I too recently lost a co-founder to a Valley company of similar size. Considering that he is very green, not exactly the best in our startup and that we are based somewhere with rather low pay for engineers in general, the offer he received was very hard to believe for everyone. It's hard to convince people to stay when those work in Valley could be as interesting without the stress and come with a big fat cheque.
Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
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Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#12Does anyone know if they have an active program to cut the bottom performers? If not, I suspect they have quite a collection of overpaid mediocre programmers.
I worked for many years at a company that paid significantly higher than average salaries. Even with a program to cut the bottom 10% per year, we had quite a few people who were mediocre at best.
It's easier for a busy manager to hold onto the people they have than to hire and train new ones. Paying high salaries is an easy way to do that if you have the cash.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#13Another effect this will have on the start-up scene is that if you build your company in 'The Valley' that companies like Google will be competing with you for talent. You may have an upside from being in the SV eco-system in the first place, however you may find yourself paying a lot more for developers than if you were in a place where parties with pockets as deep as Google are rare.
Headquarters in Silicon Valley, development somewhere else might be a good strategy if you want to keep the burn rate under control.
Any thoughts on this? Can a small startup compete with the Googles and Apples in the Valley?
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#14$ 250,000 a year must include stocks, bonus, 401k and healthcare. As is, it doesn't match the insider information I have about Google's salaries.
Let's be realistic a minute, $ 250k/year is a lot of money.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#15A lot of people seem to find this incredible (from my twitter feed), but I don't, really. I know a couple of people running brick-and-mortar shops (think: selling furniture etc), or lawyers, or other professions that earn just as much too.
Someone -- and indeed, looking at the real estate ads -- a lot of someones -- have to be running up the demand for $1M++ houses throughout Silicon Valley.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#16nothing is stopping these guys from coding something up after work/on the weekend. Sure it'll take twice as long to release a project, but it's a small price to keep getting $20K a month salary
Quite the contrary, you don't know Google's non-compete work-contract provisions and, if any, how would they held up in court, so your statement is quite speculative.
Besides, the last thing you'd want to do is to work after-hours and find out your employer is owning the IP of your project (that's besides pager-duty and other after-hour things your employer might make mandatory anyway).
Regarding taking twice as long, just imagine projects like Dropbox or Twitter taking twice as long to get to the market - I doubt they would be competitive in the same manner.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#17Another effect this will have on the start-up scene is that if you build your company in 'The Valley' that companies like Google will be competing with you for talent. You may have an upside from being in the SV eco-system in the first place, however you may find yourself paying a lot more for developers than if you were in a place where parties with pockets as deep as Google are rare. Headquarters in Silicon Valley,…
I'm not living in the Valley (far from it, mind you :-) but I think a small startup has more to be worried about other small startups than about Google/Apple.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#18nothing is stopping these guys from coding something up after work/on the weekend. Sure it'll take twice as long to release a project, but it's a small price to keep getting $20K a month salary
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Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#19nothing is stopping these guys from coding something up after work/on the weekend. Sure it'll take twice as long to release a project, but it's a small price to keep getting $20K a month salary
Quite the contrary, you don't know Google's non-compete work-contract provisions and, if any, how would they held up in court, so your statement is quite speculative. Besides, the last thing you'd want to do is to work after-hours and find out your employer is owning the IP of your project (that's besides pager-duty and other after-hour things your employer might make mandatory anyway). Regarding taking twice as long…
Are you familiar with California's laws in this area?
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#20This is very dubious - the Glassdoor stats at http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm have 1,500 entries for Software Engineers that max out at $190k and average $100k.
The position above, Senior Engineer, averages $130k.
There doesn't seem to be an incentive for 1,500 people to understate their earnings by 50%+ on an anonymous poll, especially a poll of engineers at one of those most engineering-centric companies in the world, where corrupting a dataset would likely feel akin to high treason.
Not inclined to trust second-hand information from one individual - sounds like they're either working at a much higher level than regular programmer, inflating their salary by including perks/stock/etc to make it seem higher, an extreme outlier, or just lying (people who tell their friends how much they earn in casual conversations also sound like the kind of people who would inflate that number).