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Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

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Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#261

Post by ChuckMcM »

lcr94 wrote: post #233
mrshoe wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That this is currently the top comment reinforces the author's hypothesis that many software engineers underestimate how much they could make at a large company. > 250k a year in 5 years at a big corporation, really? Yes, really. > Yea if you're lucky to work on a project/team higher-ups care about and are also willing to bust your ass working long hours to meet insane deadlines. Nope, not true. > So I think this art…

This style of reply is not constructive. How can we know with certainty whether or not you have a reasonable shot at making 250k/year after five years of working at Apple, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft? Provide an anecdote, links to articles, etc.

I suspect its pretty certain, it certainly held true when I was working there and that was before Google was 50K employees. The flip side though is you may not make it to 5 years. A lot of employees don't (which is less commonly talked about) but Google has always tried pretty hard to not retain people who weren't providing what they considered an appropriate level of contribution.

So if you start working at Google, and you make it to 5 years, then yes I'm sure you'll be making $250k+ total compensation.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#262

Post by fbthrowaway1776 »

lcr94 wrote: post #233
mrshoe wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That this is currently the top comment reinforces the author's hypothesis that many software engineers underestimate how much they could make at a large company. > 250k a year in 5 years at a big corporation, really? Yes, really. > Yea if you're lucky to work on a project/team higher-ups care about and are also willing to bust your ass working long hours to meet insane deadlines. Nope, not true. > So I think this art…

This style of reply is not constructive. How can we know with certainty whether or not you have a reasonable shot at making 250k/year after five years of working at Apple, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft? Provide an anecdote, links to articles, etc.

At FB, my first job out of college, my W2 income was: 110k (started midway through the year), 300k, 350k.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#263

Post by dragonwriter »

thesimon wrote: post #18

Tangential to this article, but >pay outside of the US is often much lower for reasons that don’t really make sense to me). Can someone explain why salaries in for example Europe are so much less? Out of uni salary for example seems to be around 38k in Europe, whereas in US everything under 90k seems very low. Just the difference in purchase power and costs?

> Out of uni salary for example seems to be around 38k in Europe, whereas in US everything under 90k seems very low.

Part of that may be because your view of the US is distorted by being limited to a particularly highly-paid slice of the field in a highly-paid geographical region; 90k is close to the median salary for the highest of the non-management programming occupation titles (software engineer -- software developer and computer programmer pay less) in the BLS salary survey, and therefore pretty high paying for the technology field as a whole, rather than the level where anything under it is low for the field.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#264

Post by mkozlows »

dsacco wrote: post #140
Cyberdog wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit senior level and live in a metropolitan area. If, if, if, if. Just by numbers, most devs don't meet these criteria. And even in the periods of time which I personally have, I still was not making anywhere near this kind of money. These numbers are inflated and out of reach to the vast majority of developers in the workplace today, full stop.

Yes, there are if's involved. It is not certain that you will achieve senior tier at a large company in a metropolitan area. But you are also not certain to earn anything from your startup equity. I will reiterate - you are more likely to reach $250k working at a large company than you are to earn it (in salary or lump sum) at a startup. This has been corroborated by numerous individual's experience in this thread, i…

You need to quit saying "a metropolitan area" when you mean "Silicon Valley and a few places that have satellite offices for companies based in Silicon Valley," is the thing.

Show me the companies in Columbus, OH that pay that way. Or Milwaukee, WI. Or or or.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#265

Post by binarysolo »

To set people's expectations properly, this guy is high-tier dev that focused on his niche and probably had his payoff event 10 years into work. (Presumably his 8 year stint at Centaur and the buyout had some of that.)

AFTER all those 10 years, the Sr. Engineer plays at Google and Microsoft were probably 250k+, when they needed that 10 years of specialized experience for a $10M+ project and can pay to play.

Anec-data: As an SV person who's worked at BigCorp and funded startups (from co-founder to CTO)... these numbers definitely trend high amongst my friends and acquaintances who graduated Stanford CS in the early 2000s.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#266

Post by eldavido »

I think the endgame of SV is to become more like Hollywood. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

Typical startup raises a $500k seed round and is two founders + 2 senior engineers building the v1. If founders want Google-caliber people, they can't afford to pay $200k; the cash just isn't there.

So companies will have to start giving out real chunks of equity (5% or more) to early key hires. And "who you are" will matter even more than it does now (e.g. look what having Spielberg or another A-list director does to a movie's prospects, they can get the good actors, etc.)

I just don't see any other way this plays out. SV will become more like Hollywood.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#267

Post by dreaminvm »

mrshoe wrote: post #154
jarjoura wrote: post #96

250k a year in 5 years at a big corporation, really? Yea if you're lucky to work on a project/team higher-ups care about and are also willing to bust your ass working long hours to meet insane deadlines. Also, you better be someone who is excellent at communication and charismatic if you want to get invited to the table of interesting work. There are a lot of brilliant hyper-competitive people who work at these big c…

That this is currently the top comment reinforces the author's hypothesis that many software engineers underestimate how much they could make at a large company. > 250k a year in 5 years at a big corporation, really? Yes, really. > Yea if you're lucky to work on a project/team higher-ups care about and are also willing to bust your ass working long hours to meet insane deadlines. Nope, not true. > So I think this art…

Firstly, everyone not working in the Bay Area can ignore these figures because they are bloated due to cost of living (3K for 1BR/1BA apartment) and competition for talent (from startups and peers).

Secondly, people are ignoring the fact that RSUs at the 3 companies mentioned (and a few others AMZN/MSFT) have grown substantially in the past 5 years (about 125-150% on average) and is the biggest factor in these "surreal" figures.

Broken down into base (110k starting common at BigCorp), RSUs (initially 100-150K over 4 years) and bonus (10-20% base comp ), these numbers would make more sense. First year total comp is close to 145K-170K. By the time you are a senior engineer (mid-level) and assuming this took 5 years, your base comp is close to 135-160K, with refresher grants (and accounting for market performance) your RSUs probably hit 100K/year, bonuses at 30K bringing total comp to 265K-290K.

I happen to work for a BigCorp in SV (close to 1.5 years now) whose stock is performing poorly, hence my total comp is 160K (110K base, 25K bonus, 25K in RSUs/year). But if we had FB/AMZN/NFLX type of stock performance, then my comp would shoot up to 185K without any promotions.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#268

Post by eecks »

loopbit wrote: post #259
eecks wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just in the states? What about in Europe? FB, Google and others have headquarters in Dublin. I don't think they pay anything like that, do they?

I live in Dublin, don't work for Google but I have many friends that do (as well as in London and Zurich). No, they don't pay anything close to that. Actually, AFAIK, in Dublin the salary that Google pays for developers is on the low side of the scale (they offset that, in part, with all the benefits like free food and the rest).

That's what I thought. I'm in Dublin too but not in google/fb/etc

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#269

Post by sanderjd »

rockinghigh wrote: post #249
lcr94 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This style of reply is not constructive. How can we know with certainty whether or not you have a reasonable shot at making 250k/year after five years of working at Apple, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft? Provide an anecdote, links to articles, etc.

If you're talking about total compensation, 250k is on the low end. Base of $140-190k is common. Add to that $10-30k of cash bonus and $100k of stocks.

One thing I'm always curious about: most of these discussions seem to be targeted at college grads, discussing where they could be after their first 5 years in the industry. The sense I've gotten is that these big companies tend to compensate all new hires approximately the same, caring little about experience outside their company or perhaps one of the other big companies. It seems to me that smaller, less well known, companies are more hungry for experienced people, because they are relatively starved of people who can drive architecture, decision making, and hiring, and are thus more willing to take a risk on paying a premium for experience.

So my question is: stipulating that the numbers favor bigcos for fresh graduates, is the same true for people who already have that 5 (or 8, or 15, or 20) years of experience elsewhere?

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#270

Post by [deleted] »

arbitrage314 wrote: post #42

I've made this point before, but since it's a bit relevant here, I'll make it again (sorry to repeat): If you're primarily interested in making money, or if you love the startup but not the compensation, you should NOT work at that startup. If you're a good developer, you can get a better deal by working at an established company and simply investing. This has been true for every startup offer I've ever seen. Ever. I…

[deleted]
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