But a FAANG Staff Engineer will get a similar base, and then $1mil in stock for 4 years.
-- Are there people outside of FAANG and Big Banks / HFT firms making those kinds of monies?
-- if So who are they? and what do they do?
These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
If you aren't a shoo-in at FAANG and you want to make that kind of money, your best bet is to learn how to start and run a business. I don't mean try to launch a billion dollar social app that needs venture funding. I mean a SAAS that solves a boring problem for other businesses with money to spend.
Because the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5.
Especially if you start hiring other people, your liability then increases 10 fold as now anything can happen with them (sick leave, absenteism, low performance, sabotage, etc) but you're still bound to the same deadlines you agreed with your customers or you'll get sued for damages by them.
As an employee you have some basic rights and protections from the state on the limits your employer can squeeze from you, more or less, depending on where you live. As a contractor or company however, you don't, and can be fully liable in court for your failures to deliver regardless of your personal circumstances. Unless you know what you're getting into and have the know-how, experience, or mentorship, it's not worth it in most cases.
And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.
Precisely.
Add to that that as a regular 9-5 worker you have one role.
As a solo business owner you have several roles (engineer, marketer, customer service, designer, etc...).
Believe it or not you get over this. It’s kind of like the fear of going up on stage to give a presentation. Some people get an addictive rush, these are usually serial entrepreneurs who just love to be in charge because they have no problems with risk/stress tolerance (mostly). You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera. Hiring/firing is hard for people but you have no choice and certainly you’re not beholden to give people jobs. People are there to work, do their best at the moment, your job is to ensure them they’re looked after adequately and your door is always open to them if they have to talk to you.
Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig. Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well. The CEO will shit test you in almost everything you do and say and this is the grilling you will need, because they expect you to be capable of running things in their stead.
Working for a big company in the US is massively underrated. Over time, most people working in these companies will be much better off financially and with less stress/health issues.
The silicon valley/tech bubble over-romanticizes entrepreneurship without realizing its NOT for everyone.
For every 1 success story you hear about entrepreneurship, there are 50-100 that fail. The stress and anxiety is not something everyone can or should take if they have the opportunity to coast at FAANG and make $500K+.
How many businesses make $500K in revenue in the US? Not many? [1]
I am paraphrasing here, but I really agree with how Scott Galloway put it: The US corporation is the greatest wealth creating vehicle in history. Way safer and easier to build wealth working at Google.
Giving "StArt a BusZineaSs BRO" as a blanket advice is very disingenuous.
[1] In 2018, 9% of small businesses made more than $1 million. https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/small-business...
Note: Many statistics online say the number is actually fewer than 5%!
• When times get tough, cofounders playing chicken to see who can take the lowest salary
• Giving yourself the lowest pay to prevent income loss of your employees
• Always having to hunt for sales to maintain your survival (which is typically nebulous and subject to when they feel like signing)
• HR and always trying to figure out how to not get sued
• Losing big customers or big customers going out of business
For any one of those bullet points there’s a coulda woulda shoulda, but again, just taking your 400k from a well established company that isn’t fighting for its survival every day is not inherently inferior to the heroics and cortisol required to operate a business.
Get to work with excellent SWEs, PMs, PgMs, etc.
In startup land I was doing so much, pitches, recruiting, coding, landing page design, dev ops, pretty much the full stack.
In FAANG land I can just focus on existence proofs and then there’s a whole support structure helping that happen and bringing the product to market.
You could argue that setting up this pipeline is the goal of a startup, but it’s a LOONG road. The opportunity cost is immense. It’s immensely difficult to recruit. You have to effectively pause your life. Scary to have children with startup level uncertainty.
At a certain $$ where you can live a comfortable life, enjoy 95% of what you do day to day, get to be in an environment with top notch colleagues, it’s a tough sell to start something from scratch with all that risk.
How many products you have actually finished and worked on and polished over years if they produced something valuable in the end?
That defines the actual realised value of the business. Jumping from one product to another does not mean that all of them were constantly producing revenue or were success. It might look good in the CV but what was end result?
Profitable software-based ideas are increasingly difficult to find. Thousands of people are exploring every niche and trying to start startups in them, which is great, but competition is fierce and unexplored niches are shrinking.
And of course, it's still not straightforward even if you find a relatively unexplored niche. Most people I see who have attempted startups had extensive family support or personal wealth from exits as an employee of a company that had an IPO.
There is limitless opportunity outside of the webtech/adtech bullshit bubble. Go create a hardware startup, it's never been easier. It's still harder than adtech bullshit was 10 years ago, but the turnkey manufacturing industry is faaaar better than all the "hardware is hard" weekly blogspam would lead you to believe.
I, like many others, hold a white-collar job in a technology company, not FAANG, with a salary between 300 and 400K per year, with lunch breaks, paid vacation days, good health insurance, and the opportunity to work from home at least 75% of the time.
At the end of my workday, which I have not found to be stressful in at least 3 years, I am fresh, hydrated, and ready to spend late afternoons, evenings, and nights pursuing my interests, taking care of the kids, and maybe learning French at last. I see guys running fairly successful local businesses, both physical and digital. Assuming you have a choice between the two paths, a brief look at the physical condition and a conversation with me and the business owner would quickly lead you to prefer one of the two paths.
I might be privileged, lucky, in an unusual situation. But the same is true for the successful local entrepreneur running a plumbing business with profits equivalent to those of experienced people working in tech.
There are real downsides to owning your own business. It’s probably been 15 years since I had a day where I didn’t check my email.
Most people are Indians, not chiefs, and I think that’s actually an evolutionary adaptation that’s built into us. Someone may want to be the best programmer they can be rather than the best at managing employees, setting business strategy, dealing with taxes and other paperwork, etc.
Totally get it.
Startups are so hit and miss. It's really really hard to make $500k a year at a startup. There's many years of zero, near zero or sub-intern salary. After that there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.
Classic businesses can get a substantial salary sooner than a startup, but do have a ceiling. If you're selling a well known need (plumbing, consulting, etc), there's competition and a ceiling at hours worked.
Having done both, a FAANG job is infinitely less effort than running a company. Also lower stress, lower risk, and immediate rewards/pay. I still have more fun starting companies though!
>there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.
Tech or not I think it usually doesn't dwarf anything but if it comes close, a little bit low or high, that's a huge milestone above failure.
In that case it might allow you to maintain readiness for an incredible bonanza which might be within reach only from beyond that point, and that can be what dwarfs the "big payout".
IOW depending on the situation, occasional big payouts that really just even things out may not be very life-changing even if they are big, but it can give you more rolls of the dice at things that can't be approached any other way.
I do better as a consultant/contractor for a client who is a previous customer from when I had my own facility. Fundamentally I used to provide the paperwork (the deliverable/invoiceable product) and supported everything needed to generate it, including any free advice which goes along to smooth the flow. Now I'm paid to help their paperwork achieve and maintain value with none of mine in the mix at all, but I'm basically doing a lot of the same stuff when I'm on site.
As a contractor aren't you now a small business operator of a different type, perhaps much smaller?
I would estimate in more of the exact same business in so many ways very few ever come close to that.
Maybe even doing some of the same things under different degrees of ownership and responsibility, and this could be a good example of way different compensation when the only difference is the underlying arrangement.
Looks like ironc can be good :)
You have to find a business that makes sense for you (you know it, you want to put up with it, etc). You then have to execute. All the while hoping that you don't get struck by lightning (something kills your business), while also hoping to get struct by lightning (you become wildly successful). God forbid you need job security (family, health care, etc.).
Contrast this to going into a job, where what you do is laid out for you, you just have to execute. With insurance. With job security.
Even as someone who has run a startup and still has the itch, it's a no brainer.
Very rare to see businesses where you're sole developer and salesperson unless you are the main SME on a niche field/technology you probably developed.
Also A LOT of FAANG is immigrants who can't start a business in the US or children of immigrants whose parents put strong pressure on them having an upper middle class job.
Anecdotally, I've noticed that a disproportionate amount of formally-educated people I've encountered in life are more allergic to this idea than the opposite.. I don't have any solid theories as to why, exactly, but it's curious nonetheless.
What sees you discount the obvious? That is, formally educated people end up in formal education because they have a proclivity towards not wanting to have to go out and get it. They want someone else to hand it to them. Which is, after all, what the "formal" part of formal education describes.
It seems like you are vastly underestimating the effort (and risk) it takes to start a successful SaaS that brings its founder $500k+ annually.
You're right about everything if you can actually start and grow that business, but you're glossing over how difficult that actually is to do, and the fact that you have to start from $0 income.
It's also unlimited as a gambler. That doesn't mean everyone should start buying lotto tickets.
I like coding. I don't want to run a business, and these are very separate skills. This is like asking why an IC doesn't want to become a people manager.
I can't do that as well while starting and running a company.
Maybe people want to be developers, and not managers/CEOs/business owner/entrepreneurs?
They're completely different jobs. Why would you expect everyone to aspire to the same thing?
We don't look at nurses and say "its funny how so many nurses have an aversion to become a multinational pharmaceutical CEO"
And you might say, "well - you'll never become a billionaire working for someone else".
That's not true.
There's plenty of CEOs (non-founders) who are billionaires.
And the chances of you running your own company and becoming a billionaire, is about the same probability as you becoming a CEO at a Fortune 500.
Being a business owner doesn't necessarily mean being the founder.
No CEO is becoming a billionaire by collecting a paycheque. They might become a billionaire by accepting the right stock offer in lieu of wages, but that makes them the business owner again.
To anyone exploring starting a new business I would keep the day job and suffer until you get to a point where the business is on a good clip and you can dedicate all your time to it. Otherwise spending 20 years at FAANG and enjoying your life is really not a bad way to live, in fact its a dream to 99% of the planets population.
Otherwise, you can contact incubators like YC. If they approve your idea and grant you money, you can then easily apply for loans at banks because you've been vetted by a well known company.
After all that energy spent, you will understand the quote :
> Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.
Being an employee is still running a business. The separation you are trying to draw isn't meaningful.
That particular line of business is one of the few businesses out there with a near-guaranteed customer base, though. That's a highly attractive trait for someone operating a business. With small risk comes small reward, of course, but it is no surprise that most businesses venture in that direction.
As for myself, I can’t wait to free myself from these chains called salaried employment. (I don’t mean to offend anyone)
He is smart but not a genius. He kind of knows what is going on though, he "gets it". Probably even more motivated than smart, but not insanely motivated. Motivated enough to learn how to get features done at a brisk pace, take ownership of his team's work, and to study for interviews. Didn't go to a top tier CS program, didn't come out of FAANG or FAANG adjacent, and probably took a detour working for us, but three years later his TC is over $300k. He also had the luck to jump ship before the FAANG layoffs of late 2022.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/holy-heck-this-is-hard-8eb...
Granted, this is Indie Hackers, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the general idea still applies. Getting to $10k a month, let alone making $250k a year (so ~$20k/month) is really hard, probably about as hard as making $250k a year as an employee, maybe even harder.
Plus running a business takes a lot of money and luck...
What about all the guys running unsuccessful local plumbing businesses?
To me it's always been a matter of personality. As an introvert, I can't picture myself doing the kinds of social interactions required to sell a business on my own.
It’s been a LONG time since that’s happened.
Just remember that.
I know a guy who ran a successful plumbing business around Northern VA.
Took home around 300k per annum. I used to bang his daughter.
He worked hard, though, and had a couple of other guys working jobs independently under him, on top of his work. He was mostly corporate and construction work, but a couple of those guys under him also did residential, and he mostly supervised.
I'm far less than his TCO but also don't have to get elbow deep in shit and work remotely from my basement. Respect the hustle, but I think I'm winning in terms of work-life balance and QOL.
It’s not like nobody wants that, the scarce thing is having a good business idea unless you want to go into consulting.
> And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
That’s kinda stretching it. Higher FAANG-level salaries are enough to reach financial independence, which is pretty much „unlimited“ territory for most normal people. On the other hand, most businesses are not hyper successful. It‘s not like becoming a millionaire entrepreneur can be taken for granted.
It’s interesting that you don’t seem to understand this. Survivorship bias or something else?
There’s just so much more responsibility resting on your shoulders. Holidays have never felt the same since I left employment in 2011.
No regrets here, just saying this path is not for everyone and not as accessible as you might think.
The one has got nothing to do with the other. Running a small business is far more sales and marketing, and if you are lucky enough to get to the point where you need to hire someone, then HR, managing suppliers and fuck me don’t get me started on fucking customers.
My base salary is $150k/yr. My cash bonus maxes out somewhere around $80k/yr, and typically falls in the $50k - 70k range. I also receive equity worth roughly $12k - $15k per year. Counting in the value of benefits, my comp package is worth roughly $280k - $300k/yr.
I am extremely well paid for the area I live in. It's very unlikely that I could make more money without moving to a different metro, getting lucky with a remote position, or going into niche contracting.
Just throwing this out there, because a $250k salary (plus bonus) is doing well even in a HCOL area.
That used to be the case where I live, just a few years ago. Now what used to be a starter home is over $400k.
One other nice thing is that instead of restricted stock you get actual money.
And generally the money will be locked up for less time than the 4 year vesting that these companies often follow.
And on top of that you can usually invest your money fee free in your own fund to help juice your returns.
The downside is that there is almost certainly going to be more stress on you and probably no where to hide if you want to just rest and vest.
Your team and company will likely be pretty small and everyone will be very aware of what everyone's contribution to the company's success.
I think you need to be a pretty unique individual to succeed in environments like that. Most people I know break down under intense pressure when shit hits the fan, even if they're wildly competent. I can only assume it's that much more intense when tons of money is at stake.
While I've done zero attempts to work at any hedge fund, I know plenty of people who both had success when wanting to join one (even though some of them were under-qualified) and people who failed (some who were over-qualified).
"Rest and vest". What a luxury. Some of us are trying to tread water with an anvil chained to the waist. That's what I get for choosing to work for something I'm passionate about. What a world
Are you passionate about working for your current employer or passionate about your career?
I’m passionate about my career (programming/software development): I love reading the classic tech books out there (TAOCP, DDIA, etc.), I love working on side projects, sometimes I contribute to open source, etc.
On the other hand, I couldn’t care less about my employer. Not because they are bad, but I just don’t care about most of the tech companies out there. I do what I need to do to get paid, but i’m not passionate about deadlines, conversations with other engineers about subjective topics, daily standups, on call, etc.
Err...4-year vesting doesn't mean the money is literally locked away until you hit 4 years' tenure. A $1m stock grant vesting over 4 years might pay $250-350k every year, depending on the vesting schedule and stock performance.
If a hedge fund pays $1m every 2 years then they're just paying more period. It's not the vesting schedule which causes the difference in comp.
No one said it did:)
My point was that a typical bonus is about 2/3's employees at the moment its granted and 1/3 held back for a year sometimes two, so you get money faster than a typical 4 year vesting schedule.
Does that clear things up?
Stock at FAANG is basically equivalent to cash. You can sell it as soon as you get it.
1) Be better than the overwhelming majority of your peers, and be noticed for this. You are quite likely to find interesting opportunities come your way. I do mean overwhelming though - small fraction of a percent.
2) Specialize in something most people can’t or won’t do. This includes difficult, obscure, and unpleasant work.
In both cases some of the biggest $ comes from independent consulting, once you’ve built up a network and a reputation for fixing a particular pain point corporations have (bill for value, of course).
To offer just one example, I'm aware of a software company that does nine figures in ARR making high performance computing software for very large financial institutions. There's basically no chance you've ever heard of them. They're very low key. The company hasn't grown headcount much in the last decade, and their employees don't really leave. But some of their people writing really low-level code are certainly making multiples of representative peers at FAANG.
Unless you’re the low level wizard you’re just going to make an industry standard salary, maybe a bump but nothing special.
(Of course, the original question was "not FAANG or HFT", so this still may not be what they were looking for...)
Those awesome salaries tend to be paid to mercenaries and not the lifers.
I think you mean "respectively"
The only companies that could beat my current comp are other big tech and finance, but there were a couple of surprises along the way.
For example, a Tier 3 (i.e. you never heard about them) company offered me 450k TC for a Staff level position. This compares to the 500k TC for a senior level position at FAANG. I also interviewed for a Startup that offered 650k TC for a Principal level, although the stocks were paper money.
To your point, "random" companies can come close to FAANG salaries for high enough levels, but it's far from a given. In fact I'd say most random companies probably top in the 200k range.
If you are interested just start every conversation with a recruiter asking for their comp range. I found these days almost all recruiters answer, and then you can decide if it is worth your time to go ahead.
I documented my process of getting job offers here, you can check it out in case it helps
https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-experience-getting-offers-...
I've also spent large parts of my career as an independent consultant -- similar compensation most years.
Staff PM, around $250k base, 20% bonus, and $150k RSUs per year so pretty much on the money with yours, $450k TC.
1. they don't hire often & usually have small teams 2. they make so much money, that they don't make noise about it. & you won't hear about them, unless one day you randomly run into one of their employees saying they're hiring on reddit / hn 3. they work in unsexy industries or high risk stuff e.g gambling 4. they're usually located in places you wouldn't expect
Also, you're actually expected to work 40 hours a week and generally not more, and you're expected to take all your vacation.
It takes a while to get to that level, or you need to get hired directly into a GS-15 equivalent position. But it's doable, especially at an agency that does technical work (eg NASA, NOAA, DOE, parts of the DOD, etc.)
GS-15s aren't particularly common (fedscope data says 3.1% of federal employees are GS-15) and overwhelmingly they are supervisory positions (or more commonly supervisor-of-supervisors). Even if you do find a non-supervisor GS-15, the federal government mostly contracts development, so it's exceptionally rare to find a federal engineering position that does something other than contract oversight (generically called acquisition). I'm not saying those positions don't exist, they are just rare, and typically reserved for promotions from within the agency or federal government. Also, since GS-15 is so senior in the federal government, even if the position is technical it will start to be political.
Pay is pretty low for new grads and experienced engineers, but decent when you're in the ~3-8 year range of experience. Most agencies are hiring new grads at GS-7 or GS-9 (in SF that's $61k to $75k to start) which is a joke. So even if you can get on at a federal agency as a GS-14 or GS-15 level, you'll have an exceptionally hard time hiring new engineers. Pay at the high end, especially in HCOL areas, very quickly hits the congressional limit and makes it pointless to seek promotion (Look at the SF are GS-14 table: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... ). You can theorhetically bonus up to 20-25%, and I've heard that some intelligence agencies just do that across the board, but most agencies are probably giving a 2-3% bonuses each year.
This is a sad and interesting factoid: Long ago congress passed a law saying they need to track federal vs private sector pay and adjust the pay to federal employees to match that. Of course, there is an exception that allows the president to disband this requirement in case of national emergency. So now every year the president literally writes a letter declaring a national emergency and manually decides what the pay increase will be, which is always significantly lower than what is recommended. Here are the national emergency letters from 2023 and 2022, but they have been issued by every president for decades now:
2023: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action... 2022: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
Benefits are good, but not amazing. Yes, there is a pension and a wide variety of health insurance options, but they're mediocre compared to what a lot of high-paying tech jobs offer. TSP is basically vanguard with lower fees and a 4% match. You can look at the healthcare options here: https://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/plan-inf...
The 40-hour work week it completely true. If you're trying to work overtime, you'll actively be discouraged and told to stop it and go home. There is generally support for telework, but it's very political, and who knows if it will get killed in the future.
Lots of agencies, especially the agencies that need a lot of technical work, will require you get a security clearance and that comes with it's own considerations. Drug use and foreign contacts are a big problem and makes recruiting even more difficult.
It's possible to find a job at some agencies working on stuff that feels very rewarding and very important, but you will always constantly feel like the bureaucracy is constantly fighting you.
This has not been my experience, my agency hires new PhDs at the GS-13 level and BS/MS graduates at the GS-12 level. But YMMV.
"It's possible to find a job at some agencies working on stuff that feels very rewarding and very important, but you will always constantly feel like the bureaucracy is constantly fighting you."
Concur.
Of course, government jobs are very stable, which can be an advantage or not depending on what you want out of life. We find that most of the engineers we are able to recruit have been to industry or academia and found the instability and poor life balance to be incompatible with having a family. So my "new" recruits tend to be a little older, married, with a child or two. On the other hand, many of my actual younger hires eventually get headhunted and leave for industry to make 2x more than I can pay them. Then they find out that on an hourly basis they're making roughly the same amount, because their new jobs expect 20-40 hours of unpaid overtime.
Most FAANG engineers are NOT getting $1M stock grants.
That is the stock grant for Google L6-7, Amazon Principal SDE, and Microsoft L67.
These are engineering levels comparable to Director of Engineering or Engineering Manager and extremely rare.
> a Staff Engineer at an avg startup might get $250k base salary, in a HCOL area and maybe a 10-20% bonus
This is the norm at FAANG as well. Just add a $60-150k/yr stock grant, which is normal at other public companies in the Bay Area and Seattle tech scenes as well.
Companies give the option to either go Management Track (Manager, Director VP) or Technical Track (Principal/E6, Fellow, Distinguished Engineer)
In public companies, most Engineers will peak at the L5/L64/SDE3/E5 level by their 30s.
> Plenty of data on other companies offers there
Plenty of companies offer that kind of compensation, but the competition is intense as the number of roles paying that much are limited, and WLB is atrocious as it's basically a Architect/Team Lead role.
If anyone thinks they deserve a L6/L7 role with less than a decade of experience at peer companies they need to adjust their expectations or remain unemployed
Having worked in the finance world, where the wheels are made out of software at this point, I never got the feeling that the old guard that still ran the place fully understood how crucial software was to their business, and how much it saved in labour costs.
The software department was generally seen as a cost center, with the salaries and outsourcing of projects reflecting that.
So I agree with the sentiment, just saying it doesn't always hold up.
You could also make these amounts in adult/gambling marketing but that's another can of worms..
Interested. Tell me more.
It’s not just salary.
The "not just salary" bit is very often used as a mirage intended to fool employees to take a lower compensation than what they can get, and then tag a bunch of conditions that can't possibly or realistically be met.
TBH that's one of the reasons I chose the company I'm at now. I had other options, but having a team that I love and very healthy PTO won me over. To each their own!
For people with family, I believe a good insurance plan and flexibility in hours also mean a lot. Especially hours.
If it’s coming from a peer, especially one whose been round a few more blocks than you, may just be an observation about life.
At FAANG you will definitely make exactly as much as a FAANG salary.
That's like saying "a tech job". Most jobs that require those things pay poorly. Big defense contractors like Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, etc. pay worse than most tech companies. I have over a dozen friends in defense (I used to work for a defense contractor) and none earn comparably to big tech. It's not a matter of clearance, to be clear - most of those dozen have TS/SCI and had to go through a full polygraph.
Unless you meant working directly for the government, not a contractor. That would put you on the GS payscale, which does not have carveouts for SWEs, meaning it won't pay as well as any private developer role.
Maybe that's just the state of the job market, no desirable jobs left, only thing we can hope for is a high salary?
With the way compounding works, highly paid years when you're young and can invest much of it sets you up for financial independence and much less money stress for the rest of your entire life, no matter what you want to do. I don't worry about getting fired or laid off or the stress of finding the next job because there is no financial stress about it.
Plus in my career so far, the best paying jobs have also been the best culture and WLB. People incorrectly think these big tech jobs are a constant long hours grind. IME, the absolute worst working hours and culture have been in startups and small businesses, with lower comp and equity lottery tickets with an EV of 0.
I'm not a maximize comp at all costs robot, but it's a big big factor. I'm selling my time and labor and I want to get a good value for it while I can. There's no guarantees these 300k+ years will continue. Get it while the gettin's good.
Getting rent raises that are 1000% higher than annual salary raises, childcare costing like renting another apartment each month, per child, has become the norm
Spend enough time in a major US metropolin and you figure its about 50/50 people with very high income, and people who's family is funding their lifestyle
And to clarify, I'm not saying it's greedy or wrong, just that you'll be happier in life with clear goals beyond a salary number. I found that what I wanted was attainable with lower salary and not working for FAANG or living in Bay area
Side note: The difference at Staff Eng is slightly more wide. Eg. IBM Band 9 pays TC ~$250K while Meta E6 is ~$640K.
Side note 2: From what I understand, Big Tech often brings in Staff Eng from smaller companies to a Senior Eng role. Reverse is also true, Sr Eng at Big Tech are often able to join Staff roles at smaller companies.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/leaderboard/Software-Engineer/Entry-L...
For example at your avg startups you worry about which latest GraphQL technology to learn. As Staff at a FAANG you realize how the graphQL engines work and can pretty much critique the design choices made in each. A Staff at avg startup is more like L5 at Google or L6 at Amazon.
Having said that, relaize that if you become that good at the craft, its better to found a tech startup. Take the example of DGraph if you are looking for a blueprint. You have got founders advantage because of your deep expertise. And tbh, its in the Faang's interest to keep you on the payroll.
I think you are taking it in the wrong way. A startup has lower mean income but can have a much higher return in the future. Most startups are also cash strained, so you won't get as much cash for your income. I'd suggest you look into the expected return of your startup instead, and the take into at least the following situations:
- Your peers. Do you get to build lasting relationship with truly amazing peers? With such peers, you won't regret it even if your startup fails as you will have great experience, let alone your career will likely take off in the near future.
- The problem space. Does the problem you solve inspire you?
- The potential of your startup. You get to to evaluate the potential continuously, as the situation of a startup changes constantly. The good news is that a startup is usually quite transparent. You get to know how your company performs easily and how the founders lead too.
- Know yourself. How much risk can you take? How optimistic are you? And etc
- Your expected income. Take your equity into consideration, but multiply the value with a probability of success in a given time frame.
Those are just golden handcuffs! How many of the hired employees get to complete the vesting period?
I do pretty well doing my own thing. But there was a ramp-up, and it wasn't overnight (much like some LI influencers would have you believe). Regarding the effort of creating your own thing, yes, there is a lot of non-sexy stuff that no one talks about because it is non-sexy.
An additional benefit for me is flexibility. Being able to go to my kid's school function or help coach a team is more important to me than professional accolades.
As far as the work. Yes, it is a lot of work. But theoretically, you are doing your own thing because you like it. My work is generally self-motivating. I can't say the same about when I worked for others.
That said, some folks in consulting pull off those numbers and it is, theoretically, possible to exceed those numbers on a good year in presales (at a place where commissions are uncapped).
She decided to accept the offer from the not-sexy credit union software company, knowing she could've earned at least 30% more elsewhere. She kept using the word "genuine" when she talked about the people she met during the "interview" process, and that's what attracted her.
Well, about 2 years after accepting the offer she was diagnosed with breast cancer. (tl;dr = dealing with cancer sucks. constant doctor appointments. chemo treatments. pain. vomiting. life/death uncertainty. and so on.) She said her company was unbelievable during her cancer battle. She didn't work for almost a year (her bosses wouldn't let her), and they never even talked about sick leave or FMLA or disability - nothing. They just kept her on the payroll like normal, for almost a full year! She said her bosses would call all the time, asking about the latest test results, how she was feeling, did she need anything, etc. And, to her surprise, after about 2 years of treatments, almost the entire company showed up to watch her ring the bell.
Moral of the story: Money is great, but it's really not everything.
Money is the same.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pretty good because they offer huge comp packages, but many of the others are mediocre because there's limited upside to their stock (rather than raising at a $50m valuation, they might raise at a $1B valuation. A $4B exit is much more life changing when you own 20x as much of the company. And they're very risky.)
Why pay easily 50-200% more for US talent when they can often get solid talent in Japan / Europe / China / etc. Outside of a small business and localization team, why bother?
I maxed out bonus/stock at MS as Senior my last year, still left for PeerDB. But MS pays much less in Canada I guess
I'd also argue that sometimes you get lower pay but in low cost places, with good benefits and work-life balance. It's more reasonable to take other things into the equation.
The trick is that it’s not RSUs, so not regular income. Instead it’s some form of option (I am not a tax attorney so I hesitate to state the type of option, there’s a variety of them that are used with different limitations). I believe they exercise 83(b) style to avoid AMT as well.
As usual, you need to already have a lot of money to make this work. Tax avoidance is amazingly accessible once you have enough money. One trick I could do, but don’t — my bank gives me a line of credit based on assets they manage for me. I could quit my job and easily live for years just using the LoC and report zero income other than passive income from rebalancing trades (which are very minimal).
I can’t speak to non-public company stock though.
Also, one thing that happened early in the dotcom gold rush is that a ton of people swarmed in, all suddenly acting like experts and professionals, with little/no prior experience. Meanwhile, Internet people who were also prolific programmers were, like, who are all these people, and why do many of them have fashionable eyeglasses like nerds would never try to pull off. I don't know how much we'll see something like that this time.
I'm very confident there are, but should there be?
>-- if So who are they? and what do they do?
A lot of times it will be things that are a lot less ethical than big tech or financial firms.
>Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?
As to the title question, stick around and you'll notice messages from people on the payroll of many of the biggest tech outfits who confirm that you can be quite gainfully employed there for years without having to do any real work at all ;)
With all the layoffs over recent times there may never be another message like that.
Not a single one.
I guess you would have to look over old comments if you want to re-live the experience.
Sorry to be so misleading or hurting anybody's feelings.
> a similar base, and then $1mil in stock for 4 years.
so are there firms with similar market caps and/or growth?
Eventually it will normalize closer to the lower end as my large initial grant is replaced by refreshers, unless the stock continues to go up dramatically, which is unlikely.
Controlling spending is something one can control to some extent once the necessities are paid for.
And then that’s the way to accrue and stay wealthy or become independently wealthy over time.
2 is easy to do, 3 is manageable. I've heard of people doing more than 3, but most I've personally seen someone do is 3.
Doing so however carries a lot of risk and one needs to have a certain mentality to be able to actually do it (I certainly don't have that).
Yes.
> -- if So who are they? and what do they do?
OpenAI, Anthropic and crypto bug bounty hunters.
Non-AI, I got a written offer (for a key T-shaped hands-on technical role in a special unit of a financial institution), for which TC was (put very roughly) about halfway between Google L6 and where non-FAANG IC TC generally tops out.
Since you're asking about "non-FAANG", a few comments about that, using one offer as an example...
First, requirements: making a lot of money now is higher priority for me than it has been in the past (since I'd previously made money way too low of a priority, and now catching up to do), and FAANG-like TC is a solution, but aspects of culture and mission are still also very important.
Some ways that particular financial institution offer was more attractive than FAANG:
1. Every single person I talked with seemed genuine, honest, smart, and down-to-earth, and like they'd be great to work with, not mercenary/arrogant/oblivious like I've seen from some FAANG people.
2. The interview process was collegial and two-way. And some asked some very good questions, including questions that I think would never occur to Leetcode interviewers to ask, and the "correct answer" wasn't in the FAANG interview prep books for people to memorize/practice.
3. A higher executive themself met with me for a substantial meeting, was very smart and straight-talking about everything, and then also brought up growth opportunity they had in mind.
In hindsight, I probably should've accepted, but three of the main reasons at the time that I declined:
1. Leadership of my then-employer assured me that a showstopper organizational issue I raised would be fixed, and I felt an obligation to my colleagues to stay and help fix it. (That was my values-based choice, given the information I had at the time.)
2. The compensation was structured in a convoluted way (more complicated than FAANG TC), and the net effect was that there'd be almost no financial quality of life improvement for close to a year. So I'd be working like crazy, like at a startup (but without a startup lottery ticket), yet, although I'd be working for a big financial institution with a gazillion dollars, I wouldn't immediately have enough money and sense of income security to upgrade from a problematic early-startup-grade apartment in a VHCOLA. Buying a fleet of Brooks Brothers no-iron dress shirts would feel like an investment towards the future bonuses, and I'd just have to make sure my old radiator didn't burst and ruin everything in my closet again, until I could find a sufficiently low-risk way to upgrade lifestyle. :)
3. Once the offer was in writing, I got handed off to dealing directly with large corporate HR processes, which had a very different feel from the people I'd been talking with, and my spidey sense (battle scars) tingled. (Not potentially Kafkaesque bureaucracy for bad reasons, like some companies, but maybe the effect of decades of evolution of highly-regulated large business bureaucracy.) Not the kind of thing you want to see, right after you see that the TC structure still isn't going to make you feel financially comfortable anytime soon. This was intuition rather than hard information, but I hadn't yet gotten that disconcerting feeling from Google (where they'd grown up with a Summer Camp for Stanford Students focus on employee happiness, and where I imagine I might be able to find a progressive policy or person who is able help with a bureaucratic machine dilemma, if ever needed).
When asking about maximizing your TC, consider whether that's your only requirement, and what qualities of FAANG or FAANG-like-TC companies you have to accept to get that money.
Of the rest, the top paying ones seem to be fintech and AI startups. Only Netflix still scores high in top salaries.
It would make sense too, as they have a lot of leverage. Lots of people joining are happy to take a cut just to have the FAANG name on their resume. And I saw someone mention the average tenure is about 1.7 years.
dont compare yourself with others. focus on your art. be a craftsman at whatever you do. eventually opportunities will beckon or not, and either is fine.