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Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

danluu.com

371–380 of 418 posts

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#371
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?

$80K is top of the top developer salary I heard of in Ukraine. My own salary is $55K. With $250K, I can hire team to work instead of me. :-)

Don't forget that those 250k are pre-taxes, and salary in Ukraine is usually quoted after tax afaik.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#372
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.

Stock bonus for Sr Dev at microsoft is up to 30% of base(vested over 5 years). That won't hit 100k even if you are at fifth year. Is it typical for google, facebook to give 100k in stocks per year (assuming they vest more a less over same 5 years or so).

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$80K is top of the top developer salary I heard of in Ukraine. My own salary is $55K. With $250K, I can hire team to work instead of me. :-)

Don't forget that those 250k are pre-taxes, and salary in Ukraine is usually quoted after tax afaik.

[deleted]

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#374
post #189

I don't think you can go into a company as large as Google and expect your salary to double in five years. HR will have set limits to how much of a raise you can get in any given year and even with promotions you would be very unlikely to see that kind of bump. I also don't think the middling programmers he mentions would hit the 250k year mark. Orthogonal to the point of the article, but the only time you can really…

Google has a salary band for each role that they are very careful to maintain. If you're getting promotions then you're also getting substantial raises. The trick is that those promotions are very (very) hard to come by and require some skills beyond coding as well as luck to be on a project that people care about.

Out of interest what sort of competition was there back when I worked for British Telecom they only had promotion (boards) every 18 months and had around 550/600 apply for less than 20 roles and that was for MPG 1 to MPG 2.

MPG1 is the entry level grade BTW

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When talking about companies as well established as these the risk is a lot lower. In some cases since the goal is to give you a set number in compensation they will factor in a poor stock performance and give you an adjustment to make up for it.

Do you mean companies as well established as Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, and Netscape? Or companies as well established as Woolworth, Kodak, MCI, and Sears? Or perhaps you had in mind the New York Central Railroad, LTV, and Pan American Airlines? Yes, it is possible that you will be given additional grants or options repricing if your company's stock price declines. Usually not, unless you're a key employee or top performer…

Over long enough period of course each will decline.But within 5 years risk is small.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#376
post #233
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.

After college,

2 years of startup @ $90k, worthless stock (one of the first employees), long hours. Learned a lot, but definitely underpaid in stock.

FB @ 2014 - $230k/yr = $150k base + $50k stock / yr + $30k bonus.

FB @ 2015 - $480k/yr = $200k base + $200k stock / yr + ~$80k bonus.

Getting into the senior levels at FB/GOOG does indeed get you 250k+ easy.

Friends at FB who joined the same day as me, but fresh out of college: $200k+ / yr right now.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What companies are paying 5 year senior enigneers $200k base salary in the Valley???

I hate to be put in this position, but I have to call BS. This entire thread is highly biased towards people who make more: people who make more want to chime in, people who make less are more embarrassed / discouraged from chiming in. I'm a natural (coding since 3rd grade), out of college for 6 years, and I've only known 1 engineer in my career who made over 200k. Now if by BigCo you mean Facebook, Google, Apple, Am…

Where do you live? These numbers are fairly local to SF/NYC/Seattle, with other large cities trailing a bit and smaller cities farther behind.

That said, in those cities they are far from absurd. I started out similar to you (coding since elementary school) and now live in NYC ~3.5 years out of college. Off the top of my head, I could name half a dozen developers making seven figures, and at least 100 making over $200k.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#378

As a European constantly reading about total compensations in the 200k+ seems like FUCKING crazy to me, holy shit. What the hell.

Come to America, friend. :)

Or you could work for Google in Zurich, they apparently pay slightly more than in the bay area. Although that's nominally, after accounting for cost of living it may be less.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#379
post #344
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's real and if you're willing to move to SV, they're always hiring.

But also get ridiculously lucky or be past the 95th percentile of coders.

Nah. Programmers at Google, Facebook, et al. are all pretty solid, but most aren't amazing ninja rockstars or whatever. I'm at one of them, been doing fine career-wise and I'm certainly not mind-blowingly good or anything.

Re: Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

#380

Working in Europe I can never believe these fantasy numbers from the U.S. 250k USD after 5 years, seriously? A good Senior Developer here, with 5-10 years of relevant experience, might have a base salary of around 50-60K EUR, and perhaps another 0-2K EUR in bonuses. Then you have to pay around 30% income tax and another 20% if you hit a certain income bracket (which you do with 50K) in many Western European countries…

I know they sound like fantasy (I'm from the US but certainly didn't hear numbers like this while I was still in school), but believe me, they're very real. They're a relatively small subset of programmer salaries, but they're still big enough to cause an upward pulling effect on other companies, such that average software engineering salaries seem to be much higher in the US than in Europe, too.
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