51–60 of 91 posts
Is there data on the UK / London available?
Honestly if you're a software engineer in the UK and you're concerned about salary... you should move to the United States.
Like most software engineers in the UK, I could almost certainly make at least triple by moving to the US but I don't consider it worthwhile for me. Many people do - there's no right answer.
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We have verified offer letters for several of these companies that users have submitted to us.
It would probably be an interesting article to delve into what accounts for the difference between the Bay Area's $227,000 median (which sounds about right) and the $400K-$500K that 5 years of experience gets at the top of your list. The difference is striking, essentially paying double the median amount for moderately experienced employees.
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Can we please stop with the hyperbole? $200k in the bay area is emphatically not scraping by. You can live on your own, without roommates, save money and have a social life if you have a $200k income in SFBA. What people (especially on HN) think "scraping by" looks like is getting a little nuts. Just because you can't have an opulent lifestyle and a cheap five bedroom house doesn't mean you're struggling. $200k in SF…
it all depends on your situation. Sure, as a single person 200K is doing well. But, 200K with a family of 4 (2 kids and a wife) is definately scraping by on the penninsula or SF. The only way that's not scraping by is if you bought your house over 20 years ago (or during 2010-2012 housing slump) OR you got yourself a Rent controlled apartment. Other than that, You ARE scraping by. In SF, day care is almost 3K per mon…
Ugh, really? It's 2019. Women actually have careers too, even in tech! And men can marry other men and raise children!
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it all depends on your situation. Sure, as a single person 200K is doing well. But, 200K with a family of 4 (2 kids and a wife) is definately scraping by on the penninsula or SF. The only way that's not scraping by is if you bought your house over 20 years ago (or during 2010-2012 housing slump) OR you got yourself a Rent controlled apartment. Other than that, You ARE scraping by. In SF, day care is almost 3K per mon…
Scraping by with a stay-at-home wife?
These salaries are incredibly high for someone who never worked at a tech company in the valley. What's the general consensus on whether these salaries will increase, decrease, or stay the same in the medium term (i.e., next 5-10 years)?
With nothing to back me up except the general impression I have, these numbers look out-of-whack even for the highest-paying employers in the Bay Area.
- base salary (cash)
- sign-on bonus (typically a large one-time equity grant that vest over 3-4 years)
- a raise each year (cash)
- an accompanying equity grant (which also vests over 3-4 years)
Where the whole thing seems weird to me is that they seem to be comparing pre-IPO options/RSUs to actual stocks as if they were apples-to-apples. This matters because the fraction of an amount that is attributable to equity is typically large (sign-on total value is a few times the amount of base salary for a year, for example, so I wouldn't be surprised if these numbers were 50-75% equity)
These salaries are incredibly high for someone who never worked at a tech company in the valley. What's the general consensus on whether these salaries will increase, decrease, or stay the same in the medium term (i.e., next 5-10 years)?
I want to think there will be a correction (because in so many ways it seem obnoxious), but frankly I don't see the need for their skills falling anytime soon. Tech drives everything in our world, and specifically, software.
Looks like they're including RSUs for private companies as equivalent to cash, which dramatically skews the data. For private companies, RSUs aren't liquid, and ISOs actually cost money to exercise, so they arguably have negative value. Treating them as cash-equivalent makes these rankings very misleading.
If you're a software engineer in a city where these companies employ folks and you're thinking this doesn't apply to you, I'd encourage you to at least give it a shot. It's not only the absolute best of the best who get these jobs. I recently decided to do a round of interviews after 10+ years as an independent web / iOS dev, having never had a professional software dev job. I'm also a self-taught developer with a bu…
Btw, to give you sense of it, I'd have no trouble finding a loop in a linked list, printing all permutations of a set, or searching a tree recursively. I'd have to puzzle a bit to figure out how to do DFS vs BFS, but I'd get there, I don't have it loaded into memory. I wouldn't be able to implement merge sort on the spot, I'd need to look it up, though I could probably get it frontloaded. All I can say is dayum those interview exams are hard, what I described is a pre-req, nobody will just ask you to permute a set, but if you can't, you'll never solve whiteboard the problem they ask you in 45 minutes.
For take-home projects, one (a rails app) was rejected because I used named routes rather than using the more conventional methods (I know this wouldn't be good to do in a production app... guess I just wasn't thinking about routes, it was a demo app, so I just threw some names routes in there for demo purposes, it was a take-home), along with some "duplicated" code that I thought was justified but never got to explain (I personally think extracting this into another method would be a pre-optimization that would need to be undone when the methods diverged, something I thought would be likely under the admittedly fabricated business requirements). I did have what I though was good testing, the reviewers did complement that along with some aspects of the app in their review.
Sorry, don't mean to give you my sob story, I just... I'm at the point where I wouldn't mind a crack at these jobs but just feel like maybe it's not an effort that's going to pay off (I mean, how much more time do I really want to spend on the kind of problems in cracking the coding interview? I actually feel like I got something out of studying it and preparing, but going back over and over, nah... maybe other people retain this stuff better than I do, and you know, maybe that does actually say something about suitability for these jobs).
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It would probably be an interesting article to delve into what accounts for the difference between the Bay Area's $227,000 median (which sounds about right) and the $400K-$500K that 5 years of experience gets at the top of your list. The difference is striking, essentially paying double the median amount for moderately experienced employees.
That's easy: most people aren't senior/staff engineers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can we please stop with the hyperbole? $200k in the bay area is emphatically not scraping by. You can live on your own, without roommates, save money and have a social life if you have a $200k income in SFBA. What people (especially on HN) think "scraping by" looks like is getting a little nuts. Just because you can't have an opulent lifestyle and a cheap five bedroom house doesn't mean you're struggling. $200k in SF…
I agree. Whenever someone points out high cost of living, they mention high rents. Is $3000 per month a good estimate for bay area? or am I underestimating. This is about $2000 a month higher than reasonable rent. This means, your annual cost of living increased by $24,000. $24,000 per annum is the difference between a small town, and bay area. Am I missing something? Do you pay for apples $20 a lb instead of $2-5 a…