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My Salary Progression in Tech

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Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#251

Post by aatma »

DVassallo wrote: post #27

My progression: 2008: Graduated with a BS in CS from University of London. I grew up in Europe. 2008: €30K - Joined a small company in Europe as their only programmer doing vehicle GPS tracking. 2009: €30K - Still there. 2010: €50K - Joined Amazon in Dublin, Ireland as an SDE-1 (entry level) in the AWS CloudWatch team. 2011: €75K - Still at Amazon, same team. 2012: $120K - Moved to Seattle with the same team. Promote…

I work in Canada government on Java ee for 3 years, worked on other legacy application on cobol etc earlier for 10 years. I have undergrad in CS. What technology can I learn to level up my salary with current market standards? I will appreciate any other advice to get up to those level.

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#253

Post by s_t_away »

minhaz23 wrote: post #220
s_t_away wrote: post #181

Adding mine, all at Google: 2008: Base $90K, Total $110K 2009: Base $110K, Total $170K 2010: Base $130K, Total $330K 2011: Base $200K, Total $590K 2012: Base $220K, Total $680K 2013: Base $220K, Total $830K 2014: Base $230K, Total $980K 2015: Base $240K, Total $990K 2016: Base $250K, Total $1.2M 2017: Base $250K, Total $1.4M 2018: Base $265K, Total $1.5M 2019: Base $280K (edited for formatting)

The total is after bonus only? Or..? Any advice for others? Isn't it notoriously difficult getting hired at Google? Do other non tech positions at Google pay as much? What about positions like QA?

Total includes bonus and equity (which makes up the bulk of it, especially in later years). So some of the increases are also just reflecting increases in GOOG from grant to vesting.

I'm a software engineer. My impression is that pay for PMs (product managers) is very similar, although I couldn't say for sure. Not sure about other positions. And for QA specifically, I believe a lot are hired through a vendor so I imagine it would be very different.

I don't know if I have particularly useful advice. I think honestly it's a mix of happening to be good at what I do, working hard, and being in the right place at the right time (both in terms of ending up Google and being on the teams/projects that I did which helped me rise quickly).

The only thing I would say is that I very much did not go in expecting this or with the idea of optimizing for it. When I joined at the end of 2007, Google was already post-IPO and it wasn't clear (to me at least) that there was "big bucks" to be made there. At that time, it seemed like going into finance or to a startup was the way to go to optimize for that, and I thought I was leaving a bunch on the table picking Google over those. I do think it helped working with the mindset of doing what I truly enjoyed instead of "doing it for the money".

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#254

Post by ChuckMcM »

DVassallo wrote: post #89
ChuckMcM wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering about that. I mean when I was at Sun they paid a market wage and had an employee stock purchase plan[1]. When I left Sun in '95 the stock I had left was worth about $1.2M, it had gone from the $20's to over a $100 and split twice (if you do the math that was $60,000 worth of stock to begin with, which had accumulated over about 6 years). I don't think of my wages being $1.2M so much as I happened to g…

But ~$500K is the market rate right now. Several people I know got that amount at Google, Facebook, and Oracle here in Seattle with ~10 years experience in cloud or AI/ML. Amazon’s stock increase has inflated the market rates because other companies had to pay so much in the last 3 years for people to leave Amazon. Obviously there’s no guarantee that this will last forever, but I was pretty confident I would have con…

I understand what you are saying, and when you sell stock that vests it is completely reasonable to count it as income as it shows up on your W2.

My point was that just prior to the dot com crash I had over $6M in "RSUs" (well restricted stock which was a better deal since the number can't be fudged but what ever) and when it "vested" it was worth less than $12K. It showed up on my W2 because I used an 83b election to vest it all up front (and get in on a lower tax rate when it unlocked) only to have it generate losses when it unlocked.

Where I was going was that there is 'base pay' which you are going to get if you show up every day and don't get fired, and there is 'variable pay' which can come in the format of annual bonuses and or vesting equity. The annual bonuses tend to be something of a beauty contest and so can be hard to predict, and the market can swing wildly (hopefully nobody with RSUs today has to experience a 99.9% drop in value that I did during the dot com crash but it can happen, you could have had Theranos RSUs for example).

The original author went out of their way to stick with just base pay and I understood their reasons for doing so as I largely agree with them on the lack of predictability of other remuneration options.

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#256

Post by fitech »

minhaz23 wrote: post #207
fitech wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my 2 cents...If you want to make significantly more, focus on the business problems you can solve, not the technology you know/use. I’m not an “X” developer. I’m a business person that happens to use code to add value. If this is outside your comfort zone, look for some basic books on business and internalize the fact that until you can tie your knowledge to dollars coming through the door, you likely won’t make…

Could you elaborate a bit more? It's hard to realize what problems a business faces without being involved intimately in the industry. How can one seek out these problems and begin to work on solutions? Would you mind sharing those posts?

I’m not saying this is something you can change tomorrow. It could be months, could be years. Really depends on how quickly you can learn the business you are involved in and where you are starting from. I don’t know you or your situation so this advice is extremely general. Focus on what the problems are your business/clients have which cost them money or find a way to answer a question like “if we do this it costs X and we make Y.” Make sure you drive those types of initiatives and get your name attached to them but that doesn’t always mean doing it alone.

The posts are pretty easily searchable and even if you don’t find the ones I’m thinking of, the process of searching and filtering on its own is important. One thing I had to learn the hard way is that, with a few rare exceptions, no one is going to be your teacher/mentor. Everyone is too busy with their own shit.

Ultimately, if you want to know more or make more, it comes down to finding ways to justify that to the people that can make that decision. Given you make around $85k/year you need to look at the people several years ahead of you in the career track, if one exists, at your company.

If your goal is to make more, you need to be aggressive. Invest in yourself in as many ways as you can. Learn more about software. Start by expanding beyond “web developer”. learn back-end programming, databases, etc. Talk to the people in your company that do sales, marketing, operations, HR. Learn as much as you can about your business or one you want to move into. Experience trumps everything. If you aren’t getting experience that makes you more valuable, you need to move on.

My last piece of advice is more of a warning. A lot of how much you make comes down to luck. Did the interviewer like you for the highly paid job? Did the team you are a part of get the credit for a major win for the company? Or other things that aren’t always within your control. The important thing is that you keep moving forward. Looking for opportunities and driving things to completion. Hard for me to not phrase this in terms of finance...you want to constantly be buying call options on yourself. So that new thing you learn/project you complete that gets your name out there? It is a call option on yourself. Most of those options expire worthless, but hopefully a few pay off big time.

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#257

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

thundergolfer wrote: post #96
tvphan wrote: post #45

I am Asian but was born and raised in Australia. I have a Bachelor of Science and I work as a web developer, e.g. Spring, ASP.NET, React, WordPress, Drupal, etc. 2013 - 23yo - $45K - First job - Magento developer building eCommerce websites for clients. 2014 - 24yo - $54K 2015 - 25yo - $70K - Second job - Magento / Shopify / WordPress developer, building eCommerce websites for clients. 2016 - 26yo - $75K 2017 - 27yo…

Do you work in Australia as well? If so, Ignoring US even, you've got 5 years exp and you're making $85k AUD. That's not high for Australia. Is that including Super? The larger tech companies in Melbourne and Sydney are giving $120k+ AUD total comp to grads .

> The larger tech companies in Melbourne and Sydney are giving $120k+ AUD total comp to grads

Which larger tech companies?

I'm self employed and have worked 100% remote for around 5 years, so am a bit out of touch. However, I have close friends in senior positions at major tech companies in Melbourne (REA, Xero etc.) and $120k for grads sadly does not align with what I've heard from them, closer to $70k (AUD) for a grad seems to be the norm.

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#258

Post by fitech »

minhaz23 wrote: post #223
fitech wrote: post #73

Created new account to share since my other could easily trace back to me... Maybe this isn’t super relevant since this is mostly about tech but I’ve found my technology skills are what contribute to give me a huge advantage, even in finance. All figures in USD. All finance jobs are in research. 23: 50k - tech consulting business 23: 90k - same. Relocate to NYC 24: 110k - negotiated at consulting company 24: 160k = 1…

Could you elaborate or expand on the business? This is your business or you're just someone that got in at the beginning? Like a startup or a division of the company, you were originally at?

I can’t answer your question without giving away more information than I’m comfortable with.

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#259

Post by golemiprague »

"white people especially need too..." No, black people need to stop complaining about everything, if this guy or whatever it is was worth enough to his company he would get the money he deserve. Nobody owe any information to anyone, and I will ignore your preferred pronouns.

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#260

Post by e1g »

Bahamut wrote: post #130

I have no qualms letting people know my comp so they know that is possible, and helped many developers in my short 6 year career get better jobs/get life changing comp. Caveat to my numbers - I am an asian male math PhD dropout from a top 15 graduate program who had hardly coded prior to his first developer job. I also have substantial open source contributions to major libraries, starting from my first developer job…

How are you managing to get laid off so much and so often :)
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