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Tech compensation in 2021

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Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#421

Post by tubby12345 »

franciscop wrote: post #359
eminence32 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a lot of HN readers are continually playing the "maximize salary" game and use like articles like this one to figure out how well they're doing. If you want to play that game, then good luck, have fun. I understand the desire. But it's not for everyone. Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year? Do you enjoy what you do and the people that you work with? If so, I don't think there should be any…

Everything else being the same, it's better to make 300k than 175k/year. And not everything is the same, normally in those better paid jobs you have better Engineers, a lot of challenging problems, many nice perks, etc. What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week. Also you don't get highly ethical companies, just average ones at that (and it might actually be better…

>What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week

This isn't true. Google allows you to "scale" your work (eg 80% pay for 80% time).

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#422

Post by throwaway2016a »

hintymad wrote: post #415
throwaway2016a wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read what I said again. My point was not that algorithms are irrelevant but they are table stakes. I have known all the algorithms on Leet Code for years. My comment was not that I don't need to know algorithms it was that at a senior level the questions should be far more advanced than what leet code has. I'm a little amazed that so many people in these comments assume I don't know algorithms.

> My point was not that algorithms are irrelevant but they are table stakes You're wrong. A previous team built a simple data processing pipeline for a big customer. The throughput is single digit per second. The customer was furious as they would have wait for days to get their data in. The reason is the team was not aware that their graph building and traversal algorithms are O(n^2), and they didn't understand how…

What part of my statement is wrong?

I said algorithms are table stakes (a poker term for something you need to know just to play at the table). To continue the analogy, sounds like whoever designed that system didn't have enough to buy into the table.

> If you build large backend for data intensive systems

I have. Many.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#423

Post by neckardt »

mkhpalm wrote: post #407

If you're offering fabulous compensation packages that exceed the President of the United States for common software engineers with a little experience... wouldn't you want to use that to your advantage in your job postings? Every time I read an article like this I go looking for official numbers to validate what is being said. I'm not saying companies compensate poorly in SV. I just find it difficult to differentiat…

www.levels.fyi will get you a salary range for most companies. Based on my own compensation and that of trusted friends the real numbers are actually a bit higher than what's on levels.fyi right now. (Seattle)

When you apply the best thing is to just be clear to the recruiter what you will accept. If you tell them you won't accept less than $200k any good recruiter would tell you whether that's reasonable or not. If they lie to you, please come back to HN and make an angry post about it. You'll get my upvote.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#424

Post by Umofomia »

tunesmith wrote: post #401

Can someone describe what a Staff+ is and how it compares to architect? I think I know but my employer doesn't have that position, or an IC track - it seems that everyone is an engineer, architect, or manager, and a few years ago anyway it seemed like Architect was the senior position to aim for if you didn't want to be a manager. I'm an architect now but I don't code as much and I suspect I could add more value if I…

https://staffeng.com/ is a great resource on this. It describes Architect as one of the possible archetypes[1] of staff engineers, though staff engineers can take on other responsibilities as well. It's possible that the Architect track in your company is just simply their name for this role.

[1] https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#425

Post by throwaway2016a »

monster_group wrote: post #403
throwaway2016a wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not complaining, if you read my posts am saying the article is not representative of a majority of software engineers' experience. Using my career as an example. I even explicitly say that in the very comment you are replying to. Not everyone works for FAANG. Also, leet code is not relevant because the questions asked at that level are typically not algorithms. I passed the leet code stage in my career 10 years a…

I am not the GP and I mean no disrespect to you. Your below phrasing seems presumptuous to me - >>..someone who can answer the leet code questions easily (and has been able to for a decade)... If you are a CTO chances are you have not been practicing LC. Even if you were able to do LC style questions a decade ago, without practice you are very likely to struggle with them. So don't assume just because you are CTO / a…

I actually agree with you. You have a point. I would probably practice Leet Code or similar before I went back into the interview world just to freshen up.

Though, with that said, I have been on the interviewer side a lot and need to know some of them well enough to know if the candidate knows their stuff. So I'm not completely rusty. And as CTO I would often read through what other companies are asking in interviews to make sure what I'm asking is in line.

My objection was the implication that not crunching Leet Code problems was the sole reason for the low compensation.

But you are right. I should not assume because at one point I knew all those algorithms that I can still explain them under pressure of an interview.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#426

Post by colinmhayes »

nickjj wrote: post #233
Hermitian909 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the bay area at a large company. Generally, people at big companies work less than at small companies. Most software engineers I know making more than 400k work ~30 hours a week. Things get different at the super senior levels making several million, usually a lot more meetings, hard to speak to their specific hours. But on the other hand, they get to retire after two years if they want so...

> Things get different at the super senior levels making several million Right, everything changes at that point of income. Putting in ~70 hours a week for a few years to make 3-5 million seems like a no brainer. But grinding 60-70 hours a week for 300k-400k, I don't know. That's a much harder sell. You'll probably burn out before you could retire. I don't know what taxes would look like in CA but it would probably b…

https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator puts 300k married, full 50k to traditional 401k/IRA(spouse needs 26k income for that I guess) at 228k after tax.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#427

Post by da39a3ee »

coliveira wrote: post #344
beebmam wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that risk taking is probably deeply cultural, and is also likely effected by both policy and economic status (collective and individual status). It's probably hard to know how to quantify all of these different effects, but I hope some people are trying to research this!

Culture is not that hard to change when there is money involved. The difference in SV is that there is so much venture capital willing to create new companies. Given that amount of capital, there will always be someone willing to do it.

Doesn't it seem a bit old fashioned that venture capital should be geographically localized, as if it were a physical pile of gold? Is that not on its way out?

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#428

Post by da39a3ee »

jiggawatts wrote: post #282
sharpy wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, US tech salaries are rather crazy. 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…

To be blunt: so what? I just saved $500K per annum for a customer, after working on the most critical part of a merger between two 10K-user organisations, and I get less then half that. It's not like it's impossible to get someone that knows how to optimise infrastructure or do complex projects for less than a decent chunk of a million dollars a year! Like other people have commented, they're often making just tens o…

It sort of sounds like you're resentful of the american engineer making $500k that you're replying to. But maybe the resent should be directed towards the executives and finance people in europe who make huge salaries just because that's the tradition.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#429

Post by [deleted] »

tschwimmer wrote: post #418
throwaway2016a wrote: post #90

20 years experience, two books under my belt, and lead architect (with a CTO title) on several good sized projects and most I have ever gotten in $175k... every time I see an article like this, I think I am doing something "very wrong" I live about 40 miles outside of Boston. Edit: Looking at levels.fyi for Boston that actually puts me above the median[1]. Why the heck is Boston so low compared to other markets? Edit…

You are in the wrong place. The top salaries are exclusvively in the Bay Area and New York.

[deleted]

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#430

Post by Jensson »

gonehome wrote: post #419
m_ke wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's close enough to 0 to be a rounding error. Even some of the recent unicorn IPOs didn't return enough for employees to offset what they could have made working at FAANG. https://www.teamblind.com/post/IPO-millionaires-Y7ak8UpJ

Before Facebook was the F in FAANG it was a private company (as were the others obviously). The IPO was only in 2012 - a large number of people became millionaires. The same was true for Snapchat, Asana, Roblox, etc. The same will be true for Stripe, Robinhood, and others. A subset of those people go on to become angel investors themselves. FAANG pays a lot and there are outliers, but most FAANG employees are not cle…

They are a big lottery ticket. Lottery tickets doesn't have 0 value but you can't count on them having more than 0 value.

Lets say you could choose between 1% chance of getting $20 million and 100% chance of getting $1 million, what would you choose? You'd pick the $1 million every time, since it is really easy to transform $1 million into a bunch of risky investments if you prefer the low probability big pay-out, while the 1% of $20 million isn't worth that much.

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