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My offer numbers from big companies (teamblind.com)
193 points by non_sequitur on Dec 4, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 288 comments



It seems standard way to get a great compensation is to sit down and exercise all the run-of-the-mill algorithmic questions because that will matter the most in the end. Further optimisation could be made by being less fearful about negotiating the offer. Asking for 10% more would never hurt [1].

I am not a fierce critic of BigCo. interviewing practises but it seems a little disappointing that coding side-projects, contributing to open source, and writing mean so little in getting hired.

[1]: https://medium.com/we-are-yammer/how-i-negotiated-for-an-add...


This is true. I have around 6 years of experience and when interviewing recently I tried two approaches:

1) Not preparing myself by reading on data structures and algorithms. Just relying on my solid experience to carry me.

2) Spending couple of hours evening before interview to quickly go through data structures (array, linked list, hashmap, stack, queue, binary trees), algorithms (searching binary search trees, merge sort etc) and writing quick implementations of couple of most common algorithms you get asked about during interviews (just to have fresh "muscle" memory to be able to quickly write an implementation on the whiteboard with confidence).

Approach 1) did not really work well for me. After I switched to 2) the interviews got much better for me and offers started coming.

So I'd suggest even if you are very experienced and have a decade of experience, don't rely on that being enough. Spend a day before interview refreshing your memory on computer science fundamentals, try to memorize Big O cheat sheet. And you will be much more likely to get offer.


Even though I've not been in interviews for a couple of years now I still read from time to time something on the basics of algorithms and data structures to keep it "fresh" in my mind.

I go from re-reading Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual (I prefer his writing style over more formal textbooks like CLRS or Sedgewick's) to a more easy to digest piece when I'm really not in the mood for formality (last one was this week with "A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms").

It helps me to refresh it with different styles of writing as I can go from a very broad overview to the details if/when I want but I always have the basics in my head.

I hope I won't go for another interview soon though, it's really tiring, I have 12 years of experience now and I still dread just thinking about going through the process again.


I think having a tier 1 college degree matters the most even in getting an interview, atleast here in India. This is from my experience of seeing increasing job posts having tier 1 college degree as requirement and colleagues I know having good college degree having no difficulty in getting interviews(github code, portfolio etc really doesn't matter)


Not true for a 5+ years experience. The scene is changing fast. Github is a plus and hacker rank interviews are getting adopted in almost all new startups.


It's because the vast majority of candidates, including a lot of very good ones, will do none of those things.


Work will have much more in common with said open source efforts than with all those algorithmic challenges though.


A good chunk of these people will be good engineers that cannot talk about or show the stuff they worked on at their previous job. And those places specifically ban them from making apps or working on open source and they will be hard workers that work 40-50+ hours a week. Maybe they have kids too.

How do you interview these people?

I agree, algo interviews are annoying and I wish it wasn't there. If it wasn't it would make switching jobs a lot faster. But thats what it is. The suggested alternative of portfolio work has it's own problems, the same with homework problems.

Unfortunately, even places that have you write code with the internet still have an algo inteview or two.


I had an interviewer ask my for some code samples. Conveniently it was the day after I accepted another offer, but that was a definite no bueno for me, I don't contribute to open source, and I was hardly going to send them some code samples from my previous job.


Sure, but you need to be able to produce a work product example of some sort in lieu. Most people can.


I guess I need to move to Silicon Valley. These numbers are insane for two years and an undergrad degree. I have 32 years experience and I don't get these kinds of offers. This is either complete BS or the guy is a savant. Something smells fishy here.


Don't do it. Silicon Valley is more favorable for the inexperienced, in part because they are a blank slate that can be more easily coached. His interviewing skills could be too notch regardless of number of years of professional experience. On top of that, there is a huge bias with interviewers to expect much more interview performance from those with more years of experience. The local industry favors the young in so many ways.

Also, don't forget about the cost of living. With 140k per year salary, about 10 percent of that (for me) was money that didn't go to taxes or bills. I have 15 years of experience (and I look young).

It's definitely a different kind of experience, so if you're feeling adventurous, do it! Just don't expect it to be fun, and be sure to do your own homework on whether there is a realistic market for a company's product if it's a startup (especially if it is Pre-Series-B). And, for the love of all that is good, don't work for any CEO under age 25. They are probably not the next Mark Zuckerberg.


If you want those offers, most of those companies are more than happy to fly you out for an onsite interview. Get 3 San Francisco weekends out of your onsites, and see if you can get this kind of pay.

Practice basic algorithms. The guys at these firms aren't nearly as smart as they think they are so you can comfortably stop after part III of the "Introduction to Algorithms" (the R. Rivest one) book (which is about 1/3 of the actual book, but like half the text is exercises, so in total this is like maybe 150 normal pages of theory, which you can condense down to 3 really dense ones, which is a good exercise by itself. Make sure to have actually written those data structures in C++ or Java (Python if you must), with tests, and if you want to ace, with benchmarks. Of course you could super-plus ace and get to part 6 or so)

And yes, the "real" way to learn software engineering is not a good way to ace these interviews. The author and maintainer of 10 years of a VM system you guys all know about, who codes and designs circles around the best engineer you've ever heard of failed the big G interview (also good enough that using some connections managed to get that reversed and an offer extended anyway). Like most jobs, it's not about actual ability, it's about knowing the "magical" bit of theory that doesn't matter in practice, but is effectively a lock on the door.

Every last bit of it you can find extensive explanations on youtube for. Don't get distracted :). There's also a free coursera course. If you don't want to follow the time schema on coursera, download the course videos on piratebay.

Oh and for academic CS candidates. Please do remember: Stanford is a LISP school, not a Haskell school. If in any book you're training for these interviews with you see the words "dependant typing", you immediately slam the book shut and make SURE you don't open it again until after the interview. Sad, but you use that stuff, your interviewer won't understand and you'll get dinged. Yes, really. Don't go into theory that you can tell your interviewer doesn't know about beyond "oh yes, I know about some stuff relating to x". DO NOT talk for 40 minutes about advanced theory your interviewer doesn't understand.

Oh and one last thing. Give a small amount of thought to how you appear to others. You might be the best engineer on the planet, but if your interviewers all write that on the feedback form, they'll pass on you. You may have 10 years of experience and get interviewed by a 2 months hire (usually 2 years, but 2 months can happen). If you proceed to shout at the guy about how his person being there disrespects you ... things won't go well. Be friendly, be approachable. Talk about your cat, but for 5 minutes at most (not for 50).

Also, you can get a small plus next to your name by asking to get referred.


I’d fail all of these interviews.

I have never worked like an “engineer”. My brain takes information from many channels, I let it congeal, then I create solutions.

This means that I’m terrible at algorithms and patterns, but highly creative with real-world solutions.

I believe companies need both kinds of technical people (drone and creative), but I’ve only been in a few places that actually understand that.


The only solutions you need to come up with are things that closely resemble the answers to questions in the book I mentioned.


They seem a bit higher than what I would normally expect for 2 year experience; sometimes a successful startup and some salary negotiations can give you a boost.

But recall: $1 USD (SFO) != $1 USD (Almost anywhere else).

And there are some other downsides, you work very long hours in a company of 70%+ men. I think quality of life in South Bay for most isn't as nice as much less affluent places. It depends on your cup of tea, I guess.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...


True, but the total compensation here is at or above 250K annually. Most places in the US won't break 100K with 2 years of experience, and the cost of living is less than 2.5x as much. In other words, you still come out well ahead.


Maybe. But checkout Austin cost of living https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare... and stack overflow careers https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&l=Austin%2C+TX%2C+Unit....

That's essentially a parallel move if you consider nerdwallet doesn't consider local tax rates (very high in SFO vs 0% in Texas).


Again though, I don't know anyone 2 years in making 134K (the Austin-equivalent of 250K in SF) in Austin. I know more than one person 2 years in making that much in SF.

And you're also ignoring that CoL calculators bias against high CoL areas in a few important ways.


When I had 2 years exp, I was offered 125k at a company in Austin. Not 134k, but I imagine that figure isn’t impossible


At my BigCo, I am working maybe slightly more than 40 hours/week on average, and mainly due to unfortunate circumstances. Otherwise it’s pretty relaxed - I did mostly 5-6 hour days last week for example, and that includes meetings where I had to take company shuttles to get around to a different building.

Also for comp, keep in mind that he is getting that sort of comp with two years of experience - I have met people with even less experience getting similar numbers (I know one with less experience with non-technical degree making even more). If you have the right experience/background, you can get such compensation. Just imagine what the comp is like when these people get experience under their belt at the big companies.


According to that site, I'd need to make over $200k to meet my same standard of living, but I still think someone with two years experience can't come close to my knowledge of software development. There are inherent limitations. Of course if the job is to write code without any comment about the big picture and without complaint about hours, then maybe it is competitive. And that signing bonus? That just doesn't translate to the Midwest at all.


We just bought a 5 bedroom, 3-1/2 bathroom house with a nice size separate office in the northern suburbs of Atlanta with about 2800 square feet. Brand new build for $335,000 with all of the niceties. I've looked on Zillow, the same square footage, much older home, would be around 2-4 million at least in San Francisco.


Yup, this is the major difference. The COL numbers can be explained away, but if you want space now and a retirement later then you can get by with much less work outside SF.


In Chicago, it's fairly common to take a regional 50 to 75 minute train ride into the city from a distant suburb. Is there anything like that for Silicon Valley? Can you get an hour away by train and lower housing costs?


I can only speak for Atlanta, but the state of public transportation is abysmal from the burbs. True the train system is great to get to certain parts of Atlanta - and I use the park and ride any time I'm going to the airport or going downtown, but people in the burbs fight tooth and nail against an easy transfer system that will allow "them" to come up here.

And don't let me get started ranting about why the majority of white collar workers even need to come in to work as often as we do just for appearances.


Sure. Live in the Eaat Bay and BART in.


How about that. Clean 1br for around $1500/month and 10 minutes from BART station. That's pricey, but workable.


That's actually cheap, depending on the BART station (not all are created equal), the size of the place, whether it's gated, and whether you mean 10 minutes walking or driving.


All else being equal 32 years experience will count against, you though --- and this is quite rational...

These companies want to hire for trajectory. If someone's gotten to a great level of skills 2 years out of university, that says good things about where they'll be in 5 or 10 years.


By your logic, all they say is "in 5 or 10 years you'll be a has-been".


Don't worry their tune will change when they are the one turning 40.


> And there are some other downsides, you work very long hours in a company of 70%+ men

Why is it a downside for someone who has no bias against men? Would you call a downside working for example as a registered nurse just because there are too many women?


Or working in a coal mine with over 90% men?


Is working in a company with 70%+ men really a bad thing, or are you just leaning on existing cultural biases?


Having a work culture that matches societal norms is just a healthy practice. It makes us all better people.


Whoa...such bias. Like working in a company of 70%+ males is a bad thing. Stop this madness please. The americans are known for working hard that's not a mystery.


These are reasonable numbers - a little high, but not if he negotiated since he had competing offers.

Silicon Valley salaries are pretty decent and I’ve heard of new grads getting 100k signing bonuses at Facebook.


No, they're par for the course in the bay area (well, among the set of companies that are oft-discussed on HN: FAMG and well funded startups).


I still find it a little hard to believe... When I was a new grad, I got offers from several of the companies you listed, and the comp didn't come close to OP's post. I can't imagine 2 years of experience and some negotiating changes the compensation that drastically.

Google, for example, offered a base salary just over 100k. Is the difference between level 3 and 4 (what I assume 2 years of experience gets you) really ~60%? The annual RSU difference is also drastic, as OPs offer was 100k in stock annually.

Note: I'm calculating the 60% by looking at annual salary + stock + target bonus each year.


Google base is 110K for a new grad L3. This isn't a 70% difference, its a ~30% difference.

Total comp for a new-grad Googler who doesn't negotiate at all will be 110K base +18K bonus + 25K stock annually = ~153. That's without negotiating at all. Negotiation can push that across 200K annually in extreme cases. From that perspective, its not as gargantuan a leap. And similarly, I expect that this person was able to negotiate their google offer, so it would be higher than the "default" for an L4.


Right, I was calculating the difference across total comp. OPs total comp is ~261k per year (140 + 21 + 100), so compared against the number you listed, it's almost exactly +70% (261 / 153 = ~1.71).

I edited it to 60% to account for negotiations (assumed +10-15k annually), but I didn't think there was that much room at the new grad level. I remember Google being very inflexible on base, and didn't think you could get 200k annually with just negotiating (which would involve tripling the initial stock grant you listed, assuming that base is inflexible).

Even still, are the bands truly that wide across L3 and L4? I suppose I'm most astonished that the median L3 and top of L4 are that wide apart. Thank you for all the information.


Indeed, Google is inflexible on base, but they're well known (or at least I have it on fairly good authority) that they will match total comp of new grad offers from various finance firms, which have first year comp at ~200K.

And as to your second question: a rule of thumb that I think exists is that total comp approximately doubles every 2 levels, so you get a ~40% increase per level on the median. Keep in mind that a new grad offer is not the median of L3, but the bottom.


Sounds high to me, but not BS-high. Just a bit surprising to see 160 base. <130 would be more commensurate with 2yrs exp.


Before you do that, take a look at these:

Taxes: https://imgur.com/a/s3SVY (Not sure if imgur links are allowed here, but I couldn't find a website that would let me calculate an estimated paycheck and share the link)

Rent: https://sfbay.craigslist.org/d/apts-housing-for-rent/search/...

Car Insurance: https://imgur.com/a/3UgPw

Public Transit Options (https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/49dfm6/poor_public...)


Nope definitely not fishy. I'm 2 years out of college and $180k salary + 250k RSU. SF is expensive these days. And also remember California grabs 9% of your income so it goes down by a lot


Also, remember there are tax brackets. So you won’t be taxed at 9% for all your salary. If you made 180k, your CA tax rate is 7.53%.


Ah yes you're correct. 9% is the marginal tax bracket


These numbers are real, at least for Silicon Valley. There's nothing fishy when you take into account the cost of living here and the constant demand for engineering talent that's up to date.


Not fishy at all. The answer is A), move to sillicon valley (or work remote for a company there... many friends to that)


403 Error.

TLDR the author had 2 years experience

1) Google - 140k base, 107.5k RSUs, 50k sign on, 15% bonus

2) Facebook - 160k base, 75k RSUs, 70k sign on, 10% bonus

3) Lyft - 170k base, 180k RSUs, 20k sign on

4) Dropbox - 162k base, 114k RSUs, 10k sign on

5) Airbnb - 152k base, 75k RSUs, 13.5k sign on

6) Palantir - 150k base, 51k stock options, 25k sign on, 25k bonus


I cringe every time I see Palantir still on options when their 409a valuation must be very close to their preferred price at this point.


From what I have read about the potential Palantir IPO in 2019, they might be valued less than current 20 billion valuation if they IPO, potentially much less. It will depend on how well they do in 2018, that will be key year if they are going for 2019 IPO.


> 2. What's your background?

> Male. Two years of professional experience. Bachelors. Non-ivy league school. Previously from a unicorn startup. I'm mentioning these because people ask, not that I think they matter.

Being an alumni from unicorn startup is my guess on why he got these offers.

People are obsessed with salaries and positions which I think is unhealthy. But what I find ironic is that I have always heard the rich talk about how money can't buy happiness or how you should take risks from people who have some kind of backing - monetary/family or like here how background doesn't matter, even with evidence like unicorn or referrals.

Edited for some clarity.


Money can absolutely buy a lot of contributing factors to Happiness. However it can't solve your unhappiness.

Also not having money will often cause unhappiness.


You're as wise as your username.

To add to your points, money used to invest in experiences with loved ones will certainly add to happiness.


This is really interesting because "it can't solve your unhappiness" "not having money will often cause unhappiness"

So by definition, having money will not solve your unhappiness caused by not having money :)


From a practical point of view, SF is expensive to live in so being 'obsessed' with salary might just be practical. Being able to know the range your in is also good, regardless of location, for not being taken advantage of, especially if you're young and new to the business world.

I think beyond salary, maybe you meant money in general or the social status that having a lot of it confers. That can be a particular obsession that is not healthy for a person or society in general.

Also, there are people obsessed with titles as status, which can be funny. A former co-worker made a stink about not getting a 'promoted' to a certain title level. At her next year's review, she finally did and she was ecstatic. She was doing the same job with the same duties and getting paid the same. But she had the title.


I'm not sure, I work at one of those companies and the numbers sound about right for 2-4 yrs out of undergraduate.


It always strikes me as odd at how much HN complanies about hiring practices in tech. Spend a few weeks with Leetcode and CTCI and you have a decent shot at salaries in this range at the BigCo's (depends on location of course).

What other industry has it's interview process so transparent with such high rewards?


If you have a job and any kind of social life, going through 200~300 questions like OP is going to take you more than a few weeks.

A lot of people complain because this is the very example of cargo culting, you hire people who went through the same questions and reject those who haven't, even though it has no bearing on their ability to do the job.


Dude, any other job that pays remotely in the same range requires way more BS than doing 200-300 questions. If people want to make more they should just shut up, put their heads down for however long it takes, and signal whatever bullshit is required. That takes way less time than going back to school. If it were easy everyone would do it and doing it would be worthless.

Want to work in finance? Have fun doing boring shit and working long hours for years. Doctor? Blow your 20s on 4 years of school + several more years of residency and maybe a fellowship. Lawyer? First, get into a good law school then spend an enormous amount of time working to get your billable hours in. And if you're a woman and want kids, good luck balancing all that with starting a family.


Sure but you are forgetting a key factor. Once you get Google/FB/Amazon (or to a lesser extent even a unicorn like Netflix/Airbnb/Dropbox etc) on your CV, that will help you tremendously in your career.

You will get shortlisted for top jobs and bombarded by opportunities by recruiters forever and you will be able to skip any screenings and phone interviews and just go for final onsite interview mostly.

Investing several weeks or couple of months once might be worth it as you will reap benefits for a long time, perhaps until retirement.

You need to consider this before you decide not to spend the time to go through CTCI etc.


I've had interviews with most companies you mention. Getting in touch with a recruiter and passing the phone screenings hasn't really been a problem.

Maybe I'm not smart enough, but on-site rounds are a different story. I've practiced CTCI and solved my fair share of questions on Leetcode. Yet I find pretty hard to get back into it on a short notice. It's not a one-time investment. I assume I'm not the only one since

- The on-site to offer conversion ratio is typically between 6:1 and 8:1 at such companies.

- Most people do better with practice. It implies that a standardized process is biased towards people who have the opportunity and time to interview a lot for fun. (Some companies let teams do their own hiring though, where this is less of an issue).

Not everyone lives in the valley or in a place with a high concentration of tech companies. At least the Microsoft-era questions such as "how much would you charge to clean all the windows in Seattle" were more equally silly and unfair to everyone, including outsiders.


Well I applied for a job at both Netflix & Twitch and never heard back from them. I think if I had Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon on my CV I might have gotten more recognition. Just my personal opinion, I could be wrong.

Funny thing is, I have been called by Google, Amazon and FB recruiters in London couple of times. But I never went for onsite interview. I figured they can't really match contractor pay and they only outsource "shitty" jobs to London (I told recruiters my contractor rate and asked them if they can match/beat it and answer was no).


FB London has many teams doing interesting stuff. I'm not sure about Google (Zürich is bigger and pays more anyway) or Amazon.

Netflix got back to me within a couple hours after a one-click application on their careers page! Unfortunately I had to prioritize other companies at that time, we put things on hold due to the visa situation in the US and I never got the chance to have a technical interview.

Before I left Berlin, Twitch seemed to be hiring engineers there.


Yeah, but pay in London is mediocre compared to contracting (for FB and GOOG).

I applied to US. I was never interested in moving to Berlin.


This is such a good point.

Imagine you discovered an opportunity for arbritage in currency exchanges, for example. A normal person might quickly act to start printing money before the market corrects and the opportunity ends.

Meanwhile, programmers have noticed that being able to solve algorithmic quizzes with a smile is a free ticket to an oversized salary. Their collection reaction? Disgust and defiance!

As you say, people in other professions would probably be happy to replace their black box interviews with a set of relatively uniform tests. All a programmer has to do to get a job is ring up a recruiter and then complete some algorithmic challenges. From the perspective of the programmer, why do we want to replace this?


Because one would want to work with people that are good at the work they do, not just good at the interviewing.


I complain about it because it's absurd. It's also actually not that transparent, because for all it supposedly is there is still the bias against age, gender and a number of other things that no matter how Leet your Code interview is will get you rejected.


What is CTCI? Search engines didn't return any results that make sense.


Cracking the Coding Interview. It's a book by a software coder about how to pass code interviews at places like Facebook and Google. I suspect the author makes more money on the book than she ever did as a coder.


Thanks. I knew of the book, but not the acronym.



I'm in the southeast. 24, self-taught, no degree (I was able to make it through Triplebyte, though I'm not persuaded that actually means anything). 2009-2015 IT/helpdesk/sysadmin, and 2015-2017 more dev/devops, all with a local medium (~350 employee) retail-ish business that grosses about $30m annually if I had to guess. I quit this year for a number of reasons (depression), but I mainly worked on automation. A collection of scripts I wrote (and documented!) saves about 30 days' worth of the team's time annually. I made $22.50/hour. The numbers in this post are unfathomable to me.


A friend of mine dropped out of CC with a 1.9 at the age of 20. During/after he did 4 internships at top-tier companies making $8-9k a month in each one.

Now he’s choosing between FB, Google, Microsoft, a few other unicorns, and a tiny startup all with offers over $160k TC.

He’s incredibly smart, no question, but at the end of the day it’s all a game. For him, all it took was his first internship at a top-tier company to land future interviews and months of practice to get offers.


Switch companies more frequently. Each time you do, you'll make more.

The trick is, you're worth whatever the market is willing to pay. But the only way to find out is to go out on the market. Most people stick with the same job for years, meaning they only check their worth a few times. Hence low salaries.


IMO, the key to this is to also increase your responsibilities and skill level - which sounds like the OP has, but some people ignore. It's the difference between a 10% bump and 2x-3x moves early in your career. I also think it's worthwhile to find a good company - growth and culture - and then negotiate well as tech and domain knowledge will make you less replaceable.

One thing that gets ignored on the west coast is how to specialize without hurting your career. In the southeast, we don't have endless tech companies, if you specialize poorly, you could get stuck with relocation being the only answer.


I think location matters the most


I live in the UK, to me these numbers are insane. How are these salaries at that work experience possible? Is the pay increase from then on slow? Are these salaries sustainable for the industry long term? I know experienced professionals who would be considered successful in the UK who finish their careers nowhere near this level of salary (not programmers but certainly engineers). I’m astounded.


The numbers are meaningless without knowing the cost of living. Here in the Netherlands I also make a lot less (Ph.D. working in bioinformatics) and probably pay a lot more taxes. But my mortgage is my only dept and if I get cancer I can stop working for the treatment and have no other worries than the actual cancer. When I lose my job I can still pay for my house and food and school for both kids. University is about 2000 euros a year here. There are more things than net salary.


Agreed. Nobody takes into account the total loss of social security in the US. Healthcare, retirement, child aid, education, .... If anything, I'd be upset if I were living in the US about other jobs not earning at least that much, to make ends meet, particularly given the huge risks everyone has to shoulder on their own.


In the UK my wife and I loose 25-30% of our pay checks to tax and national insurance and I would imagine the cost of living in the UK is comparable to the US. Our household income is considered pretty high in the UK as well so it’s not that we are badly paid in UK terms


What kind of healthcare facilities do you get from the government?


At least here in the Netherlands the minimal, obligatory package is about 100 euros a month. this is with 375 of own risk (doesn't include doctors visits). This package will basically make sure you'll never get a real surprise, except when you have something with your teeth, oddly. Some cheap drugs are not covered. And for example there are sometimes discussions of whether new immuno-oncology related drugs that go well over 100.000 a year per patient will be in this package.

For people with low income there is "zorgtoeslag", they get sponsoring from the government.


In the UK you get everything for free regardless of work history or other factors. Every prescription has a £12 charge, topping out at a maximum of about £150 a year. Dental treatments are also normally charged at a low rate.


and probably pay a lot more taxes

This is a misconception about the US. Compared to Europe, engineers tend to proportionally pay as much taxes, and sometimes even a bit more (!) in the US.

You get tremendously LESS for your taxes though, both at the city/state level and national level.


That's not a misconception. The US has a far more progressive tax system than Western Europe. People earning $40k to $80k in the US pay extremely little in taxes versus most comparable nations. If you're making $47,000 in the US, you're paying near a 10% effective federal income tax rate (before any deductions). That income level, which is the median US full-time income, is far higher than nearly every other median income on earth (except for a handful, such as Switzerland, Norway etc). At $80,000 in the US, you're paying a 16% effective federal income tax rate. If you're making $80k at a job in the US, you're also almost guaranteed to be getting a solid benefits package on top of that including healthcare.

In systems with fully socialized healthcare, the middle class pays far higher taxes to cover their health insurance. That's why Scandinavia's tax systems are so regressive for example. In the US, the middle class is taxed far less, and they simultaneously get health coverage from their job. The top 20% are paying 95% of all income taxes in the US. Serious income taxation doesn't kick in until you get well above $100,000.

All of these US engineers are getting nearly entirely / entirely subsidized health coverage, which is extremely lucrative and is not accounted for in the pay numbers. US healthcare costs twice as much as it does in eg Britain or Germany, so if your employer in the US covers the cost of that, as is typically the case with an engineer, that's worth another $10,000 to $30,000 per year depending.


Your not including the flat ~%15 social security / medicare taxes that you get, the ~%3-%9.5 state taxes. New york has city taxes if you live there making your high income.

Also not including the ~%1 or more property tax rate, which doesn't really exist at the same level vs. places like the UK. That can add $2000-$10000 per year to your tax bill.


At $47k, Federal income tax + FICA + average state + local + deducations, you're looking at about 18%-20% all-in.

The VAT tax also doesn't exist in the US, you're not accounting for that, and it's dramatically higher in most of Europe than the US sales tax. In the US we think a 6% or 7% sales tax is high; in Europe 15% to 20% VAT rates are common.

We don't need to go over all of that however, we have the disposable income figures to reference. The US median disposable income figure is among the highest:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/05/through-an-a...

The US is better of in terms of median income than all of Europe except for a few nations (that gets even more exaggerated if you select for full-time employment):

https://mises.org/blog/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-state...

And per the OECD, when it comes to taxation progressiveness, the US is the leader among developed nations:

https://taxfoundation.org/news-obama-oecd-says-united-states...


Interesting, thanks for the write up.

My post came from the fact that as an engineer in Silicon Valley about 45% of my salary goes in taxes, which is more than if I were an engineer in my native European country (where obviously the pay would be much less).


As a percentage comparison to your salary, what are you getting in benefits (including healthcare coverage)?

If you're making $200,000 and getting $60,000 per year in total non-base-salary benefits, that makes a meaningful difference in the taxation percentage picture. In my experience, Europeans properly always talk about what they get for their taxes (eg healthcare), while Americans rarely discuss that they get an entire other compensation set to go with their salary and it's excluded from income comparisons (which is extremely relevant, because of how very expensive US healthcare is, ie that it's not cost comparable to other developed nations).


This is what I wonder also. It's like here in Australia, where blue-collar truck drivers can get paid $200k/year. It doesn't seem sustainable... because it isn't.

Edit: This has resulted in what people are calling a "two-speed" economy - http://archive.treasury.gov.au/documents/1421/HTML/docshell....


I knew a 19 year old girl who was driving trucks in a mine in Western Australia. She was on $180K/year. She gave it up after a year though apparently, and I don't know where she is these days so cannot ask her why she left a job that was paying that much only a couple of years out of high school.


I can give you some direct insight on that.

First of all, she would have experienced severe gender bias. I don't think it needs an explanation when you consider a demographic of mostly low-to-moderately-educated men in the workforce and everyone living in fairly close quarters.

Secondly, the conditions are harsh. You work around 14-hour days in 35-45 degree C heat. This wears out people very quickly. It can get so hot that rubbish bins catch on fire themselves, and you can cook an egg on your car's roof.

And third, people get homesick due to the rosters - usually 2 weeks on, one week off (or similar). It disrupts relationships and takes a big personal toll on people.

There are a lot of people that do it for years - but the majority pull a year or two and then leave.


I figured it would have been something like this. She was a fairly attractive young lady. Very capable, but I am thinking she would have copped a fair amount of harrassment just due to her gender.

I am several male friends in the mining and offshore oil rig game too, and those jobs appear to suit young people without a family and little social life. Once relationships and kids come into the equation, that shift regime just doesn't seem to be compatible.


I know someone in Brisbane who did the mining thing who went to General Assembly and accepted the first job he could get his hands on - he knew mining wasn't sustainable.


I work in this industry and the women I've talked to don't seem to feel gender bias is that much of an issue. Your second and third points are much bigger factors - in some parts of the industry (admin, environmental management, safety, camp support - ie. desk jobs in airconditioned offices) I'd guess 40%+ of the workforce would be women, but other roles with more physical discomfort (mechanical fitters, civil works, machine operators) are almost exclusively male.

Depression and suicide are a huge risk factor for FIFO workers. It's shit work.


The rotation doesn't sound that bad to be frank. The oil and gas industry has been operating that way for decades.


I've seen rosters between 7/9days and 3/4 weeks - It does vary depending on the site. The main difference though, is that oil and gas is literal luxury to working in an iron ore mine... My ex partner used to be a chef on one of the Atwell platforms, and just the difference in food is unbelievable haha.


> where blue-collar truck drivers can get paid $200k/year.

Remember that this is for a specialist driving a haul truck on a remote mine site, working 12 hour days on a 3-in-1 swing or worse (ie. three weeks on, one week off, only one day off out of 14). You literally have no life.


The equivalent in the UK that I can think of are Pimlico plumbers in London, over £100K. But it’s a very small subset of an otherwise normal industry pay wise


In Switzerland my salary is a lot less (in terms of numbers only). However, I feel like my quality of life is much higher here than it was in the US.

You could pay me 300k a year and I'd never want to go back to the Bay Area ever again.


[flagged]


Do you mind not posting off-topic rants on Hacker News?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Wow. Seems like you feel personally attacked. I noticed that you defend working in the US a lot in this thread... not sure what is up with that. But I hope you can somehow relax about this discussion...

And btw. I never said everyone should live there. I said I do not want to live in the US.


I am european and I work in Europe. No need to explain I totally understand why one would want to work in Switzerland and not in the US.I just felt like giving a different perspective on how working and living is in Europe.


Couple thoughts: 1) This engineer is getting offers from FB, Goog, etc. They are definitely in the top 1% of engineers in terms of interviewing ability if not in terms of engineering ability. 2) No salary increases do not slow down. A friend of mine has 4 years of experience, is a top 1-5% engineer/interviewer and had multiple offers at 350-500k. 3) Sustainable? No. This is a supply/demand issue and supply is increasing rapidly (more CS grads, etc)


I think they actually do slow down in most cases. While some engineers may continue to get promoted and get large bumps I think most are probably in the 150k-200k (base+bonus) range after a couple years.


FWIW, my BigCo has base comp in that range for the second lowest level. I think comp gets even higher after a few years, but there is pressure at these companies to reach a certain tier in a couple of years. For competant engineers able to learn & adapt, they will reach it just fine, but I imagine there is a percentage who struggle as well.


Facebook and Google are making over $1 million in revenue/yr per employee. They can afford to pay this.


revenue != money to spend


Well in this case, for Google and Facebook, it is pretty close to that.

Facebook has 86% gross profit margins.

Google's are a little lower but still incredible, at 60%.

For the most part, they print as much profit as they want to. Google could get rid of half of their staff and just print $40-$50 billion per year in profit off of search (while keeping various critical moat pieces like Android). They have nearly 80,000 employees now, the majority of that is a combination of bloat and efforts at expansion into other non-search things.

To put into perspective how hilariously profitable Google (the search business) is, they're now capable of doing $35 to $40 billion per year in operating income. Last quarter they generated $8.7 billion in operating income for that segment. Google's (search biz) capital expenditures were a mere $3.5 billion out of $27 billion in sales. If they cared to do it, they could push margins to the ceiling.


He was mistaken. It's almost a million in profit.


Making more CS majors doesn't decrease the salary someone needs to live in the Bay Area/Seattle/New York. As long as FAANG insists on engineers living in cities with housing crises and minimal supply growth, I just don't see the floor coming down much.

Entry-level engineers already live far away with roommates. What are they going to do if salaries fall? SROs? Bunks? Doesn't seem like people who are generally capable of knowledge work would take that deal.


Consider that it might be the reverse. Why are we paid so low? How come companies extract so much profit from UK developers? Can businesses get away with being much less efficient with dev resources around the world vs. USA?


Successful US technology businesses tend to detach from the rest of the world, they stop becoming very good comparison points (eg vs a local or semi-local technology business in a given smaller market). They first have the US to massively scale into, which can be enough by itself to generate a vast business, then they tend to rapidly push global.

If you look at that list: Facebook (global), Google (global), Dropbox (global), Airbnb (global), Palantir (US military money). And then Lyft, which is going to push global.

And among some of the other giants: Microsoft (global), Amazon (global), Apple (global), Netflix (global), Oracle (global).

Many of the prominent start-ups in the US are then backed by the proceeds from all of that (further enabling lucrative start-up pay), and it keeps cycling upwards.

The point being, they scale and extract at a hyper global scale. That enables extremely unusual compensation.


Honestly, I think most development work in the UK is crap,and most of the small and medium-sized companies out there are producing bad software, slowly.

They can't afford to pay more. They offer bad salaries, they get people with low productivity and low reward expectations. The people running the company have low expectations of their engineers and the whole sorry mess just stumbles along barely holding its head above water.

(I have been contracting in the south-east these last 5 years, I've seen quite a few of these places)


I know many developers who have come to London for better jobs, but not many who are leaving the UK altogether. Are you including London on your assessment?


A lot less so than the rest of the country. And there are pockets of competence elsewhere I'm sure.

I don't know many people who have left the country for dev opportunities elsewhere either, and most I know eventually leave London for quality of life reasons. It's just my comment on the UK industry as I have experienced it in the south east and south of the country.


I think it's the same everywhere in Europe. Unless you are in a big metropolis with lots of financial power behind it, IT will be treated as a cost centre, salaries and quality will be sub par.

The same in Germany, if you are not in Berlin/Munich, most jobs in IT will be really bad. Not sure about US but I'd assume best jobs are in SF/NY/Seattle and other places will have "shitty" jobs compared to that.


I think there are two core parts of the issue here:

- he claims to be from a "unicorn startup" -- this matters a lot in SV for some reason

- my impression, in SV, years of experience against salary seems to be a skewed bell curve where >= 2 years is near optimal and >= 5 years is too much (for whatever reason)


Yes it’s sustainable — I remember reading somewhere that Apple could pay every employee almost a million dollars per year and still make a profit. You can do the math yourself, and you will be further blown away by just how wealthy our country and tech industry is.

As to how our companies make so much money? I’m sure it’s very complicated, but just look at the US economy and contrast it to more socialist economies as seen in Europe. The US economy is far from perfect, but for better or for worse, it’s very prosperous.


In addition to the US having lower taxes and fewer services I think there’s some sort of status thing going on in Europe/the UK with engineer salaries being lower than they’d be otherwise.

Engineers there seem to be viewed as the lower rung on the status ladder compared to management/sales/finance and are paid less on that metric alone. I think the US (particularly Silicon Valley) is better about respecting engineer talent.


One of my biggest surprises when moving to Europe was that engineers earn less (and are IMO less respected) than all types of managers, including but not limited to PMs.


That shouldn't be surprising. You will find this much with little research. Engineers are treated as blue collar workers in majority of world. There are couple of exceptions such as notably Silicon Valley and most big metro areas in US (New York for example), perhaps London in Europe. But these are just anomalies, prevailing consensus around the world is that engineering is blue collar work, just instead of shovel you use keyboard.


Well, I guess I’m glad we proved that “consensus” wrong.

I suppose this goes to show that just because the majority of the world has consensus on something non-scientific, does not make it the best decision or mindset.

Thankfully science is mostly immune to political and social biases when done correctly.


> That shouldn't be surprising. You will find this much with little research.

Elementary. Quite, Quite elementary. I yawn in unison with you old chap.


It's worth remembering that these numbers are essentially for contractors in UK terms.

No job security, no long-term promise of employment, if you don't fit what the company wants, you'll be gone with little or no come back.

This all leads to very long working hours, little or no holiday, and a different lifestyle than we have in the UK.

I know plenty of UK (and European) software developers who wouldn't dream of answering their phone about work after 5 or 6 in the evening. If you want $250k a year, you'll answer it at 3am.


None of these things are true at Google, Facebook or half the other places on OP's list. These companies will not fire you at will. You will go through at least 2 cycles of poor reviews and a performance improvement plan, it should be obvious at least a year out that you're not cutting it.

All of those companies have great benefits and generous holiday time. Some people have an oncall rotation, but they know what it is ahead of time. Others don't.


It's nuts compared to UK money isn't it?

But then the UK pays its programmers peanuts, more or less considers them blue collar, and wonders why it can't retain 'talent', AFAICT.


Well, but you cannot just compare with UK. That's just like comparing Silicon Valley with rest of US.

Compare Silicon Valley with London. It's still much worse in London but engineer salaries in London have been going up lately and it's definitely best place in Europe to be a software engineer.

£80-£100k is something you can get in London if you are good at your profession. It's not Silicon Valley obviously (mostly because concept of bonuses and RSUs does not really exist in London compared to SV). But as base salary, it's not bad.


Oh I agree it's a fine salary, but it is at the higher end (if we disregard contractors (like me)).

But the post is about someone two years past graduation! That's the mind-boggling thing to me. Those high-end London salaries are probably people with 10+ years behind them. I could be wrong about that but... I don't think so.


You are right. I am a long time London contractor too but am close to accepting a perm offer :)

I have even seen £120k offers for lead engineers but you have to be really talented and have exceptional record behind you.

Regarding experience I think 2 years is definitely not enough to reach that salary, you are right it's probably around 10 years of experience.

Unless you go contracting and then you can do it even very young. But then again, you get no RSUs, no bonus, no paid vacation or other benefits, have to deal with taxes and admin of your company, can be fired at will, high levels of stress...

I think that's a much worse deal than working for one of the FAANGs in Silicon Valley.


So what finally turned your head? A bit of security? More of a management/architect type role? Or just an obscene amount of money?

Because right now I still like the change and flexibility, and my thought towards "what happens next" are more about running my own software house or consultancy (more than a one man band like now)


I actually got a really good job offer in South East Asia for one of the big unicorns over there so I’m going perm but to a different continent :)

If I stayed in London I’d probably keep contracting. But yes I guess it would be good for my career to settle down for 3-4 years in a perm job to get that sort of experience.


Well programmed high end robots are a scarce commodity.

The reason Facebook needs 5000 robots to run/take care of the data of 1.5 billion people while the Indian or Chinese govt need about 2 million robots says all there needs to be said about the quality of the robot.


>Thankfully I had FB and Google referrals else I doubt I would have gotten a reply at all.


This is one of the things that really sucks about the industry. It is a new "boy's club", and if you know people in the club then the barrier to entry is easier (if you can code at a reasonable capacity).


The entry fee for a referral is striking up a single conversation at a conference. If someone from a big tech company is speaking at a conference, the fact that they are speaking isn't the primary reason for being present. They are there to recruit.


Just having a chat with someone at a conference is often not enough to get a referral tbh. I'd assume for a referral you need to know a person at least reasonably well, i.e. you know each other on first name basis and have been out for a beer or worked together on some open source project or something like that. I don't believe you can just walk to a person at a conference, talk to them to 15 minutes and then ask for their referral.


I was a bit brief on tactics. Yes. Don't just ask for a referral.

Tactics:

Understand that they are there to recruit. This should give you confidence. This isn't some weird game, you're not manipulating or tricking them. They are here for these conversations. Some soft-skill tactics don't work for everyone. If some/none of the below materializes or isn't your thing, it's alway okay to ask. "Are you doing any recruiting while in town? I'm interested in talking to someone at NeatCo."

If you can speak at the conference, that is preferable. If not, walking up and saying hi will work but it should involve you asking a well-informed question about the thing they are speaking about. Spend an hour before the conference researching their topic and come with something in mind: What lead company X to create Y? If someone were motivated, could they create ${interesting but not crazy new feature/thing} using Y?

If you don't have a question, just talk about the content of the talk. Tell them what you thought.

The person speaking on behalf of NeatCo will often bring another person with them. The speaker is the domain expert, the other person will often be someone capable of hiring. If they bring a +1, talk to that person as well.

The goal of your chat is to get any of: dinner invite, next-day coffee, straight up ad-hoc interview.


Typically the referrals are paid pretty well, from my experience most people in a BigCo will refer anyone with a pulse as long as it's not to their direct team.

I wouldn't even bother going to a conference for this, just find someone on LinkedIn who is a 2nd connection, InMail them (no need for an intro), mention your shared connection and that you're looking for a referral for [job spec link] at their company.


Hah, that assumes their current employer will let them go to conferences.


I'd take the day off for the prospect of $100k+ raise.


Yeah, but that just reflects the sad fact that working together with someone is a much better indicator of their quality than any interviewing process.

So a referral saying "I worked with X and he/she is really good" should outweigh most other things.


If you are applying local you can go to meetups and meet people and easily get in to interviews. The hard part is if you want to go to another city and have no contacts or networks. You can't really go to meetups there before you move. I've had to move twice for my wife's job, it's brutal losing two networks. Luckily I was able to work for my previous companies remotely. Then when I wanted to move on I attended meetups and got connected with the right people. Finding work remotely is also an option but it's really difficult getting responses. They get flooded with so many applicants you probably won't even get a reply.


Isn't this really all industries? Suppose you wanted to get into being a real estate broker. It's all about who you know.


Google referrals don't really help you get in; they do, however, make it easier for recruiters to notice you


Exactly, I think he should have started from this (and that unicorn experience). In other words, he's not just any young developer with 2 years experience.


This is how you know there isn’t actually a talent shortage in tech, despite what companies like to claim.


That, plus this:

>Previously from a unicorn startup

Still, must have been some referral for those kind of offers.


True, if big.

Anyone could write up such a Blind post. And when it comes to anonymously bragging via lies on the internet, there is no shortage of prior art.

To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if the growth rate of engineering applications to these bigcos has declined over the past few years. A decline in the supply of candidates relative to demand, among other factors, could lead to an increase in compensation per offer.

That being said, I'm still leaning towards this post being BS.


Not BS at all. Just negotiation and being good at interviewing.


But you get these posts on HN quite often with similar numbers. I'd assume all of them are not lying or using fake data to brag. If only some of them are telling the truth then the numbers are real which is why I tend to believe them.


The only thing about the post that seems off, is the experience level that's generating that income. It could happen though, it's not implausible. The income figures stand-alone are not abnormal for someone with several more years of experience.

We're looking at maybe 3.7% type U3 unemployment in 2018. The Fed's GDP Nowcast figure is projecting nearly 4% growth for the fourth quarter. Throw on corp tax cuts and possibly infrastructure spending in 2018, and the US economy might expand at something like 3.5% for all of 2018. There's a massive hiring rush going on around things like artificial intelligence, that is vacuuming up immense amounts of engineering talent (depleting the total pool for everything else). These salaries might get crazier yet.


Which is good for us (software engineers). I have noticed the same thing in Europe. Even though it's nowhere near Silicon Valley, I have noticed salaries in London rising faster than they used before. So there's definitely shortage of talent and market (supply / demand) seems to be reacting to this and driving salaries up.


Definitely. Incomes and growth are starting to pick-up in Europe and Japan (finally) as well. Much of the globe is in sync on this expansion. I'm not sure if that means we're getting close to the next recession pull-back, or if the global economy is finally fully pulling out of the great recession era. There are some indicators aggressively pointing both ways right now. I'd like to see it continue for a while yet just so workers can see a meaningful net wage gain vs 10-15 years ago. At least in the US, corporations can afford to give up some margin due to a tight labor market, given the profit boom over the last decade (plus the inbound corp tax cuts).


I hope Japan finally gets a break. They have been in a stagnation for such a long time and it had to be really tough for young people. There is already a sizable lost generation, Japan really needs to get some growth going so the new generation gets some economic boost (and is able to afford to raise a family) and doesn't become second lost generation in a row. That would be really bad.


I disagree with this line of reasoning, because exaggerated numbers are more likely to be make it to the front page of HN. In fact, the optimal lie (wrt the probability of it being upvoted) contains compensation claims that are just on the border of unbelievable.

If such claims were non-anonymous, they'd carry much more weight.


If you are making $100K in Albany, GA then to have same standard of living in SFO you need to make $201K: http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/index.html

So SFO/Bay area is that expensive. Most people don't think of that and assume that SFO requires modest 20% increase in cost of living. Absolutely not true. So before you get floored with these numbers you need to divide them by almost a factor of 2 for the corresponding standard of living.


10 years ago I was working for VMware in Palo Alto as an intern and my salary was $5.5k per month. They offered me a permanent position for $75k per year, but I decided to move back to Finland. I would say that those numbers in the article sound believable. Housing costs in the bay area are crazy.


Housing costs shouldn't really factor into what the company is willing to pay staff though. It costs the company the same amount regardless of how much it costs the employee to live.


Housing costs come in to play when trying to recruit and maintain talent. All cities do not have enough tech talent. Migrant tech workers consider housing costs when deciding which city to move too.

In addition, if salary does not increase with cost of living workers will leave.


Sure, I agree. One just needs to remember that when living in the bay area sizable chunk of that money goes to housing.


These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. I live in Zurich, Switzerland and I have a similar salary (~200K) but the high cost of living (which, I assume, is similar if not lower than the Bay Area) make my salary comparable to an "ok" salary in other European countries. Just to give you an idea: the overall cost of school + a nanny for 2 kids under 6 is around 70K year in Zurich.

As other have mentioned, the sign up bonus is quite awesome, but I assume is not the standard in the US either.

edited: nannies -> nanny


There are people in Zurich who live happily on 1500 CHF a month which would be 20'000 CHF a year, a tenth of what you're making: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1oeSs67myA

You might say "yeah sure, as a bachelor, it's easy to save money but with family it is expensive here". Well, I know a computer science PhD who lives in Zurich with his wife and two kids on 60k CHF a year (Phd salary).


Also living in Switzerland. I have to comment that ~200K is not "normal" salary here either. To be fair, most people also don't have a nanny for their kids (or more than 1 as you do), and do not pay for private school. Average salary for a Software Dev with >10 years experience in Zurich is somewhere around 130k - 150k.


There are no public Kinderkrippe in Zurich. If your kids are under 5, the only option is a private kita - and if live in Zurich you should know how pricey they are.

In any case, my point wasn't about "me". I was trying to highlight the fact that in certain places, a high salary is driven by other factors, such as higher-than-average cost of life, low security (Saudi Arabia), etc.


Bern, Switzerland here. I know plenty of people with families and sub-100k the are perfectly happy with their respective salary as well. I'd say it's a matter of personal spending habits what's an "ok" salary. After going back to uni, I'm also happy and ok with < 50k (of course this wouldn't be all that ok if I had kids rather than a cat).


Unless the culture is wildly different than here in the US I don't think it's reasonable to consider private school and nannies as part of "cost of living"... Those are both unnecessary luxuries.


In Zurich, there are no public kindergarten. The monthly fees ranges from 2.500 to 3K+ a month. A nanny is necessary, when both parents have a full time work and family is not around (like in my case).


I think what you are talking about are "Kindergrippen" (when kids are 2-3 years old). Kindergardens are public and free.

This Kindergrippen-age is really the only moment when kids in Switzerland cost you significantly more than in the rest of Europe.

Think it this way: From the actual kindergarden age (4 years old?) you won't pay anymore. It's even free to send the kid to the best technical university in mainland Europe, which is supposed to be ETH (think MIT of Europe)


Yes, my mistake, I meant kindergrippe (I have actually used the right word in a previous comment).

In any case, kindergartens are not entirely free. If the kids have to stay after 12.00 it gets very expensive.


Most people/families in the US don't hire nannies...



There was a question on gender and race in the article comments. I am wondering how much does this play in the numbers game? Do tech companies ask this in their application process (in SF, USA anyway)? Are they even allowed to? Can they find out? Do they have recruitment teams sniffing out applicant's social media to find out?

Sidenote: One of my favourite replies on the article comments:

> Can you share your gender and race?

>> OP is a female dwarf paladin


I'm somewhat confused by your question, but generally it's not a secret what gender someone is based on their resume/application. You may also be able to glean race from this. This information is rarely anonymized.

That said, the "numbers game" doesn't really start until after you pass the on-site, and any inherent bias likely occurs more frequently there since there are more opportunities (likely a single phone screener/resume screener, then 4-6 on-site participants).

From what I've seen in management in SV, bias tends to rear it's head more in the phase of considering on-site feedback in the topic "does this candidate fit in here?" before anything gets to the offer stage.

At the offer stage, the actual financial details are usually left to a different set of individuals, depending on the size of the company (hiring manager, HR, CTO, CEO, etc.). There's a different opportunity for bias here, but I think generally, it's smaller.


Well, with Western names, I guess a recruiter can guess at the gender, but with some Sub-continental or Asian names - that can be hard to do.

Which leads me to another question - Do people use pseudonyms to increase their chances of getting through initial screening of their applications?

(Anecdote: I had a (female) business mentor many years ago who said that she had trouble getting businesses to meet with her. Until she stopped using her full name on letters to company executives. She changed her signature from 'Anna Smith' to just 'A. Smith'. She said she then started getting lots of replies addressed to 'Dear Mr. Smith'.)


I suppose depending on where you're located, a name may be difficult to pinpoint gender. Though I think it's more common than not to be able to tell (or guess).

I think it's important to understand the context of SV, and especially the larger companies. Most companies are flooded with applications (less so on the referral side, which I think this post points to being useful a bit).

Because of this, most people applying seem to shotgun apply to many companies in hopes of having a good one respond in a reasonable timeframe.

It seems rare to have a tweaked resume per position, let alone per company. I would not be surprised if there were some people that choose to leave out some details from their resumes to avoid early bias, but I personally don't think it does much to help them, as they would likely face that bias eventually anyways. I don't, however, think it's particularly common to see this.

You do see the occasional "American-ized" name from time to time, where an individual from an Asian/South Asian, or other area where pronunciation differs greatly from the common US English, will adopt a pseudonym to be more easily accepted, pronounced, or not hear their name butchered by every person they work with. I also don't think this is overly motivated by avoiding hiring bias.

(Anonymized anecdote: a previous fellow I know is Chinese and his name is 'Xiang', but he goes by 'Jacob')


Depends. With Chinese people applying for jobs, for example, Chinese people have English first name as well as their Chinese first name. And they would use their English first name when applying for a job at US or other large international company. So you could definitely guess gender there.

Sub continental names I would agree, if you are European or American it might be difficult to guess the gender from name. But from the resume you might be able to guess it based on other information (lots of people put their photo on their CV which makes this a moot point obviously).


> Chinese people have English first name as well as their Chinese first name

I've always been intrigued by this. I assume they do this when they decide to travel to the West for work or study (in order to make it easier to communicate with locals), as opposed to being given dual names at birth?


I think it might depend on country. Mainland China I'm not sure about but in Taiwan/HK/SG I think parents choose a second "unofficial" English first name for their children. This is useful exactly for reasons of traveling, studying or working abroad or for multinational corps.


You can find out from the applicant's name.


These seem in line with what I've seen from friends and acquaintances. I've also heard 100K signing bonuses to new grads at FB. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-rationale-behind-Facebooks-1...


It can go up to $125k if you negotiate. I’ve heard even higher but I’m skeptical of those claims.

I’m just sad I can’t get even a fraction of that at my Big4.

Source - multiple friends at FB.


Well this makes me feel terrible... Your sign on was probably for more than I've made in my professional career.

My first job after graduating 10 years ago was for 45k per year.

I have had an awful lot of bad luck since graduating and have yet to be paid more than that since.

Every job I've had paid progressively less, always took them cause I needed the job.

My last programming job paid $14 an hour.

Can anyone offer advice on breaking out of the cycle of terribleness?

I'm a US citizen, bachelors in CS, live in Tx.


Regionally: The wealthiest companies pay the highest salaries. In the tech world, those live on the west coast or the east coast. Texas probably isn’t going to give you much room to grow in the tech world.

Some of it is regional, and some of it will depend on what you do. The best salaries will go to the most valuable roles, so you may need to find out how to develop a specialty to make your work more valuable.

$14/hour is really low. I don’t know what exactly you do, but for most programming that’s below the market rate. If you can give me more info I’d be happy to help with advise where I can.


I understand that Texas isn't going to pay well, I'm anchored to a wife who has a PhD with extremely limited opportunities that pay decent. So here I am.

The $14 was way below market, some web work, some IT, and some updating a program that I had built for them a year earlier. I needed the cash and it beat flipping burgers or working retail. The place was interesting, people did Bio-Research. I was trying to get my foot in the door and get a better job with them. About that time my wife took a job that brought us back to Texas, outside of San Antonio.


> Texas probably isn’t going to give you much room to grow in the tech world.

Outside of Austin, Texas definitely isn't a tech hub, but there's tons of work in energy and health care, and the pay isn't bad. Your average tech worker in Dallas or Houston is probably on par with the average SV tech worker, when you adjust for cost of living.


$14 is really low for programming in TX. Interns in (Houston/Dallas/Austin) get paid more than that. I think you just to look what's actually there, especially in the heath and energy business.


I know $14 is low, but I was trying to get my foot in the door. I will not live in Houston again. I'd be willing to live in Austin or Dallas, but I need an offer to be able to move.


Where are you in Texas? I'm in Houston, and those numbers don't jive with my experience (since 2000, making $30 an hour in the lowest paying jobs, and making well more than that on a regular basis)


The 45k was in Houston. Worked 10 months before the company decided to offshore everybody but sales.

Took that job because I had been looking for a year and this was the first reasonable offer. Didn't negotiate cause I really needed the job, found out after a promotion that I was lowest paid employee in the shop by 20k.


What languages do you work in? I'm not trying to belittle you, but at the same time, I'm trying to understand how you've received such small offers. Your experience is EXTREMELY atypical for Houston/Texas.


I just get a 403 page instead of an article, probably because I browse via a DigitalOcean IP address.

If this is enough to get me blocked, that's hilarious given that this company's product is supposed to be "anonymous work talk" - if they like anonymity so much why am I not allowed to browse from whatever IP address I like?

EDIT: And furthermore, all it takes to find out if a company uses Blind is to type in the company name and see what it says. That's a pretty blatant privacy leak right on the company's home page.


Here're the numbers for those who cannot access the site:

1) Google - 140k base, 100k RSUs, 50k sign on, 15% bonus

2) Facebook - 160k base, 75k RSUs, 75k sign on, 10% bonus

3) Lyft - 165k base, 180k RSUs, 20k sign on

4) Dropbox - 160k base, 115k RSUs, 10k sign on

5) Airbnb - 150k base, 75k RSUs, 15k sign on

6) Palantir - 150k base, 50k stock options, 25k sign on, 25k bonus


I browse with a regular Comcast IP in the US. I think it's just down, sorry.


I get the same thing. It also breaks out of a google cache view.

Here's archive.is: https://archive.fo/FF094


This is interesting.

Archive:

> 5. Did you get rejected anywhere?

> Yes, I got rejected by Asana and Instacart at the onsite stage.

Web Link:

> 5. Did you get rejected anywhere?

> Yes, I got rejected by some smaller startups at the onsite stage.


Guess he edited the post shrug.



Damn... I guess anyone smart should just stop complaining and find a way into the big co.s... Living in midwest this is insane... :) ...congrats....


You also need to think about what you'd lose if you were to work for a big company. I do not know your current company, so maybe there is nothing to lose.


I just recently quit a Big 8 co and moved to a smaller co (was working remote for a few yrs, wanted to do something local); its just different styles of working; the quality of work isnt much different between each other.


I just left a company that got aquired by a big US security company, I was offered a 140k bonus (50/50 cash/stock, under the condition of staying min. 2 y) if I stay (because they knew I was probably leaving). The Bonus was several times more than my annual salary (Eastern Europe). Despite all the day dreaming about the numbers I declined and left. Why? Because after 2 years there I was already burned out, had no time, was getting calls at 5am, had to be available 24/7. I was miserable and had no life and for what? “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” - Thoreau. Now I only work 10h a week and am so happy and relaxed, I earn enough to cover my living costs and can use the rest of my LIFE to do whatever I want. Just wanted to share that because I often see people here obsessing about money, but what's the point of it if you can't live?


Couldn't you have negotiated that in your offer e.g. I'll take the 140k bonus but my phone is off from 6pm to 8am, only covering night shift on certain days etc. If they say no that's OK, but if they say yes, great.


There were other issues which the new company didn't agree on. But I wanted to leave anyway. In the end I followed this: "You can always earn more money but you can never make more time"


I think you made the right decision! Enjoy your life friend :)


Recruiters who was interviewing this guy must have been all believing he is worth it. Well done.

Have been interviewing people, many with 5+ years of experience and in my opinion it is not too difficult to spot somebody who is not fit for the job.

So well done again.


These are insane compared to the UK.

17 years ago I started out on £21k, which was considered pretty reasonable. Two years later I switched job and got £35k and over the next few years until I hit the 10 year mark I pushed it up to almost £50k. At that point AFAICT I was actually doing better than average.

I'm now contracting in the financial world, earning well over twice that figure, but while I can match the salary the various otions, bonuses etc put a guy two years out of college in SV well ahead of the game.

I like the bay area, too...


Yes, it's the bonuses and stock options that make the compensation in SV ridiculous. If we compared just base salaries then SV would be ahead but comparisons wouldn't be so silly. But all these sweet RSUs and cash bonuses that are standard in SV make their overall yearly compensation really insane (plus things like 50k sign up bonus... I got no sign up bonus when I moved to London from EU). I wonder why software engineers don't get those kind of bonuses / extra cash on top of base salary in London.


Given with multiple offers, he didn't drive hard negotiation like this guy. http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii... HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552780


Jesus christ, $50k as a sign on bonus.

I haven't seen anything like that in Aus for that sort of experience.


If you have the flexibility, most of the companies on this list recruit regularly in Australia for roles in the US. You may need to fly state-side of an on-site but the initial round can be done in Melbourne or Sydney.

Tech companies love E3 visas.


The E3 visa is amazing. I don't have a need for it since I'm a US citizen too, but I'm glad it's​ available for Australians.


I may look into this, I'm in need of a change of scenery


I'll be in Melbourne renewing my E3 visa in late Dec/early Jan. And maybe doing some recruiting for my almost-unicorn company too. Message me if you'd like to get coffee or something. My email's in my profile.


I'm actually Perth-based, but I do end up in the Eastern States from time to time, I'll see how I go :)


My chance to try and swipe a referral bonus, then. I'll be in Perth for Christmas and my lot were sponsoring E3s before it was cool. My work email is jchester@pivotal.io


I'm in Sydney in Feb. If that's a location that works for you I could chat or get coffee.


I'm actually Perth-based, but I do end up in the Eastern States from time to time, I'll see how I go :)


Your rent for a 1 bedroom is $2800-3500/month to start tho. Total tax rate around %33, and your marginal tax rate is ~%40.

If your interested, you could apply to these companies directly on their website. You would probably get a reply. Same with many startups. Go practice a whole bunch of leetcode questions and cracking the coding interview beforehand although.


It's good, but a huge chunk of this will be lost to taxes because he's in SV (I know because I live and work here as well, have been in a similar situation, and his numbers are plausible). So it's something to marvel at, but the actual amount going in the bank is much smaller.


Huge as in like 7-9% of their sign on bonus for living in SV.


Mine was sadly much more...


Facebook offers $100k to new grad converting interns. $50k is nothing.

Hell even I get $66k over 2 years if I take Amazon and my friends don’t even think that’s good.


Wow. These are high. Anyone know what the numbers are for data scientists nowadays? Also, how hard would it be for a senior data scientist working at a large (non-tech) company on the east coast to get an interview at one of these places?


Top notch devs earn less than the quarter of that money around here (I know about the cost of living, but still). No wonder the US is outsourcing all its dreams here, from faceplus to instasnap, from payeasy to dollarpal.


How do these numbers carry over to non bay area places like Austin? I've got an offer for 86k base, 4000 RSU, no sign on here in Austin for an L2 at one of those companies in the top 5 and it seems like a joke.


Dude is advertising for LeetCode. He’s not too clever, easily figured out.


Getting a 403 when trying to access the link? Anyone else having problems?


Same here.


Anyone have a copy/cache of the content? It's down already.


Can someone explain what RSU's are? I'm assuming its something specific to being American and since i'm not i'm afraid i'm not familiar with the term.

Thanks


"Restricted Stock Units" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restricted_stock .

It's basically company stock you get after you've been there awhile.


"Restricted Stock Units". Company grants you the $$$ worth of stock, but access is spread out over time (i.e. 1/8th of it every 6mo over 4 yr)


Thank you to those that replied.


So that $100k RSU you see in the list should not be considered yearly, but instead something like 25% of it per year?


The author claims

> figures above are ANNUAL.

But if he is mistaken on the RSU part, then people might find these offers easier to understand. (-e- but the only thing typically not annual in these numbers is the RSU, so I don't think that mistake is likely)


These numbers seem high in absolute value but one must compare Cost of Living (insane in the Bay Area I guess) and insurance costs and other living expenses as well


I'm guessing he was working at Uber before. Would explain why Lyft wanted him so badly and why Uber is missing from the list of companies he talked to.


Could be. Also Uber pays top end salaries so it would make sense with these very high offers as they probably had to at least match but preferably beat his current Uber package (and potential counter offer).


SF must have some insane margins to afford this.


For those who are incredulous or doubtful, what experience do you think should command $150K Salary and $100K liquid stock in SV?


Nah, actually it's totally not any meaning to me. Because the numbers are too impractical to me. Whuu...


In every single thread where someone publicly discloses rates like this the comments are flooded with people who use all kinds of FUD to explain why what they've just read must be untrue.

It's strange.

> Are these numbers real?

Yes. I'm not the author, but they don't appear at all unusual to me. SF's developer market is nearly as screwed up as it's housing market (except not really, the housing market is truly something else).

> Is this "normal"?

No. Well… yes and no. These numbers are real and you can get offers like that too. But this type of pay isn't "normal" in the sense of historical norms. Tech isn't normal right now. We have a shortage on one side of the market. It will be relatively short lived. That doesn't mean you should ignore you're ability to make unreasonably amounts of money for the next 10 years. If you're qualified to fill the positions that people are over-paying for, you should totally take that money.

> But this person had "special" access because of ${referral/previous company/magic}!

Yes. This person did have "special" access. But being granted that access is literally as easy as talking to someone who works for the company that you'd like to work for. Are they attending a conference? Walk up to them. It's really that easy. I know. I've done it.

> No really, this person got lucky because they worked for a unicorn before applying to these companies. They got lucky by picking a place that happened to turn into a rocket ship.

Little secret, you don't have to work at a unicorn _before_ applying to a unicorn. There's a phase after everyone knows it's a rocket ship where the company is still hiring like a madhouse. You can join during that phase and still get credit for "picking" a unicorn. You'll likely get a very small piece of an over-saturated employee pool so the equity won't make you rich, but it does allow you the pick of the litter amongst other top tier firms, App/Goo/Ama/book/Soft, which all pay along the lines of what the author posted.

> I have no desire to live in SF.

Yeah, SF is awful, don't move there. You can get close to these numbers in some cities that have a much better standard of living. NY, LA, Austin (the numbers are close but come down in that order).

Feel free to ask any questions about getting a job in a company like this if you'd like. I find it mystifying that people consider it some kind of secret so I'm down for sharing w/e people want to know (within some personal boundaries). I wouldn't say that it's easy to get a job like this, but the information isn't hidden. In my experience it's right in front of people and they either ignore it or choose different paths because they prefer the lifestyle that they have outside of these major US hubs.


I've got a really shoddy work history. What do I need to do to make myself attractive to these places?

ie... I graduated 10 years ago, I've got 2 or 3 years programming experience in there mired with periods of unemployment, moving/relocating a few times, health issues (resolved) and dealing with the fallout of a bad accident (I walked away, but had to transport wife for about a year while her foot healed)


That's a good question but one that I'm not 100% confident that I'm qualified to answer.

If you have the flexibility it sounds like Austin is your best bet for a close-but-high-paying jobs. It's a beautiful city as well, I love Austin. Would move there in a second. Remote work is possible but getting those positions is much more plagued with the whole catch-22 of needing previous experience in order to gain experience.

Obviously brush up on algorithms and data structures prior to interviews. Whether you think it's BS or not, that's just the best approximation of ability that most companies can manage to come up with.

You mentioned that some of your jobs had been paid hourly. My advice is to try to get a reasonable salaried position ($65k+/year) at a tech company and hold that down for ~2 years and ratchet your way up to companies that pay better. If you start that low it's not unreasonable to request 15% raises each year for several years. If you can hold a position at around that range for 1.5-3 years, changing companies should net you a 25% raise.

I've had co-workers with fairly scatter-shot resumes. It's a small red flag in interviews but I've never seen someone dropped from an interview because of sporadic work history. I've seen people dropped for lying about their work history.


>We have a shortage on one side of the market. It will be relatively short lived.

Can you support the latter claim?


Well, nothing lasts forever. Given enough time the hidden hand of free market will cause developer salaries to get so high that more people will study CS eventually increasing the supply and lowering salaries.

However this is very slow process and I personally think shortage of engineers will continue for quite a long time (next 10 years easily). So "short lived" can mean a decade or perhaps two. We should be fine.


Good call. I can't.

I feel unreasonably lucky and make this claim to myself in an effort to engender urgency and grace — I have what many want and few have and it is fleeting.

The other two shortage that I was aware of during my primary education seem to have been filled at this point. I was told regularly that the best paths toward success was to study law or accounting. At the time law firms were experiencing a lack of supply similar to the current state of software that has since been filled. You can still make great money but you're going to need crazy hours + prestigious education or unreasonable amounts of proof-of-awesome. Similarly, after SOX there was an immense need for accountants but that demand was filled rapidly when higher ed was successful in pushing huge numbers of degrees out the door.

Education in practical skills for software development has been slower to fill demand. I see three reasons, I'm sure there are many more: Software doesn't have the same social prestige as law or accounting — the first dot-com crash scared people — demand has grown more quickly than any other field.


Thanks for elaborating, was genuinely curious.


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