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Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

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Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#101

$175,000 at Oracle for an entry-level engineer? I mean... just... wow. You could retire at 35 and not have to work for the rest of your life. How hard is it to get these jobs?

Not that hard depending on your natural cognitive ability. Just grind leetcode questions. For higher level interviews, also study up on systems design questions.

If they get far more applicants than they hire, it isn't possible for the solution to be something anyone can do.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#102

I 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.

Might be the team or sub-org you were in. This data is also for fresh offers in 2019; most FAANG engineers who started prior to 2019 are earning less to much less than listed.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#103
post #12

I get Airbnb and Stripe being up there for entry-level engineers, those companies are almost printing money. But Lyft, haemorrhaging money, is top of the list, and Oracle - the company no-one in the Bay Area or on HN seems to work for, and everyone seems to hate - is 5th? Are there legions of quietly-well-paid Oracle engineers out there just keeping their heads down and getting on with the job? Why isn't Oracle in th…

At some point Oracle Cloud (OCI) started poaching engineers from Amazon by paying ungodly money, so much so that there was a running meme on Blind about this.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#104
post #75

There 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.

A friend of mine was just hired as an IC2 at Oracle at 175k. He is on cloud stuff in Seattle, but by no means a senior or principal engineer -- only 1 year of experience.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that hard depending on your natural cognitive ability. Just grind leetcode questions. For higher level interviews, also study up on systems design questions.

I think that's underselling things. These companies have very low admit rates, and leetcode is pretty tedious. That said though, divide the compensation difference by 200 hours of studying and it probably works out to a worthy investment.

[deleted]

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#106
post #6

I do the job of a senior engineer and yet am paid a bit less than what's listed for an entry level engineer. And I live an incredibly comfy life. What's the catch? Are these for more than 40 hours a week? Is silicon valley really that expensive? Or are they literally giving college grads enough money to retire by 35?

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…

Pay is partly based on cost of living, and cost of living helps to set the market rates.

You'd have to pay me 10 times more than I get now, with a huge hiring bonus, to make me move to San Francisco. I'm not alone in this thinking. This is why the market rate is high.

Part of that is sort of circular, due to the bidding war for housing. Part is that some people just hate the political insanity. Part is that people have family connections elsewhere and they have hobbies that are incompatible with San Francisco.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#107
post #6

Earlier 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…

Interesting, thanks. Now I wonder how many of these jobs are 100% work from home. I'm not sure a salary doubling could take me away from my family and into commuting an hour a day. But I mean, if they're going to pay me to engineer in my pyjamas, sure! =)

None of them are 100% work from home. Work from home pays work-from-home market rates, not high end silicon valley rates. There will be some, but they will have negotiated a switch from office work to remote work after a few years, or have hard to source specialist skills.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#108
post #33
post #5

If 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.

If you added benefits to these, it would likely be an additional 50K a year (healthcare, 401k match, other incidentals).

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#109
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 app…

>> 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. I don't think Google is purposely ok with some of their employees doing basically nothing. I've heard the theory that companies pay for some top talent who don't generate value just t…

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2920903/google-really-k...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-en...

[3] https://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley-TV-series-Do-low-perfor...

[4] https://money.cnn.com/2007/01/05/magazines/fortune/Search_an...

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#110
post #49
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the 5% drawdown rule, 2M in savings is enough to have a 100k/year income in perpetuity without adding to savings. Idea being that average market returns are 7%. So if you use 5% per year, you will never run out.

5% is not a safe withdrawal rate for "in perpetuity". 3% is much more realistic if you want to be conservative.

Yes it's a rule of thumb not the law of thermodynamics. Run your numbers with your own parameters for details.
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