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Tech compensation in 2021

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Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#441

Post by Jensson »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #437
tubby12345 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

Do you have a source for this? I know a lot of people at Google and have never heard of this. In fact, a few years ago I explicitly asked a Google recruiter about this, and they said it wasn't an option. Is it a more recent thing perhaps?

It was absolutely an option 5 years ago when I worked there. I knew lots of engineers who worked 80% and took every Friday off.

Not sure if your manager is forced to give you that option but it didn't seem to be hard to get at least. I think by default such requests gets accepted and your manager would need to give a good reason why you couldn't work part time.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#442

Post by mym1990 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #410
Jensson wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are great at algorithms, have 20 years of experience with a great track record and live near a great tech university so plenty of tech companies, then you are doing something really wrong if you just earn $175k a year. Or you intentionally choose to have a low salary and prioritize other things, but if you did that then you'd know about it instead of asking this question.

You're being downvoted (not by me) but you have a point. I did two things wrong that I know of: - I graduated college right before the great recession and that effected my career starting rates - I stayed at a company I knew was under paying me for far too long (because I had a lot of stock options and I valued them too highly) If either of those two things were different I'd probably be making a lot more. But my poi…

I feel like those 2 points are just excuses(no offense but plenty of people would kill for a chance to even go to college)...if you were to go back would you hold off graduating college until after the recession? It sounds like you are extremely proficient in the technical space, are you good at negotiating and/or identifying where the value is? There is really no reason for someone to stay on a linear pay progression when moving from one job to the next, or even one title to the next.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#443

Post by [deleted] »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #437
tubby12345 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

Do you have a source for this? I know a lot of people at Google and have never heard of this. In fact, a few years ago I explicitly asked a Google recruiter about this, and they said it wasn't an option. Is it a more recent thing perhaps?

[deleted]

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#444

Post by diskzero »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #143

Is hiring outside the US remotely so fraught with difficulty it’s worth paying extra 100,000s?

Are you talking about hiring a remote team and managing them? The answer may very well be yes for organizations that don't know how to properly communicate and utilize tools and methods to manage them. There is an entire middle management class in Silicon Valley that exists to manage engineers in person. Their day consists of many meetings, meetings with their team, cross-functional teams, visiting you and your co-workers in your office/cube and managing your work flow. Their work is not without value. This model has produced most of the software and hardware that we use daily. When you introduce remote teams, you introduce a type of friction that does not work with this model. All of sudden managers are not able to call an in-person meeting. They have to get up early or stay up late to coordinate. There is a perception that the remote team is slow, or not responsive. I have been in meetings at Apple where Steve would excoriate teams in France for not moving as fast as he wanted. This was not the case, but he could not micro-manage them in person.

The future is going to belong to companies that can master processes and technologies to coordinate teams across time zones, languages and countries. Warehousing employees in Mountain View, Cupertino, South Lake Union, Manhattan, Frankfurt, etc. seems ridiculous once you begin to understand how to co-ordinate dispersed teams. There is value in having teams work together and I like working in person with other people. The whole company town aspect of Apple/Facebook/Google/Oracle/etc. campus' seems so bizarre to me however. I just can't understand the benefit given the toll on the lives of the workers.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#445

Post by diskzero »

unobatbayar wrote: post #220

Has anyone gotten rich from their salary alone? If your salary goes up, so does your spending/lifestyle?

Lot's of people can get rich from their salary alone. I know many Silicon Valley workers who chose to live more frugally, invest in properties like duplexes, town homes, etc. and then rent and improve them and increase their net worth that way. When I was at Apple, they would do a 100% 401k match. Is being really rich at 65 good enough for you? That is one way to do it.

Rich is relative, right? How rich is rich enough? Spending seems to find a way to consume the income of a lot of people. There is always a nicer BMW/Audi/Tesla/Mercedes to buy. You can spend $300 on a pair of jeans. Spend a few hours at Neiman Marcus in Palo Alto and look at the prices. You can buy better and better seats at the ballet, symphony, baseball game. Business and first class plane tickets become mandatory. Look at the watches people wear. This is what happens as your income increases. There is always a way to spend and consume more and you will find a way to justify it. Believe me, I know.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#446

Post by m_ke »

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…

Things are getting a bit wild since the pandemic but prior to 2020 we only had a handful of tech IPOs per year, for every Uber there were thousands of promising failed startups.

That's why in my other replies in this thread I recommend only joining later stage startups that are backed by top VCs and have clear product market fit. At that point things are derisked and compensation is pretty competitive with larger tech companies.

When I was graduating I had an option to work at Google or be the first employee at a very promising startup. I chose the startup and worked my ass off, the company raised a ton of money and got too big to be an acquisition target but not successful enough to IPO. My friends who went to work at Google made 2-3x more than me in salary and their RSUs 10xed during that time, all of them have millions in the bank. I bounced around incubators and in the startup ecosystem and have not met many people who did better than an average engineer at FAANG, in most cases the ones that did were founders.

The only people consistently getting rich off of startups are VCs.

EDIT: I do have to admit that I enjoyed startup life and got to work on and learn things that I'd never get to at a large company.

EDIT: Also if you're set on startups I'd recommend working at FAANG for a few years first, saving up and then bootstrapping your own company for a year or two before you think about investors. Being a founder is a completely different experience than an employee, you hold a lot more equity and have much more control over things.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#447

Post by smilekzs »

m_ke wrote: post #167
lacker wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! This advice to value shares of private companies at zero is buried deep in the article, but I think it renders the article quite misleading. The right thing to do is to use your own judgment to estimate the value of the stock. A small stake in a promising early-stage company really is worth something. There just isn't a clean formula for how much it's worth. When you really think hard about it, this will push yo…

Important tip for people considering startups: only join ones that recently raised an A or B round from one of the top VC firms. VCs get to see all of the numbers and won't invest unless there's some sign of upside.

Yeah but after each "validation round", the stock option grant for new hires becomes 0.1x before the validation. Kinda sucks to join right after Series A, get a tiny % (say less than 0.1%) of the company even after 4 years of grinding away, and even then the company doesn't go public so your options are still worth a tiny % of... zero.

Right now it only kinda makes sense when you join as a co-founder (at most seed round; definitely not post-series-A), or pre-IPO.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#448

Post by dfadsadsf »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #408
Jensson wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leet code is not relevant because the questions asked at that level are typically not algorithms Top companies still ask algorithms at these levels and fail people at these levels if they don't perform at least as well as juniors. If you are L6 at Google you are looking at liquid compensation around $500k a year, and they still require mostly leetcode questions. Of course you wont get considered for those positions…

I've never gone through a FAANG interview but I have gone through some fortune 100s and never once been asked an algorithm questions. But I have no reason not to believe you about FAANG. Saying questions asked at that level are not about algorithms was based on my non-FAANG experience. I shouldn't have been so absolute. But with that said, to back up and restate where I was trying to get. What I was trying to say is…

Big difference between FAANG and other fortune companies is that FAANG expect their managers up to very senior level to be technical and be able to code even if they do not code day to day. Other Fortune 100 companies are happy to have non-technical managers to manage engineers with mixed results.

In all SV companies coding interviews are strictly required at interviews at M1/M2 level (up to 60-80 reports) and required at some companies at D1 level (150 reports). CTO at start up with 20-30 reports is M1 and will have to do coding 100% and failing coding interview is automatic no hire.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#449

Post by mathattack »

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…

Lots of highly educated grads in Boston relative to jobs. (Compared to Denver)

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#450

Post by toast0 »

beebmam wrote: post #23
KronisLV wrote: post #14

As someone who works in an Eastern European country, i also did a writeup on how much i've made over the years and how that figure has changed, while working for a local company: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings In short, this year i'll probably make around 18k Euros, in total. I guess that just goes to show how different the situation is depending on where you live and where you're employed.

Why are these numbers so massively different across the world? Do European companies generate that much less revenue? Or are labor unions in Europe just that much less effective at bargaining? Or is productivity that much lower in Europe? (I'm not sold on any of these)

If you're a European developer and underpaid, are you going to start your own company to do the same work but sell it yourself and take all the margin?

Probably not, from comments I've seen here, it takes an awful lot of work to make a legal business. In the US, it takes minutes to incorporate, and even less time if you don't care to incorporate and just want to file a Doing Business As to use a separate name. Business banking doesn't take a lot to get going either. If you live in California, your employer probably can't stop you from quitting to start a competitor (as long as you don't take IP with you)

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