Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 547 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#311

Post by kayge »

zxexz wrote: post #88

I’m aware of a couple people at health systems/hospitals that work maybe 400 hours/year making $500k+/year. Experts in legacy languages, specifically COBOL and MUMPS. For legacy billing and EMR/EHR and related systems code, respectfully. One guy gets flown out to the east coast from his ”chateau” in Utah every month or two; the only downside is he’s on-call pretty much all year round. I’ve heard banks have people lik…

As a 30-something "full stack web developer" who has also spent the last 3-4 years learning about IBM i (aka AS/400) servers and the CL and RPG programming languages... I have a glimmer of hope that I might move into a gig like that in my twilight years of employment :)

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#312

Post by filoleg »

keiferski wrote: post #270
brigadier132 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im doing both and yes its very different. The stress at the big companies is nothing.

Sure, I get that. But are the people trying to maximize income as an employee really looking for the low stress route in the first place? I suppose I should have qualified my comment by saying it's if your primary aim is to maximize income.

My primary goal is to maximize my income with the least amount of stress possible, and FAANG hits that spot just right.

I guess you can say I could maximize further by switching to finance or starting my own business, but the amount of extra stress is just not worth it at the moment, personally.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#313

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

keiferski wrote: post #305
entropyneur wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound so easy. I've ran small businesses for most of my career and I've never made more than a quarter of what I currently make working as a contractor (ironically, for a business I once started, now owned by someone else). And most of the time I earned 5-10% of that.

I'm not sure how I made it sound so easy, because presumably getting a 250k job at a FAANG isn't easy either. Which is what my point was - if you're going to deal with the time and stress to get one of the most desirable jobs, why not use that same time and effort to build a business?

> getting a 250k job at a FAANG isn't easy either

Except, it kinda is for people that have the right background and are well suited to it. That is, the reason I think you're getting a lot of pushback is that many folks are just inherently risk averse. There are people who are smart, know how to work hard, and know that if they have a path laid out in front of them, they can succeed.

For entrepreneurs, there is simply much more variability. You can be smart, work hard, do everything right, and still fail in unexpected ways due to things outside of your control.

I don't think entrepreneurship is bad at all, but it's not surprising at all to me that people who want to go the FAANG route aren't well suited to starting their own business.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#314

Post by nequo »

berdario wrote: post #282
xeromal wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems strange that ridicule should be your instinct rather than simple education

An educative reply is easier to ignore than a (or multiple) replies in which you're ridiculed. Moreover, being thought about how you're wrong about X might not necessarily translate in the subject being more careful before confidently expressing themselves on a Y topic on which they don't know anything about. Hopefully, ridiculing might make the subject reconsider that part of their character. That said, the HN polic…

The pile of downvotes drives the point home. No need to ridicule, education is better.

If you can't educate the poster, at least you educate other readers who also didn’t know, without the unnecessary noise of ridicule.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#315

Post by malux85 »

some_random wrote: post #217
malux85 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalist societies where the alternative to employment is destitution can force people into working at huge online gambling companies due to the need for employment and their responsibility (kids, aging parents, etc) While I agree in an ideal world, individuals should all stand up against unethical employment options, I am also mature enough to know not to penalise someone who might be otherwise meritorious based o…

People can absolutely be forced into working immoral jobs by muh capitalism, but some of you are way too enthusiastic about it. Someone doing blue team work for MGM after getting laid off in 2022 is one thing, a Staff Addiction Engineer looking to try a new industry in 2019 is another completely. Secondly, I agree that we should be hiring good people out of these industries, but there are a lot of people who just are…

> but there are a lot of people who just aren't going to be comfortable with that.

Actual LOL - who? I’ve worked at enormous orgs, Google, to medium sized orgs, to startups over my 20 year career, as a senior dev, engineering lead, CTO and now founder, I have hired and mentored hundreds, maybe close to 1000 engineers, hiring managers, project managers, and this has never ever been an issue, in one case we hired 20 engineers from Betsson, a huge (~400M/y) gambling company in Malta into a much larger organisation (non-gambling), and nobody from senior management, middle management or engineers ever even raised this point.

I think you are uncomfortable with it, and are projecting that starry-eyed wishful and naive thinking onto others by saying “a lot of people aren’t going to be comfortable with that”

I have 20 years experience working in 9 different countries, all with very different cultures, that says otherwise, nobody has ever mentioned it.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#316

Post by neilyio »

keiferski wrote: post #221

It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur, and will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business. 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, w…

Would you be open to mentoring someone curious about doing so?

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#317

Post by ghaff »

javier123454321 wrote: post #130
garciasn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am part of the group that misses unlimited PTO. I was averaging 8-9 weeks of time off under the unlimited model while I am capped at 5 weeks at a company with actual PTO. The only difference is that I get paid out any remaining PTO, should I leave, whereas with unlimited, there was no expectation that it will be paid out on departure.

I also came from a place with unlimited and I loved it. Makes me wonder if the people that regurgitate the notion that it's a trap actually have worked in places with unlimited.

Depends on the work culture certainly. Unlimited is, if course, not really unlimited. But whether (for a good performer) it's culturally 2 weeks or 6 weeks matters a lot. Even in an old-fashioned regular PTO company, I had people--though not my managers--incredulous that I would take 4 weeks of out-of-contact time.

More recently, someone I know who worked at a well-known unlimited PTO company told me that a newly hired head of corporate communications quit in short order because the CEO would actually go radio silence on vacation and they couldn't deal with that.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#318

Post by brotchie »

keiferski wrote: post #221

It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur, and will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business. 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, w…

Startup guy who’s now at FAANG. I’m technical technical technical (IC track). I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a staffed project, then onto the next new thing.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#319

Post by gregors »

orochimaaru wrote: post #189
unregistereddev wrote: post #176

Anecdote: I'm a Sr. Staff Engineer at a large employer in a LCOL city. Typical middle class houses cost $300k - $500k here, with luxury houses costing roughly $1m and small starter homes costing $200k (just using real estate as a rough proxy for cost of living). 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 roughl…

[flagged]

You actually get a tax break after $168,600. After that you no longer get taxed for Social Security.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

#320

Post by ryandrake »

alephnerd wrote: post #83
khalilravanna wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect information. Check out levels.fyi. The average stock grant for Meta E6 is well over $1M/4years. Just one example. Plenty of data on other companies offers there.

E6 is adjacent to Engineering Manager at Meta. 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…

> 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

I think a lot of HN commenters simply assume that every role at these companies is L6/L7+ and pays $1M/yr or whatever the meme is currently. Like it's the default for "Software Engineer" at these companies. In reality, these roles are exceedingly rare. You won't even often see them publicly posted, simply because there are just not many of them.

People see one example of this kind of compensation and declare, "See, it is possible to make this money at a FAANG." which is true, but in the same sense that it is technically possible to get struck by lightning. Your median FAANG employee is probably L4 and not making $1M/yr in compensation. They're probably not even making $150K, depending on their location.

Post reply on HN