Are these numbers just salary or total compensation?
Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
71–80 of 614 posts
Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
#72I wish they had one for the product managers too. I remember their website had that data as well.
There’s 1 PM for every 20+ engineers, so it’s harder to gather a representative sample.
Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
#73I was a manager at one of these companies and my L5s were making half of what this thing says. Don't trust everything you read on the internet.
Can you name the company? These numbers are in line with what I've seen from peers for new offers.
Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is not necessarily a catch. Pay is not based on cost of living -- it's set by market rates, and the market rate for software engineers in these areas who can do the jobs required at these companies is high. All these companies operate at an immense scale where an engineer, through what is often a simple change, can add significant value to the company. So, yes. For now, these companies are giving college grads…
A senior position in the doc will probably get you ~2M in savings by 35. How do you retire with that?
400k- taxes = 270k for joined filing
Monthly expenses = 3k mortgage+ 500 property taxes + 2k daycare for one child(or 529) + 1.5k for food and other = 84k
Without compounding interest you need 10 years to get 2m, and these salaries are for 5+ or more years of experience. (And you need down payment, etc.).
Living in those areas is expensive.
If you are making 500k, that's a different story :-)
Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
#75There is absolutely no way IC2 makes $175k at Oracle. LOL. I doubt you can even find an IC2, period. They hire everyone in at IC3 and above, and everyones paid like shit.
The only exception I can think of was the people brought in to work on the 'next gen' cloud stuff who were poached from Amazon. They were all 'senior' and 'principal' engineers though.
Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
#76It makes me feel bad how many people see these figures and immediately start trying to find ways to rationalize why they must be overstated. Aside from some of these companies not being public (so those RSUs are not very liquid) or backloading vesting, they’re pretty accurate IME.
The main thing I would point out is that the years of experience guideline is a bit optimistic. Many engineers get downleveled moving into top paying companies (so someone with 9 years of experience might be level 2) and usually either level 2 or level 3 is a terminal level, meaning it’s both ok to stay at that level for a long time and that promotions get harder.
Also, while these figures don’t (or shouldn’t) include signing bonus/relo, nor health insurance, free food, and other benefits, it should be noted that most of these are in the Bay Area or similarly expensive areas. So a lot of your money goes to housing (with housing close to work large enough for a family being super expensive), and state taxes are a bit steep.
Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
#77If this is for real, _everyone_ I know is getting completely screwed. I have a hard time believing any of these numbers. If I earned any of these amounts for 2-3 years, I could live off the interest for the rest of my life.
These are not salaries. It’s total comp. My total comp. calculating pension and benefits in the Great White North is similar, and that’s govt. to boot. Total comp is always a highly misleading number.
This is total comp outside pension/benefits. So solely salary + bonus + RSU. Only income earned directly not benefits.
Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
#78What I'm taking away from this is that many (most) companies are grossly underpaying their engineers. I've been through the SF/NYC Senior SWE interviewing gauntlet twice in the past three years, and received 10+ offers at half this rate. Levels claims to be checking offer letters, which is great IMO. It's really hard for people to know they're being undervalued when the employers are low-balling and the self-reporter…
Levels.fyi seems to be pretty accurate in my experience, though there may be selection bias as there are more offers at the top of band than bottom submitted.
Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
#79I was a manager at one of these companies and my L5s were making half of what this thing says. Don't trust everything you read on the internet.
Maybe you’re thinking of salary and not TC, or that was a few years ago
Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level
#80What I'm taking away from this is that many (most) companies are grossly underpaying their engineers. I've been through the SF/NYC Senior SWE interviewing gauntlet twice in the past three years, and received 10+ offers at half this rate. Levels claims to be checking offer letters, which is great IMO. It's really hard for people to know they're being undervalued when the employers are low-balling and the self-reporter…
> many (most) companies are grossly underpaying their engineers.
No, that's simply unfair to the companies who don't have billions of dollars in free cash flow or effectively infinite amounts of VC money.
The top firms have gotten themselves into an insane bidding war which has a side effect of creating an oligopoly on talent, as it's simply unrealistic to impossible for many firms to compete. Not to mention they apparently pay many people these sort of salaries to do basically nothing [1]: they've decided it's better to simply retain talent than risk them going to a competitor, regardless if they provide any value or not.
That all said, as an employee in whole debacle, you should simply focus your interviews on firms willing to pay these levels and maximize your income while you can.