometimes it's the original offer value and sometimes it's the value at that time (which might be years after the grant was given). Since things are really going up right now... it can lead to some big numbers. These numbers are still real, but not necessarily what you would see in an offer.
The salary numbers, however, are spot on in my experience.
I've asked decision makers about this (or similar enough) before, and the answer was that they considered compensation to be a bit of a competitive advantage. I can see two reasons for this, first it being secret makes it harder for employees to effectively negotiate. Second, it being secret makes it more difficult to accuse the companies of doing something akin to wage fixing, which some of these have done before, so being careful about the appearance of impropriety makes some amount of sense.
Personally though, I don't find either of those particularly compelling. Especially given that they're de-facto public anyhow. There's two reliable ways to get salary information even if you don't trust self reported data:
1. h1b data, which shows only base salary and is hard to tease good data out of, because there isn't differentiation by role usually. Google for example shows "software engineer" or "software engineer manager" salaries that range from like 150K to like 300K (again, base salary), because they can cover like L4, L5, L6, L7, and even L8 (director) and above under essentially that one title. It's not super useful.
2. The careers pages for remote jobs in the US, or jobs in Colorado. Thanks to a law that took effect this year, Colorado requires companies to post their salaries (again, just salaries). Companies in California are also required to give you a salary range if you ask during an interview process. This doesn't give you stock or bonus numbers, but you can use these to verify that the salaries people talk about are legitimate.
Here's some examples, all taken from the careers page for the companies (careers.google.com, https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/, etc.). In each I've included the important part of the role description and what I think it maps to in the internal levelling scheme (see https://www.levels.fyi/ to compare these).
Google:
Notably these are lower than salaries in SF or Seattle. Unfortunately, all the VP level jobs were in office and not in Colorado. Note again that this is before bonus (which starts at 15%+~5% based on performance, but for the higher level roles can reach like 30%+10% based on performance), and stock which starts at maybe 30-50% of your salary, but by Senior or Staff can be larger than your salary. I think some of these are also on the low side, 137,000 is below the bottom of the band for L5, my hunch here is some combination of data entry mistakes and willingness to accept L-1 for a role ("we'd prefer Staff but will take a Senior with some additional experience") so the salary requirements reflect that.Facebook:
Much like above, I believe FB pays higher in SF than Colorado and this doesn't include bonus or stock, which are similar to Google's structure.Microsoft:
MS has a bonus structure that's a bit worse than Google and FB, and pays a lot less stock.Amazon had one role, a Senior SDM role, with range $122,300-160,000. 160K is the max base salary Amazon pays outside of SF. They don't do bonuses except your first year, but as far as I know by the time you're higher level, their stock awards keep pace with Google and Facebook.
I also checked Lyft and Uber, which didn't appear to have roles that were Remote or in Colorado, and Stripe, Netflix, and Dropbox whose remote roles didn't list salaries. Someone at stripe should probably fix that, I expect they're technically violating the law right now. Salesforce included numbers which were oddly low. Oracle requires that you email them, which I think may also be a violation of the law, but its unclear.
Anyway, bit of a tangent at the end there, but I hope that helps to show that these aren't made up (and are sometimes publicized).
I’m a senior FAANG coder making 350k TC, and it looks like I should be able to net 400-600k at this level if I go to Apple or Google. Hoo boy, looks like it’s leetcode time again…
I hate studying leetcode just for these interviews, but with these numbers it seems foolish to not put myself through hell...
Half a million a year for a developer or architect is bonkers.
That's the equivalent of AUD 800K a year. That's more than what the Prime Minister and a cabinet member put together make here!
How can that possibly make sense? For that kind of money you can easily hire 4 senior developers here! Any company "hiring local" at those prices isn't exploring their international staffing options properly...
Mid-stage companies like Convoy are also going very high, but there is an upside with those companies.
Don't know much about early stage, but a few of my acquaintances are moving from FAANG companies to early stage companies to play the lottery.
I used to buy into the whole risk vs reward of startups, but the numbers are far too biased towards founders and big tech salaries now for any individual contributor actually paying attention to the market to think about a startup job.
Are all these good-paying software jobs behind the "leetcode firewall", even for non-FAANG? I guess my willingness to practice on leetcode would be partly driven by potential TC reward, but I really would like to be judged on the merits of the development I've already done for previous companies instead of having to memorize solutions to esoteric problems I'm never going to have to solve on the job.
An E4/L4 (the level right below senior) easily makes 400k right now depending on which company they joined. Their typical offer was 160k base and let's day 82k RSU (325k over 4y).
With the usual (~15% of base) bonus, that's 160 * 1.15+82=266.
But now let's assume they joined 2 years ago, so they got refresher of stocks that are roughly 20k per year extra (80k vesting over 4y), 266+20+20=306k.
Here's the catch though, the 82k/y from the in-hire grant are now worth 160k/y: it's {stock price today} * 1/4 * 325k / {stock price at join date} , and look at FB, GOOG, AMZN etc trajectories.
Same for the refresher, the oldest one is probably worth around 40k/y, and most recent one probably worth 30k/y,
So this year exact TC could be (bumping base with 2 usual raises to 170): 170 * 1.15+160+40+30 = 425k.
That's ignoring extra (~10% of base) for on-call compensation.
That E4 doesn't need promo to E5. The math can be repeated for E3 or E5, the higher the stock number was, the higher the effect.
That's the effect of stock compensation and alignment of employee compensation with company performance. Of course if those share prices go down, so does the TC. There's a company in FAANG known for their frugality famous for not offering refresh "because the stock price is doing so well", but even without the refresher, someone's initial stock award from 2-3 years ago is worth a lot more today.
Some companies are starting bad trend these days due to them offering only 1 year vesting stock awards, instead of typical 4 years (smaller on-hire awards but bigger refresh), where an employee cannot benefit from the compounding effect of stock growth anymore. The employee can "hodl" their vested shares, but the vested shares are usually less, since ~1/3 is removed to pay for the tax the vesting represented.
Google did not bother to match at the same level. I guess Google is not drowning in money anymore (in comparison).
Money.
What will you do with all that money?
Retire comfortably.
When is it enough?
When I can retire. Why not change jobs to earn 30% more for the same amount of work? You're essentially speeding up your retirement every time you increase your total compensation.
Just a few observations from my job search.
1) I was targeting remote roles, but almost every recruiter that reached out was local, at least to the state I was in. This probably greatly affected the numbers available to me. Again, Amazon was the exception.
2) Basically all of the jobs I applied to directly either screened me out or never got any response. This makes sense, as I very much find myself stuck in the “enterprise” world, and even worse the legacy section of it, and the only companies that are interested in me are those. I attempted to put some non-work projects on my resume, but people are uninterested in those even in interviews.
I ended up settling once more (I really didn’t want to settle again, but it would take too long to even figure out my way out of this issue) for $121k with even that being a significant increase over my current comp (non-tech too 100 F500 company local to the area)
I'll add a data point. I live in a 90 COL index city(I don't live in a 90 area though) and will clear >300k this year total cash comp at a non-FAANG company working remote. Earlier this year I had a 200k base salary offer for a staff full stack eng role at a startup(that just raised a bunch of money). The money is out there.
I'm getting old enough to worry about ageism myself (mid-40s) and my total comp is just a bit over 200K this year. That's not bad for Portland, but when I see the numbers tossed about on HN it makes me want to take Facebook up on their interview requests. Probably amount to nothing, but I'm thinking I really ought to open up and start renewing my interview experience before it gets any harder.
And people wonder why we don't make things in the U.S. anymore...
I wish I made $120k/year.... :(
Real drought of senior talent in that area
The right thing to do is to use your own judgment to estimate the value of the stock. A small stake in a promising early-stage company really is worth something. There just isn't a clean formula for how much it's worth.
When you really think hard about it, this will push you toward working for companies that are more likely to succeed. If you treat all stock offers like they are worth zero, that will push you toward working for companies that don't offer their employees stock, and that are not likely to succeed. Over time, those companies just don't attract the best coworkers. So you're really hurting your career if you decide that you don't care about the stock, even besides the direct financial hit.
Not trying to value that is a mistake.
You should judge these deals based on expected value.
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I got you all beat.
I have 15+ experience. I am a really good coder. I can be very not humble because this is a throwaway, but everyone who has ever worked with me or gone to school with me or worked on open source with me would agree, I am very good at designing and writing and maintaining software, including understanding what software should be written, let's just accept that for the sake of discussion.
I only make around $90K.
Now, I work in the non-profit/academic sector, and have my whole career. That's what I wanted to do, and I make more than most people in my social circles even at $90K, but the work is getting old, it's not actually that "meaningful" in the end, and especially when people keep saying that I could be making literally 4-5x what I'm making.
I also these days mostly only know ruby and Rails (but that's not un-marketable right? And I certainly can learn other things, I have before. And I know ruby really well).
People here are like "Sure, but don't you want good work/life balance, maybe $175K is just fine for that." Yes, and $175K would be a fortune to me!
I literally don't understand how I get into that market. Because I have worked in academic/non-profit industry my whole career. (which I don't know if that leaves me out now. And I'm in my mid-40s, does that doom me?). I know how to get more jobs in the industries I'm in at about what I'm already getting paid, and have several times...
But I don't understand even the first step to this world where $175K is considered low-paying. I believe I have the engineering skills of anyone at that level. I don't know how to get into it. Help me out?
When i read these things, I'm never sure if it's reality or what.
I think I will try to get back in when I am ready to retire, maybe a nice IT management position for a few years.
That was for my first tech job. Once I had that one advertised on LinkedIn (and some open source participation, and some talks at conferences - not sure what generated interest), I started getting a steady stream of unsolicited emails from recruiters. Next time I was ready to switch jobs I just responded to the ones from FAANG companies and went back to practicing leetcode.
You can probably also just reach out directly to recruiters at big companies, or ask someone you know who works at a big company to put you in touch with a recruiter or recommend you.
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Go to levels.fyi and apply to those companies’ job listings.
When I go there.... I see a lot of data points with ~10 years of experience paying ~$140K.
Which is more like I expected honestly -- it's just that OP was blowing my mind suggesting $175K-$225k and up... saying they are using levels.fyi as data too... or discussions here on this post with someone making $175K being considered very underpaid... every time I see salaries discussed on HN I end up confused.
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