131–140 of 631 posts
There's a huge difference between early stage and mid-late stage private companies. For the latter, you are almost always getting RSUs rather than options, so you don't have to pay taxes out of pocket to exercise them. It's also wrong to automatically consider all stock grants to be worth $0 just because you can't immediately sell them. If Stripe or Databricks offers you a million dollars worth of shares today it'll…
> What should Robin, Chris, or you do with this information? Work at a hedge fund.
I know some folks more senior than me at top hedgefunds making less than I am.
Co-Founder of Levels.fyi here. As Jacob points out, the market is extremely hot right now. It feels like salaries are inching up slightly each month. We're working on improving how numbers are updated and working on weighing recent salaries more heavily. Would really encourage everyone to submit their compensation on the site. We also have some relevant discussions with recruiters from FANG type companies on our team…
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How does that work with the recent 'they need to return to the office' + anyone remotely working for Facebook outside the US will never make hundreds of thousands as a developer.
Facebook announced they would allow all employees to work remotely a few months ago. Pay is location-adjusted.
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Agreed - Silicon Valley exists in part because of 500k-5M$ payouts to employees happening all of the time from private options. Not trying to value that is a mistake.
That's the myth that keeps the whole thing going. For every successful exit that makes employees rich there's a 100 failures and acquihires. You should judge these deals based on expected value.
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Yeah I know a lot of FAANG people getting 500-600K packages. Makes it hard to even think about startups.
What the... s%&#? Half a million a year for a developer or architect is bonkers. That's the equivalent of AUD 800K a year. That's more than what the Prime Minister and a cabinet member put together make here! How can that possibly make sense? For that kind of money you can easily hire 4 senior developers here! Any company "hiring local" at those prices isn't exploring their international staffing options properly...
But at the scale they operate at, it is also relatively easy to justify such salaries. For example, just last month, I saved the company more than a million a year of cloud costs by doing 1 week of cost optimizations for just one of our services. I will create many times that in new revenues/cost savings in the remaining 2 months of the year.
My total comp for year? Barely over half a million. So I'd say they are getting a good value.
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Why are these numbers so massively different across the world? Do European companies generate that much less revenue? Or are labor unions in Europe just that much less effective at bargaining? Or is productivity that much lower in Europe? (I'm not sold on any of these)
It's all of that. European tech companies are smaller than US tech companies, have lower gross revenue per employee, make less profit per employee. Taxes are higher in Europe, which disincentivizes risk taking and ambitious individuals. Labor productivity is also lower in Europe. Finally, Europe still has a culture where software engineers, cloud architects/products/managers/etc. are viewed as code monkeys and the pe…
You need to back this up with something better than anecdotal evidence - FWIW I've worked with plenty of world class American engineers who don't live in the US
> Chris can expect to make $300k at a non-FAANG company, but nearly double that if they’re willing to compromise on that “no-FAANG” stance Ok but aren't the expectations for a Staff+ way higher at FAANG than at non-FAANG? Or we assume Chris already got the offer from FAANG for a Staff+ role and so it's just a personal choice? Those articles and discussions about salary always assume everybody is able to work at FAANG…