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Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

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Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#241

Post by TulliusCicero »

syedkarim wrote: post #156
tlb wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find this in many places around the Bay Area outside SF. I have 5 acres and keep chickens in Woodside, and it's 15-20 minutes drive to several big tech companies in Palo Alto and Redwood City. Some people keep horses here.

5 acres that is 15 minutes from Palo Alto/Mountain View? How much does that cost?

Yeah seriously. Just the land for a regular house lot can easily be over a million dollars in the area, and 1 acre can hold like six of those. So five acres...like thirty million dollars? Unless there's some weird situation I've never heard of.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#242

Post by afthonos »

meritt wrote: post #119
stale2002 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I mean.... so what? Why should I, as an engineer, care if some companies are suffering under the "unfairness" of high salaries? > which has a side effect of creating an oligopoly on talent It doesn't really make sense to use the work oligopoly, which has certain negative connot…

> I mean.... so what? Why should I, as an engineer, care You shouldn't, you should always maximize your income. That wasn't my point. My point was the guy shouldn't interview at a 5-person bootstrapped startup and act bewildered when they cannot offer Facebook level comp packages. > oligopoly It's absolutely an oligopoly. There are a small number of firms who possess the capital to compete on salary and that creates…

I think the technical term would be “oligopsony”.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#243

Post by TulliusCicero »

Pandabob wrote: post #189
gamesbrainiac wrote: post #100

Looks like us over here in Europe are getting shafted. Even if you adjust for living expenses, European engineers are grossly underpaid.

I might be wrong here, but I think the biggest reason for this is that Europe hasn't really produced a tech company in the past ~25 years, with revenues (and profits) amounting to anything close to those of the FAANGs. OTOH, there is the separate issue of FAANGs not compensating their European workers as well as they do the ones working in the US.

> OTOH, there is the separate issue of FAANGs not compensating their European workers as well as they do the ones working in the US.

They don't, but they do compensate them similarly relative to the local average pay. They pay what they need to to get the talent they want.

I work at Google Munich, the pay here is much higher than a regular company in Munich, similarly to how Google pays much more than a regular company in the US. In some ways the difference is even more striking here, because there are few peer companies here that pay similarly to Google (there's a Lyft office, and a small number of Amazon devs, that's about it AFAIK), whereas in major tech hubs in the US you usually also have Facebook and Apple and Amazon and Microsoft and Netflix and various others that are similar or close.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#244

Post by TulliusCicero »

cletus wrote: post #171

As a FAANG engineer going on 9 years now, let me address the usual rebuttals: - There is a selection bias. Nope, this is pretty much accurate. - These aren't real. Yes, yes they are. - Self-reporters are lying. Maybe some do but these numbers are pretty accurate. If anything, I question Lyft and Airbnb as such outliers. I wonder if this factored in Lyft's post-IPO stock performance and makes unrealistic valuations of…

> - Some FAANGs have a 1 year cliff. Some do not (eg Google, FB).

?? I joined Google in 2014 and had a 1 year cliff. Have they removed it now?

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#245

Post by cletus »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #244
cletus wrote: post #171

As a FAANG engineer going on 9 years now, let me address the usual rebuttals: - There is a selection bias. Nope, this is pretty much accurate. - These aren't real. Yes, yes they are. - Self-reporters are lying. Maybe some do but these numbers are pretty accurate. If anything, I question Lyft and Airbnb as such outliers. I wonder if this factored in Lyft's post-IPO stock performance and makes unrealistic valuations of…

> - Some FAANGs have a 1 year cliff. Some do not (eg Google, FB). ?? I joined Google in 2014 and had a 1 year cliff. Have they removed it now?

Yes. As of -2 years ago.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#246

Post by killjoywashere »

cletus wrote: post #238
throwaway713 wrote: post #236

Now imagine having one of these incomes but having a spouse who is hellbent on moving back to the southeastern U.S. in a year. It’s driving me nuts; I can’t find any company in the south that pays anywhere near my current compensation, and a rough calculation indicates that leaving FANG will bump my retirement age from 38 to 65 (never mind the amazing health insurance I’ll be giving up too). It’s like throwing a winn…

Surely cheaper housing, education and other costs would compensate for a locally lower income? I don’t know where in the southeast you’re talking snot but I imagine it’s 50-80% cheaper for housing?

Here's the central issue with the coast: saving 10% of $350k anywhere is a lot easier than saving 20% of $175k in a dirt-poor county in .

Partially, this has to do with the desire to retain your absolute peer tier: if your neighbors have PhDs in Alameda, then you want to live with the PhDs in New Orleans. And the Sliver by the River is still expensive. Same holds in Augusta, Jacksonville, wherever.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#247

Post by marvin »

TrackerFF wrote: post #225
boulos wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say more about your home? Perhaps rough size and country? 15k is really cheap even if you bought it a while ago. I assume you’re in Europe somewhere from your comment, but even Bulgaria which is fairly cheap isn’t that cheap. For example, housing outside the center of town in Sofia is about 1000 euros per square meter [1] (for sq ft folks, multiply sq meters by 10 roughly). Varna is a bit cheaper at 700 which…

Northern Norway, but there's a ton of variance in prices here. You can easily move tens to hundreds of thousands in one city, so to find the cheapest you really need to look hard. I found a relatively old and run-down place, but which was easy to fix. With that said, I have a very nice salary - relatively speaking - but as mentioned, it's around half of what jr. Engineers make in SW. I'm lucky because my background f…

Software in Norway and saving $80k per year? In government, no less? That means post tax you're making in the ballpark of $150k, or maybe a bit less if your expenses are very low? Very good number for the location regardless.

I'm able to save $20k per year in Norway (south) and consider that great, relatively speaking. Remote work? I didn't think the public sector jobs paid this well.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#248

Post by villahousut »

tempestn wrote: post #59
typest wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You read through all the advice in these blogs [1][2]. Seriously. If you are invested in low cost index funds, most assume you can safely withdraw 4% a year and not deplete your principal. If you're retiring at 35, you might want a greater safety margin, so let's say 3%. That gives you 60K a year. How do you retire on 60K a year? Obviously take what I'm saying with a grain of salt as I'm a relatively young person and…

Good advice. Just one nitpick: The 4% rule, which states you can as a rule of thumb safely withdraw 4% of the starting capital per year in real dollars (IE increase it each year to account for inflation), is intended for a standard retirement period (65+) and does expect the principal to decrease. There's more debate as to what would be a safe withdrawal rate over the long term without depleting principal, but I expe…

That's a bit incorrect. Returns from a typical investment portfolio have been over 4% for the last 10-20 years, so that's the amount you can withdraw without depleting any principal. If you're looking to consume your whole principal by the time you die you can go way ahead of 4%, easily double that.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#249

Post by villahousut »

rhexs wrote: post #49
Swizec wrote: 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.

That's assuming you want to leave the whole 2 million principal in your will to your children. I don't see why - if you want to retire, you can consume the whole principal while you live.

Re: Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level

#250

Post by dub »

slg wrote: post #11

I have never worked in the valley, so the answer to this question might be obvious to the people working there. What happens to all the experienced engineers? According to this, the Senior, Staff, or Principal titles are generally for people with 5+ year experience? Those roles make up 30%, 10%, and 3% of companies respectively. That leaves 57% of engineers in positions listed are usually for people with 0-5 years ex…

Often times experienced engineers eventually move to much smaller companies that aren't as likely to appear on levels.fyi

They might get tired of the politics at their company, or they just want to try something new, or founding/joining a smaller company might be the easiest way for them to continue to get promoted

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