Compare career levels across companies • Hacker News Board

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#141

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 2:00 AM UTC

JimboOmega wrote: post #109

seattleeng wrote: post #10

Huge fan of this site, for two reasons: - It lets “outsiders” to the tech scene understand salary and levels at big companies. If you went to MIT you probably already have frat brothers/sorority sisters or an alumni network that consists of senior engineers at these big companies that know the promotion and compensation schemes well. But if you were an equally smart student who went to a non target school, many of th…

There are two problems with these: 1) If you aren't at one of these companies, it's not a fair comparison. It's really difficult to find a pre-IPO company who is going to compensate you like these, if for no other reason than that options are just not something you can easily stick a dollar value on. 2) It's kind of depressing. It's very easy to find people at similar experience levels as you making FAR more money (p…

[deleted]

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#142

Post by mawburn » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 2:01 AM UTC

This is surprisingly not as insane as I expected. I was expecting to feel underpaid in comparison and they do make a bit more at the same level, but this actually makes me feel better.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#143

Post by arminiusreturns » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 2:03 AM UTC

Why are sysadmins so ignored in things like this?

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#144

Post by brilee » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 2:03 AM UTC

Benjammer wrote: post #106

josh2600 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, there are different levels for managers and engineers. An L7 engineer is a seriously dope engineer (like the kind of person you'd want to found a hard technical company with; think low-level problems like DMA). An L7 manager maps to a senior engineering manager. I have talked to a couple L9 engineers and they're monstrous. L9 managers are directors or VPs.

Can you give an example of a project an L9 engineer would work on?

Invent TensorFlow. Design a new language (Go). Invent new storage formats (Capacitor)

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#145

Post by mrep » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 2:03 AM UTC

domlebo70 wrote: post #140

What is it like working at Google? I work at a startup, and these numbers are insanity to me. I have 10 years experience in mostly Haskell & FP (and that's what I enjoy doing). What would I do with my skills at one of the bigger tech companies?

Move protos around [0] :/

[0]: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#146

Post by eeks » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 2:15 AM UTC

The IBM ranks are inaccurate. Fellows are not above DEs. Both are the highest ranks indeed, but of two different tracks. DE is the highest rank of the engineering track, while Fellow is the highest rank of the research track. Fellowship have also be granted to non-research people over the past 20 years, diluting the merit of the title IMHO. Examples of fellows are: John Backus, Gene Amdahl, Ken Iverson, Benoit Mandelbrot, etc.

Both levels may reside in different pay bands, but they are both at the executive level. And DEs cannot become fellows, and vice versa (some exceptions to the rule may have existed).

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#147

Post by selfselfself » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 2:16 AM UTC

amazon_tossaway wrote: post #119

Amazonian here. Can anyone else from Amazon speak to whether you think these numbers look accurate? I'm sitting here in almost disbelief at how little I apparently make at AMZN. I don't think I have anyone to ask that would know and would be willing to give any kind of answer. I've been fairly content at Amazon. I've done good work, and have been a resource to others on my team. But if these numbers are right, I don'…

There could be issues around how to interpret this data, especially around stock. Those with a few years of experience are probably reporting a significant vested stock as part of the comp. Alternatively, there could also be cases where folks added the whole stock options that they were granted, even if they've not vested. The package that I got at Amazon as a fresh grad school graduate more than 5 years ago would've been $360K if I added everything... but that was not my ANNUAL comp. When I talk to folks at Amazon, they typically don't report the annual number, which is lower.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#148

Post by selfselfself » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 2:18 AM UTC

Zaheer wrote: post #80

Kaveren wrote: post #5

With anonymous submissions on sites like these (see also: Glassdoor), I wonder if there's any sabotage going on where companies submit fraudulent information about competitors. Isn't it a potential downside to this open approach without any verification?

We've had several HR reps from companies reach out to us actually thanking us for the data we have. There are consulting companies that gather salary data today and resell it to anonymously to other companies so that they know what they're competing with. We haven't seen many bad actors yet but that is something we'll have to look out for as we grow! Not sure honestly how we'll solve it just yet as we don't verify th…

How did you determine that you haven't seen many bad actors / reporting bias?

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#149

Post by ttt111222333 » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 2:18 AM UTC

robynsmith wrote: post #51

This makes salaries and compensation in Toronto seem outrageously low. Wow. Maybe I should be moving? Crazy. (Sadly, family is here, so moving is unlikely)

Would be nice if people from Toronto would enter more data points for the more popular startups I.e. shopify, instacart, unata, ritual, league, top hat, wealthsimple, freshbooks, pivotal, ada, etc

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#150

Post by laurencerowe » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 2:20 AM UTC

slivym wrote: post #7

Here's a slightly related open question: Are Engineers in the US just much richer than in the UK? For perspective, I started my career with an MEng in Electronic and Electrical Engineering as a Hardware Design Engineer at £35k (I out-earned most of my fellow graduates). It seems like these salaries are just comically disjointed from my entire experience of life. Can anyone here speak to the differences? Everything I'…

I moved from the UK to the US six years ago. The short answer is yes, but the nuances are interesting.

The US has higher income variance, if you're on the 90th percentile of the income distribution you're going to be earning a higher multiple of the median than in the UK (about 2.6 in US vs 2.0 in UK, source as below.)

Software engineers in the US are also higher up the income distribution than in the UK. In the UK in 2017, the [1] median salary for full time 'Programmers and software development professionals' was £41,314 vs £28,759 for full time employees. In the US [2] it was $97,770 for full time 'Software Developers and Programmers' vs $37,690 for full time employees. This puts UK software developers just above the 75th percentile and US software developers just above the 90th percentile.

Then there's another step up when looking at big Silicon Valley tech companies, particularly for senior engineer roles and especially the post-senior engineer roles which don't really exist outside of the the big tech companies.

Another big difference is that the GBP has depreciated significantly against the USD over the past 10 years. It went over 2.0 in 2007 and is now down to 1.3. Working at a big tech company in Silicon Valley now feels a little like working for a bank in London before the 2008 crash.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm