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Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

danluu.com

211–220 of 418 posts

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The top senior engineer at Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn is not making $200k. Fair point. The Top engineer at each of those companies is making more than $200k. Edited for clarity.

What he meant is that they are making far more than $200k, which makes his next sentence illustrative as an example.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#212
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's really no corresponding data for many other markets . Facebook and Google don't really do Work From Home and don't have a lot of remote locations for development depending on where you are. (Amazon is another example). I don't know what they offer datacenter staff, but in many areas, recruiters are pretty adamant about people moving. From my experience, say, the North Carolina scene, you're lucky if you…

> Facebook and Google don't really do Work From Home and don't have a lot of remote locations for development depending on where they are. I don't know what they offer datacenter staff, but in many areas, that's all they have for "not CA". This is just untrue. I haven't looked closely at Facebook recently (beyond watching the [office in Seattle]( http://www.geekwire.com/2015/sneak-peek-facebook-plans-epic-... ) grow…

It's completely accurate - hence the location part. If you sought to add clarification, the first sentence was unneccessary. Let's confine this to "they won't hire in most of the Continental United States". Even for exceptional candidates, remote is also completely out of the question for them. That's obviously their right and I don't hold them against them. (But it's worth contrasting with someone like Red Hat, who will hire someone from anywhere if they are awesome).

I have had lots of experience with Google and Amazon recruiters where CA was the only viable option. Google also tended to have a bad habit of offering SRE positions for datacenters in the sticks, but that was not a development-flavored SRE thing in the least. They pretty much close the door on you if you don't want to move and are dropping the ball on some pretty awesome development centers IMHO.

Facebook is often avoided by some very sharp kernel (and other) folks, because they greatly insist on a boot camp and can't guarantee what department you are going to work for. They lost some brilliant folks as a result. I wouldn't work for them for that reason, as I think the team and the manager are the most important parts of the hiring decision.

Yes, Google has other offices, but they are not hiring people in some pretty darn major development regions. There is allegeldy an office in Chapel Hill for instance, but it seems to be on the edge of being decomissioned and no recruiter will tell you anything about it.

So, yeah, it's not quite like you can just work anywhere.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best approximation of an answer to that question I can find is "virtually every large non-startup tech company in the valley that isn't Cisco".

If that's the case, shouldn't there be evidence (other than anecdotal comments via HN) to support that? Not that it's so far fetched that big Valley firms are paying over $200k base salary, but if it was so prevalent, I'd expect to see more concrete evidence to support that.

Literally, ask any friend working as SWE in any of those companies - they will confirm numbers. You are pretty much guaranteed to make that money in 5 years if you get promoted with average velocity.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$250k Total comp. That's salary, bonus, equity, and benefits.

When I use total comp, I exclude non-cash benefits, and I think that's the normal use of the phrase. Health care, vision, dental, long-term disability, etc are all excluded.

I would include 401(k) or HSA matching under benefits (cash equivalent).

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#216
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck finding a entry-level job, any entry level job in Spain that pays you more than 900€ per month in Spain, Italy, Portugal... even France and maybe, Germany (although I have less information there). From what I see, you might get 2-2.5K€ per month in the rest of Europe. Ireland and UK are, AFAIK, where the highest salaries in IT are and even there you are going to get 2-3K€ per month at most. Most lawyers I k…

I did quite a lot of research on salaries in the London area 2 years ago. Starting wage for a programmer out of school was around 3-3.5K€ per month. Some places paid up to 4K per month (90th percentile). 25th% percentile was 2.5K€ per month. I have heard that starting wages have gone up a bit in the last few years. Your numbers for the UK are more typical outside of London, though. Of course nothing like Bay area sal…

Been working in London for a good 8 years. Started at £75k, and earning over £125k base now + fairly significant bonus (50 - 100%). Fintech mainly, but also worked at a tech company. throwaway for obvious reasons.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this only in Silicon Valley? Or are these pay scales appropriate for satellite offices as well? For example: could you hit $250k working for Google in Pittsburgh?

You wouldn't be far off the GBP equivalent working for an investment bank in London as a VP developer.

Agreed, the post is pretty similar to my experience in London. Within 5 years I hit a total comp of over $250k USD.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#220
post #199

> 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

Yes, my comment (prior to deletion) said and rand(n), depending on implementation, may explicitly exclude n. I looked it up for C/C++ first, but it was slightly confusing, and there are articles that go into quite a bit of depth about how rand() can be misleading. perldoc was my next stop, as I was almost positive that perl's rand explicitly excluded the upper bound (and it does).

My recollection of 100-sided dice was that it was often printed as "00", so you could take it as either 0 or 100, depending on your need.

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