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Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

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Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#191

Post by mkagenius »

hiddencost wrote: post #138
jarjoura wrote: post #96

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…

I got a $150k starting offer from one of those companies. A friend got raised to $200k after two years at one of them. Another started at $170k with a masters in stats. Admittedly this is all anecdotal. But these numbers don't strike me as crazy. My brother got a starting salary of $80k at a startup that went on to IPO in the single digit billions (he joined after the series A). After he sold his options, he earned a…

> average of $130k / yr at that company.

Its more about the kind of experience or skills you want to gain. Money comparison in my opinion can't be head to head, some make millions while some make 0 at startups.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#192

Post by mbesto »

balls187 wrote: post #149
didip wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can come up with a few on top of my head: Netflix, Apple, Google

Do you have sources for this information? Is 200k median salary, or an outlier for the top senior engineer there?

Source:

http://data.jobsintech.io/companies/netflix-inc/2015

http://data.jobsintech.io/companies/google-inc/2015?utf8=%E2...

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#193

Post by joeblau »

georgefrick wrote: post #50

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?

I wouldn't worry too much about that. Cost of living is adjusted and it seems like the numbers in this calculation are based on the Bay Area which has one of the highest costs of living in the U.S. When you factor in taxes, cost of living, transportation and everything else, you may be just as good or even better off than someone in SF making $150k.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#194

Post by School-Cotton »

jarjoura wrote: post #96

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…

I worked at a big corporation and changed jobs after 2 years. Day one at the new big corporation I was making ~$200k (that's total compensation; so bonus, salary, and stock that will vest this year). I think $250 is very doable.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#195

Post by steven777400 »

georgefrick wrote: post #50

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?

I wouldn't claim to know anything specific about your situation, but I'll say that I'm in the same boat (albeit by intention). In order to break six figures, you'll probably need to work for a tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, etc) and live in the appropriate metropolitan area. If you're not a top productive developer, you'll probably be expected to put in 50+ hours a week. These things all incur a cost to you, the employee, that is partially compensated by the increased salary and benefits.

For example, I currently make about $90k. I interviewed at Microsoft in Redmond and was offered $110k base. Let's call it $130k with bonus. I declined the offer. Why?

I interviewed for a senior position and was told "we don't think you're qualified for a senior position, would you like a junior position"? This is not a problem, except that it communicates to me that expectations will be high for improvement. Additionally, during the interviews, I inquired, "Does the team generally work 40-hours a week?" And they said with a disdainful tone, "Well, we do have one person that works 40-hours a week." That tells me that I'll have to work my butt off for 50+ hours a week. Additionally, moving from the smaller town I live in to Redmond/Bellevue area will incur a noticeable increase in cost of living (specifically rent/mortgage).

So, I go from a pro-rata rate of ~$43/hour to ~$50/hour (a 16% raise, nice but not amazing) but then I have to pay for it with substantially higher cost of living and substantially more stressful workload. As an aside, this was when stack ranking was still a thing, and my questioning of the team during the interview indicated that it was a internally competitive team, which as a personal thing is disqualifying for me.

So if you want a six figure developer position, create a GitHub profile and build some ad-hoc demonstration apps using some interesting modern tools. But just be aware that, if you're not a "top developer" or "rock star", then six figures often comes with a considerable cost.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#196

Post by sudhirj »

gnarbarian wrote: post #183
jarjoura wrote: post #96

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…

I'm a senior programmer at a smallish company (30 programmers around 150 people total) where I've been for 5 years and I make 60k. Funny part is I bill out at 140 per hour and am 95% billable.

Service companies are always a bit of a problem. Your value is effectively capped by your hourly rate minus overheads. And that's in the highest levels. At all the lower levels you're paying the salaries of the higher ups and non billable folks.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#197

Post by [deleted] »

Cyberdog wrote: post #135
dsacco wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

> It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit senior level and live in a metropolitan area. If, if, if, if. Just by numbers, most devs don't meet these criteria. And even in the periods of time which I personally have, I still was not making anywhere near this kind of money. These numbers are inflated and out of reach to the vast majority of developers in the workplace today, full stop.

[deleted]

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#199

Post by nkurz »

kbenson wrote: post #162

> Perceptive readers will note that 100 does not actually show up on a d100 or rand(100). I was just perceptive enough to notice, that, copy the entire table into a comment and pontificate on it, then notice that I missed the sentence in question immediately after commenting, and delete it 3 seconds after posting it. :/

But is the "perceptive reader" actually correct?

There are many pictures online of d100 dice clearly showing a '100': http://www.amazon.com/Role-Playing-Dice-Spherical-ZOCCHIHEDR...

And while the argument for rand() starting at 0 is true for Perl, even this is language dependent. More frequently, rand() doesn't even take an argument: http://linux.die.net/man/3/rand

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