At Google, Sr. SWE makes about $155K if female, about $180K if male. Base salary. Bonuses and refresher grants are also skewed accordingly.
These are 2011 numbers, personally researched.
Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
201–210 of 280 posts
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#202Speaking as a Google engineer: There are three components to compensation here. Base salary, annual cash bonus, and stock grants. When he says he "takes home" $250k, he probably means the sum of all three. When the author says he thought the average Google salary was $130k, he might be referring just to the base. Most of the comments in this thread are similarly ambiguous. If you post a comment, please be clear about…
Without wanting to sound stupid, when you talk about salaries do you always mention the amount before or after tax? Here in Europe it's almost always after tax.
in austria it is always before. heck, i know a lot of people who don't even know how much they make after taxes
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I was wondering. Two former employees from my group have ended up at the Goog. Both of them can talk the talk in an interview, but they're both below average as programmers. They're both still there, too. If Google is paying either of them $250k it's time to short the stock.
Being able to 'talk the talk' will not get you a job at Google. You have to be a very strong problem solver, a fast thinker, and lucky. All Googlers might not be rockstar programmers, but they are almost all unusually intelligent. There really are no average people there, apart perhaps those that came in through acquisitions (like myself).
So I've heard. And yet, I can guarantee you Google has hired at least two dim bulbs. Well, that can happen. After all, it can only be so efficient, and some people sound a lot more intelligent than they really are (which is why we hired them).
But it all makes me wonder how good Google's internal processes are, and how long it's willing to wait for people to become productive.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#204Ignoring passion, does it make sense economically to join a startup in the Bay Area? It doesn't seem uncommon for very young (25+) top engineers in the Bay Area to be making anywhere from $175k/year -- 250k/year in base salary + bonus + equity. Over 30 years, that's a more or less guaranteed $5m -- 7.5m before taxes from a single income. (Ignoring things like promotions and older engineers possibly needing to retrain…
"It doesn't seem uncommon for very young (25+) top engineers in the Bay Area to be making anywhere from $175k/year -- 250k/year in base salary + bonus + equity." It's very uncommon. Less than 1%, for sure. The other 99% don't make headlines on HN.
I may have a biased sample, but six out of my seven engineer friends 25--35 have salary + bonus + equity in that range or higher. The only one not making that is at a very early stage startup. Even my friends making iPhone apps independently are in that range.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
A /lot/ depends on the fund. I know some that are extremely tech focused as it makes the difference between profitable and not.
true, but their product is not software, nor do the dev team develop anything outward-facing. i'm not saying that some of the funds aren't great places for a techie to work (anecdotally, if jane street capital had an office in san francisco i'd have been tempted to apply there), it's just that there is no perception of them as enjoyable places for a dev to work. pushing money around simply doesn't excite me, and i da…
I agree there isn't a perception of them being an enjoyable place to work; I think that is more due to the fact that one isn't really encouraged to talk about it, and the most successful actively avoid the limelight! Now there are plenty of sweatshops out there, but there are also plenty of tech companies I wouldn't touch with a barge pool.
Many people, even at Google, will be writing coding that isn't The Product. Having spoken to people at such firms, and their competitors, there are plenty of dev jobs there that sound boring as all hell, alongside the fun ones.
Pushing money around does sound boring, just like "pushing web pages around" or "pushing 140 char messages around". yawn ;-) In the last 12 months I've worked on custom languages/compilers, custom databases, kernel hacking, oddball processors, little visualization hacks, and have a giant stack of as yet unreleased hardware piled up to experiment with. I get to program against millions of events per second with minimal latency, giant result data sets for batch work, and points on the spectrum in between. The data itself is finance related and it's fun to munge and experiment with trading algorithms on it.
So far I have, over time, swung between product companies and trading companies. Fun to be had on both sides, among many other places. Actually, one of the more surprising things I've learned over time is how little most programmers realize about the variety of fun things out there. And how conservative and fad following most programmers are, funnily enough.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason why business types see engineers as cost centers is because engineers have positioned themselves that way. Engineers pushed for higher salary in lieu of the variable upside. What engineers really need to do is to put more skin in the game. Push for more equity, even if it means accepting a smaller salary. All too often I see programmers who just want a 9-5 that pays 6 figures even if the company is seeing…
This isn't as simple as "push for equity". There are plenty of companies where equity makes no sense (say, a private consulting company, or a company with no plans to sell a la 37signals) What other options are there? Guaranteed end of year bonuses? Commissions in the form of profit sharing?
I read in an interview that at the end of the year, 37signals takes most of its profits, and pays them as a dividend to its shareholders. I don't know if lay employees get a chance to own stock, but if they did it could be a great incentive.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#207Speaking as a Google engineer: There are three components to compensation here. Base salary, annual cash bonus, and stock grants. When he says he "takes home" $250k, he probably means the sum of all three. When the author says he thought the average Google salary was $130k, he might be referring just to the base. Most of the comments in this thread are similarly ambiguous. If you post a comment, please be clear about…
Without wanting to sound stupid, when you talk about salaries do you always mention the amount before or after tax? Here in Europe it's almost always after tax.
In Ireland, salary refers to before tax.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#208Could any engineer(with 1~3 years of experience) at Google NYC office share some income information? How's the pay at NYC Google generally compared with Mountain View?
I was a Software Engineer 2 at Google NYC, which is the level most new grads and people up to 3 years or so of experience start with, and my base was 106K, with the usual 15% expected bonus plus stock and options (though it seems like they've moved to giving out more stock rather than options). Can't say how that is compared to other offices, but I have reason to believe that I was very close to the mean salary for my level.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outsourcing? Not even a little bit. Not only that but AFAIK contract engineers are incredibly rare and nonexistent in many product areas. This isn't to say that Google doesn't have partnerships with external vendors. We do. But engineering in general is a core competency, something far too valuable and of strategic importance to outsource.
Are we counting Google Account Managers hiring third-party contractors to do ad-hoc work for major clients? https://groups.google.com/d/topic/pylons-discuss/asqBrrEEhNo...
There are exceptions. But for software engineers who contribute to Google's (non-open source) code base, Google pretty much got out of using contractors around 2008 or so. Some contractors became employees.
Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
true, but their product is not software, nor do the dev team develop anything outward-facing. i'm not saying that some of the funds aren't great places for a techie to work (anecdotally, if jane street capital had an office in san francisco i'd have been tempted to apply there), it's just that there is no perception of them as enjoyable places for a dev to work. pushing money around simply doesn't excite me, and i da…
I agree there isn't a perception of them being an enjoyable place to work; I think that is more due to the fact that one isn't really encouraged to talk about it, and the most successful actively avoid the limelight! Now there are plenty of sweatshops out there, but there are also plenty of tech companies I wouldn't touch with a barge pool. Many people, even at Google, will be writing coding that isn't The Product. H…
Besides working conditions, there's also the question of whether your work (and the company you work for) makes the world a better place.
I'm not naive about that - large companies have their own agendas. But someone working at a silicon valley firm still has a better chance of doing something meaningful than someone working at a hedge fund where the answer is pretty much "no" by the nature of the business.