The rest of the valley isn't keeping up. Startups in particular feel like slowly ramped up in pay but capped out. They're not offering enough stock to make up for it either. Usually only enough to make it such that your TC at startup would be equal to that of a big company IF the company IPO's/sells. (A big IF!) I don't see many salaries past $200k for IC software engineer (outside of 1 year to IPO startups) and most people still balk at the idea of it. Yet, 1-2 years out of school at Big CompanyTM and you'll be past $200k TC.
I feel bad for the people who aren't in tech or things that tech pays for (real estate) and have to deal with even more frozen pay. However, it still sucks for engineers not at Big Co who believed they could make the american dream possible here.
I'm on the verge of leaving this area. My current compensation makes me feel poor even though I could afford to buy a brand new Porsche. Even if I joined Big Co now and made $400k/yr... housing has grown too fast in price in the peninsula. By the time I've saved $300-400k for a down payment, I'm going to be priced out even more. If my SO had only become a software engineer or born into a rich family instead then maybe I would have been able to afford this region.
Such is life in the bay area - you can buy a brand new Porsche but you can't afford a garage to put it in.
In 2-3 years you'd have your $300-400k for a down payment - thats 30% of a $1.2mm house. 2-3 years to buy a median priced place. Thats not bad. Also, prices in say, Santa Clara CA have gone -5.5% YoY, and are forecasted by zillow to go another -8% in the next year.
It sucks for anyone who doesn't work at BigCo right now who isn't already wealthy from the previous work.
I guess it's true that money != happiness. There's always more you could have.
> Anyone can live even in the bay area on half of that, extremely comfortably.
You really might want to expand on "extremely comfortably". We all have very different definitions. I'd like a home with AC, good transportation, close enough to SF to actually make it up on weeknights (30-40 min drive), a retirement plan that works with the assumption I live in this area indefinitely, and a <=20 minute commute. I will not have that for $115-130k/yr net income. Just isn't available in the rental market we have. I'm not even getting into the part where I'd like to live in a nice neighborhood with good schools.
FAANG pays orders of magnitudes better, has better benefits, has flexible work locations and schedules, is working on the most leading edge stuff (autonomous everything, AR, VR, GreenTech etc...) contributes to FOSS, gives leadership opportunities etc...
I'm not sure when this shift happened, but I do remember the tipping point in 2016 when Apple recruited the best PhD away from my company after 6 tries and gave him a 3x pay raise (400k/yr - what startup can afford that for one person?), with the ability to work on self-driving cars.
I'm not sure how it would be possible to compete with that, and don't blame him for leaving.
TLDR: in my current experience at non-staff levels, Google comp lags behind "Big-N" comp as well as "near-IPO company" comp. Maybe they just lowball everyone though.
It's not unusual to see a huge pay discrepancy based on your ability to negotiate. It also depends on what ladder you're applying to (i.e. you can't compare a Solutions engineer comp at Google to a SWE at some other company).
In fact, when you're negotiating comp, I'd argue that an additional $1 of signing bonus or starting equity grant might be worth more to you than $1 of additional salary, because a bigger signing bonus or equity grant doesn't come at the expense of future salary raises.
However, the level you start at matters a lot. If you're an experienced industry hire who should really be an L4 and somehow get slotted as an L3, you'll spend 1-2.5 years waiting for the promo to L4. During that whole time, your peers who were hired at the correct level will be progressing towards L5. This doesn't happen frequently, but it's unfortunate when it happens. In that situation, it can actually make more sense to decline the offer and re-interview to get an L4 job offer later, since that might take less time than getting promoted internally.
I get the impulse behind trying to level employees but it always seemed ridiculous to me. Either you care about it enough to game it (which is pretty easy to do) or you don't an you just do what you think is important to you and your team and it works out... so you level up by accident.
This is actually a huge reason I don't like bigger companies. There is so much emphasis on Seniority, Levels etc. Its complete bullshit. You see people game the system, rise to the top, get all kinds of bullshit honors for doing bullshit things. Meanwhile the grunts doing all the actual work and innovating like crazy are just happy to make the higher ups look good in front of _their_ peers and don't really give a shit about the product or the market.... its a vicious, self-sustaining and self-dealing beast.
It's even worse than that, since the NPV of options is zero.
I'm $40k/yr shy of the average reported salary for the average senior SDE, and I'm missing $140k+ in stock/bonus... am I wasting my time at my current job making 50% of what I should be making or am I missing something about these massive public companies (like, not everybody gets hired at these companies... or... they suck to work for?)
Where are these $200-300-400-500k/yr rates coming from? Do you have to sell your soul to reach that? Am I grossly underpaid? I usually am at the higher level in my organization/division, and yet I'm impoverished (comparatively) according to levels.fyi?
Total comp for my college hires averages around $150k.
Total comp for my career level ICs averages a smidge over $200k.
My top 10% have total comp in the $350k neighborhood.
The very few folks who are at the staff/principal range (depending on which companies titles you're using) are taking home $500-800k (mostly in stock). If we consider attrition, it's probably only 1 in 150 of the engineers we hire who ever hit this tier or above.
The levels.fyi info seems pretty accurate to me. Their estimate for my personal role is within 2% of my actuals.
What cities is that number for?
levels.fyi does not say everyone makes $300k+ - it says people at specific companies in a specific region make that much. It makes that quite obvious from how you have to select the companies, the level, and then you see where those offers are geographically and with how much experience/tenure.
People also disregard the infamous “4 year cliff”: At most of these companies, your initial stock offer fully vests in 4 years, so your 5th year, your take-home comp nose-dives. Even if you get modest raises and “refresh” stock grants (which not all companies do), you’re likely taking a huge hit in year 5. I’d be interested in a levels.fyi filtering out people’s first four years.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html [2] https://www.levels.fyi/2018/
Also be careful what you wish for. I’m not sure if the stress and personal impact are worth it. I have constant anxiety. Some of the people I work with are really smart but manipulative and generally not great human beings.
It’s not for everyone. I’m just trying to get to $1MM in my after tax account before I leave this company for something more sustainable.
Amen to this. If anyone here believes that those who possess high intelligence are naturally more ethical or good-hearted than the average, try getting between any of them and their next bonus / promotion at a FAANG or in academia and you will rapidly learn otherwise.
It was really shocking to me to learn how disgusting some very intelligent people can be. It rewrote some of my philosophies of life in the first half of my twenties. Turns out we don't all have cathedrals in our heads when we have the tools to build them.
If your company doesn't do stock/RSUs, you're missing out on that aspect (though a small number of companies make up for that with large cash bonuses).
levels.fyi shows people making $300k in Austin, TX (which as far as I know, is not a high cost of living area)
What are some areas that are comparable to South Florida that are listed on levels.fyi?
Ping us at hello (at) levels (dot) fyi if you have more feedback!
Please do! Thanks :-)
It seems to me that now title inflation is countering this somewhat. I'm the newest hire in my organization and my title is "Analyst". I'm the only person at this level in the entire group, because I've been here less than a year. Everyone else, who have each been here 3 years or more, is "Manager" or higher (about 2/3rds are "Director" or higher) even if they are really just individual contributors with no direct reports or management duties, because they have to increase people's pay to keep from losing them, but they can't do it without bumping them up a pay band, which is only allowed with a "promotion". But while this is true in my group, there are groups where there are 200+ individual contributer-level people, and maybe 10 managers, and those people are never getting pay raises.
It reminds me of how "VP" is an inflated title in investment banking roles.
> In brokerage firms, investment banks and other financial companies, "vice president" is a seniority rank rather than denoting an actual managerial position within the company. It is a relatively junior position, usually does not denote managerial responsibilities and companies have a large number of vice presidents, perhaps as an inexpensive way for a company to recognize employees, or perhaps because of delayering when an employee can't be moved higher in the organization but still deserves recognition. In most cases, the title merely implies that someone is in a medium-seniority individual contributor role
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_president#Use_in_financia...
I worked at a small series B level startup, and when I left I had the option to buy my shares at the last valuation price, but at just over $20,000 total I declined. I decided I could use that capital better than waiting around hoping they explode and get acquired. I don't think stock options work the same with public companies though.
Usually you’re given a number of shares when you join, and the value of those shares change as they vest. This can lead to some really overinflated comp packages if a person joins before huge growth that a new person would not get.
There’s often restrictions around when you can sell while still employ by that company to avoid insider trading laws, like you can sell right before earnings reports.
For public companies, the vest date is also the release date, which is when the shares are recognized as income. You have to pay taxes when they are released, which is basically 25% federal tax plus whatever your state's tax rate is for this (10% in CA). To pay the taxes you can either deposit cash to cover the amount and keep the shares, or sell some fraction of the shares on the release date.
If you keep the shares, then any gain after the release date is taxed as capital gains. Basically, from a tax perspective it's equivalent to the company paying you cash on the release date equal to the stock price of your shares and you buying shares with it.
There are other options than purchasing the options yourself or just letting them expire.
From a pure finance perspective, you just need to find someone to take on the risk of the exercise. My company, ESO Fund, has a diversified portfolio of startups and as a result can take a $20k bet with much more ease than a single employee making a $20k bet.
It’s been discussed before but the sad reality is that passing an interview loop at the big 5 and building stuff are not really correlated.
I'm missing the craziness of studying at university where I felt everything was possible. I had sometimes similar feelings in startups.
In big companies that created that level structure it's shocking how boring everything becomes. People define themselves based on their level. That becomes the only goal together with the TC (Total compensation). It really feels like a rat race sometimes.
But that was an MSc, not PhD or something where your research is more likely to have output/outcome.
I recommend reading "Extreme Ownership" to get a sense of the importance of leadership because there are no bad teams, just bad leaders. We are the apex predators on the planet, and the key to our success is understanding the social element of it and how to take a group of people and have them achieve something amazing beyond themselves individually.
PS. bro you're great for making this happen. levels.fyi is like "software eating the world" for labor unions. Clean, elegant solution avoiding all the nasty labor unions politics. Now if we could also bring awareness around work/life balance!
