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Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

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Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#151

Post by lupire »

ewb wrote: post #105
bradlys wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The competition for these roles is extremely intense. Even doing well isn't sufficient in pandemic times. The baseline of prepping every night + weekend for 3+ months still isn't enough to guarantee you'll get in. Get unlucky and join an org like Ads at FB and you're gonna be miserable AF. Add in the general huge amount of luck that is involved with what interviewer you get, the hiring environment going on, and it's…

Prepping for 3+ months is definitely not the baseline. I'd really need some convincing that you're getting any real incremental benefit past a week of interview prep. There's not that much ground to really cover and at some point you're just solving different versions of the same problems over and over again.

It just depends on how close you are to college education and how much you've learned interviewing over time.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#152

Post by lupire »

lhorie wrote: post #87
fwiwm2c wrote: post #70

These numbers are ridiculously low. Here is what a typical FAANG setup pays you in the bay area (Source: I have worked in a couple of them): IC5 Eng (~5 yrs exp): $350k/yr all in (cash+stock+bonus) IC6 Eng (~9 yrs exp): $550k/yr all in IC7 Eng (~12 yrs exp and you are exceptional): $800k/yr As you go from IC5 to IC7, your stock and bonus goes up (as expected). A typical IC7 will earn around $250k in cash, ~25% bonus…

No, they are expensive. Consider average software eng pay for Duolingo (Pittsburgh) is ~180k/yr total comp, but houses there go for like $120k. IC7 is like top 5-10%. Also, CA income taxes are high.

IC7 is top 2-5%

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#153

Post by lupire »

_2d30 wrote: post #134
savanaly wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly possible, could you elaborate? To clear, I haven't read that wikipedia article recently, or maybe ever. I'm going off of what my understanding is of Ricardian rent from wherever I learned it-- I don't remember maybe an economics class, maybe a blog.

Ricardo is never referring to land in the use of housing, he's referring to land in the use of production. EDIT to expand given downvotes on prior post: You claim: > ...all the bounty of our efforts will accumulate to the holders of fixed assets, namely land and human talent. Ricardo says nothing of the sort here. Especially so, nothing about human talent. Ricardo strictly makes claim that the rent of land will be eq…

Quality of life is a form of production.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#154

Post by legerdemain »

jjjeii3 wrote: post #137
legerdemain wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand the point of this hair-splitting. There is a front line with land mines , ongoing armed conflict, and recent soldier casualties. Saying that what Ukraine has is a "frozen conflict" and not a war zone is like a real estate agent calling a crappy house a "renovator's dream."

Ukrainian army only had 75 casualties in 2020... and this is on a very small area near the Russian border. The rest of the country is absolutely fine.

This is a continuing misrepresentation of a grim reality. The entirety of the US armed forces, in all of its "ongoing contingency operations" (euphemism for combat) around the entire world, has lost less than 75 people over the period of the last several years. "We've only had 75 people die in active combat on domestic soil last year!" is not a great sales pitch for Ukrainian quality of life.

"A very small area near the Russian border" is literally moving the goalposts. Until Russia stepped in and redrew the border of Ukraine, the front lines were a hundred miles from the border.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#155

Post by dang »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #63
dang wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're quite right. I wish we had a more reliable way to downweight such generic responses, which reliably recur on every story related to an ongoing theme. HN threads are much better when they have interesting diffs. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Of course…

Makes sense. My goal with the comment was to shortcut the stuff that's already been discussed. I wouldn't necessarily call this topic "generic". The "gravitational pull" you mention seems like a product of "number of people affected" x "how much of a relatable concern it is"; employment compensation scores high. Apple launches are another example of this.

I just mean that as a topic becomes larger and more general, there are fewer new things to say about it.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#156

Post by yowlingcat »

smabie wrote: post #89
zuhayeer wrote: post #30

One of the founders of Levels.fyi here – wish we were cited on here too! But we also did a pay report for 2020 with a breakdown of companies and locations which was covered in another IEEE post: https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-... In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/

Have you considered adding finance/investment/trading salaries? It's super great for tech (one high paying field) and I think it would be really great for finance (another high paying field).

+1, the only comparable source I've found is anecdotal data from Blind.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#157

Post by ska »

Justsignedup wrote: post #119
zuhayeer wrote: post #30

One of the founders of Levels.fyi here – wish we were cited on here too! But we also did a pay report for 2020 with a breakdown of companies and locations which was covered in another IEEE post: https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-... In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/

Just looking at this data I question why even bother working for a startup. Getting paid 200k at a startup is a rarity, usually with poor health benefits. Lots of work and a hope that you can make up the difference in case of a huge sale. Am I looking at it wrong?

> Am I looking at it wrong?

It all depends on what you want out of your work. The balance has shifted semi recently so that if you want to maximize your expected earnings, for most tech area engineers the answer has shifted from "pick the right startup" or maybe "go be a quant if you can" to "go work for FAANG".

Things get a lot more complicated if you are not merely optimizing for income.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#158

Post by tayo42 »

kureikain wrote: post #144

i never worked at a big tech so hope someone can help me on this. The stock grants usually has a 4 years vesting? that means after 4 years , you will not get any more granted stock? Does that mean after 4 years, your salary is going to drop down significantly

You might get refreshes. Though if you join a company when the stock was $10 and you get 100 shares a year and then after for 3 years it's trading at $30, your refresh might only be 33 shares at $30.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#159

Post by DeRock »

kureikain wrote: post #144

i never worked at a big tech so hope someone can help me on this. The stock grants usually has a 4 years vesting? that means after 4 years , you will not get any more granted stock? Does that mean after 4 years, your salary is going to drop down significantly

In most companies I have seen, you are given "refreshers" at a yearly cadence. So for example if you have an initial stock grant of $100K, vesting over 4 years (so $25k per year if split equally). Then at year 1 you might get another $80k, vesting over 4 years, then the next year $120k, etc.

Of course this varies. Some may not give you any refreshers at all, biasing towards recruiting you rather than retaining. Some will give much larger refreshers when you perform well. Some (eg. Amazon) also have a backloaded vesting schedule (something like 5%,15%,40% and 40% over 4 years).

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#160

Post by Impossible »

fwiwm2c wrote: post #70

These numbers are ridiculously low. Here is what a typical FAANG setup pays you in the bay area (Source: I have worked in a couple of them): IC5 Eng (~5 yrs exp): $350k/yr all in (cash+stock+bonus) IC6 Eng (~9 yrs exp): $550k/yr all in IC7 Eng (~12 yrs exp and you are exceptional): $800k/yr As you go from IC5 to IC7, your stock and bonus goes up (as expected). A typical IC7 will earn around $250k in cash, ~25% bonus…

L7 is rare though, and most of them have more than 12 YOE (or maybe they have 12 YOE at the company). Levels.fyi seems to only have 38 data points for FB for example (https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...) and 47 for Google (https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...) vs. 490 and 457 L5 entries. It's probably safe to say if you get to L7 you're in the top 5% of engineers at the company and L8 is probably top 1%. So sure, $2M house isn't too expensive if you're both a good engineer and great at navigating company politics and selling\presenting yourself in a way that both gives you high value (to leadership) projects and peer recognition, but most employees won't get there. Going the EM route is generally considered to be an easier way to get to L7 comp.
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