181–190 of 418 posts
250k a year in 5 years at a big corporation, really? Yea if you're lucky to work on a project/team higher-ups care about and are also willing to bust your ass working long hours to meet insane deadlines. Also, you better be someone who is excellent at communication and charismatic if you want to get invited to the table of interesting work. There are a lot of brilliant hyper-competitive people who work at these big c…
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Do you have sources for this information? Is 200k median salary, or an outlier for the top senior engineer there?
The top senior engineer at Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn is not making $200k. More than 10 years ago, my in-the-door offer as one member of a team of 5-6 senior developers at an east coast tech firm was higher than $200k.
Fair point. The Top engineer at each of those companies is making more than $200k.
Edited for clarity.
250k a year in 5 years at a big corporation, really? Yea if you're lucky to work on a project/team higher-ups care about and are also willing to bust your ass working long hours to meet insane deadlines. Also, you better be someone who is excellent at communication and charismatic if you want to get invited to the table of interesting work. There are a lot of brilliant hyper-competitive people who work at these big c…
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This doesn't undermine the author's point. As another commenter said, people are really underestimating the likelihood of earning a $250k salary at a large company. It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit senior level and live in a metropolitan area. The author's core point is that you are much more likely to become a senior engineer at a large company (and thus earn ~$250k in salary)…
>"senior" is the last level that everyone is expected to hit, and at which you are "allowed" to not seek further promotions. I was under the impression that Senior is mid-level? I thought the ladder went, Junior/Associate, (Just) Software Engineer, Senior (some places have Senior I/II), then Principal, and finally (Optional for really big companies with R&D like Cisco/Juniper/United Technologies), Fellow or Distingui…
You're right that "Senior" is still mid-level, but the author is being conservative.
The reality at a healthy, profitable company is something like this: $250k being the "total comp" for someone is a T5 seems right to me, even adjusting for risk. A T5 at Google, Facebook, or Apple is likely earning much more than this as their stock from 4 years ago is vesting at a much higher price than it was granted at.
150k guaranteed comp, 25k bonus, 75k vesting equity is low for the companies w/ equity run-ups in the past several years, in my opinion. Also worth noting -- the bonus is basically guaranteed. It can be much higher if you get very good performance ratings.
The author also didn't include 401k matching (about 8.5k there), free offsites to go skiing or go to Vegas (w/ team trips to Hawaii not unheard of for high profile, long-term projects), generous medical/dental/vision benefits, free food, free gyms, matching charitable donations...
And IDK if it's just my team, I don't see people working extremely long hours.
You're totally right that you're at the mercy of stock prices in some regard -- but it works in two directions. Both FB and GOOG have gone up something like 150% in the past 5 years. So if someone got an initial stock grant of 200k vesting over 4 years, last year that 50k at vest time was more like 100k. Meanwhile they've gotten subsequent equity refresh grants -- the actual equity comp might be more like 200k, not 75k.
So I've been at this 9 years and I'm not making six figures. Fuck. I don't even understand where I went wrong. Part of me can't believe the article at all. His comment about cost of living was kind of an outright dismissal, very odd? I don't think Google will let me work from Milwaukee. Where is the information on travel, quality of life (owning a house?), etc?
> But the total comp for “a good hacker” is $250k+/yr, not even counting perks like free food and having really solid insurance
Maybe that's anecdotally true for the big companies in a small high demand area of the country (really just the bay) but not so most everywhere else. Probably why Paul Graham used a figure less than 1/2 that.
With that figure exaggerated, I'm not sure I can take any other points made here seriously...
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200k for sr in the valley is not weird. Remember: it's not year 5 of your career . It's year 5 of your tenure at one company . It's a little unusual for people to stay longer than 4 years at most companies.
Then there is a selection bias: only those who manage to make it to the 200k level stay long enough, the others (the large majority) understand after a few years that their present company is not gonna promote them to that level and try to find greener pastures.
I don't think you can go into a company as large as Google and expect your salary to double in five years. HR will have set limits to how much of a raise you can get in any given year and even with promotions you would be very unlikely to see that kind of bump. I also don't think the middling programmers he mentions would hit the 250k year mark. Orthogonal to the point of the article, but the only time you can really…
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If you think you're that good at picking financially successful startups, why not invest just money rather than time AND money?
Because you're not legally able to do so unless you're an accredited investor?