It feels like there are two classes of engineers in the US. One class of engineers makes 60k-120k and the other makes 150k-500k.
Is this just a really well kept secret? I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class. I'd expect most software engineers would jump through hoops at the prospect of doubling their salary.
For every job that it's open in one of the FAANG, recruiters get thousands of applications. It sounds like many are trying, but the vast majority never gets a call back. Others cannot pass the interview. Others again are not interested in working in a very demanding environment.
I worked at a FAANGs, now I work in lower-tier tech company. I make 3/4 (low-ish upper tier) of what I used to make, I work 1/8 of the hours I used to work, work stress is non-existent. Many people, many reasons.
Weird, it was the opposite for me. Went from 60 hours in consultancies and low tier to 30ish at FAANGish. Remote probably helped with COVID, but the output is consistent.
I can see that.
My point is that there are many reasons for not wanting to work at a FAANG, even for someone like me who has worked in one and could work, I guess, in others. My reason is that I make enough money currently not to want to work there. I was working a standard 35-40 hours per week at a FAANG.
There are also many others in non-FAANG tech who make half my salary and work much more. And maybe I will be one of them at some point, there are no guarantees in life!
Agreed about the extremeness of my case, although I would not call it as "obscenely obscure".
There are plenty of people who went from FAANG to tech jobs of lesser responsibility, maybe they don't work 10 hours a week but 20, maybe they are half of what they used to make (not my money - say from 500k to 250k), they have greatly reduced worked-related stress, they can play with their kids or partners, and they would not go back to back-stabber friendly meat-grinders.
For me, the former type of job required very little actual work. It was comfortable. It was easy. It paid well enough for a single young person. My nights and weekends were free to pursue other interests, some of which were very time-consuming (e.g. flying helicopters part-time in the military).
The big turning point for me was having kids. The inherent danger of flying caused me to leave the reserves. The increased monthly budget required for kid-raising got me out of my comfort zone. I looked for a new job for the first time in 10+ years. My TC now is double what it was when I started that process 2.5 years ago and I'm well into the latter category. Partly that's due to moving to a name-brand company. Partly it's just a great market for SWEs. Partly it's years of 3 - 5% COLAs that made me fall behind market rates.
Switching jobs is hard mentally & emotionally, especially if you're basically comfortable already. I suspect that's why many people don't do it.
I think this is a big part of it. I've worked in Silicon Valley ~10yrs and I'm surprised how little actual work people do at these 60-80k jobs.
It really isn't comparable. The way SV people work, the expectations, level of responsibility, selectivity in hiring, and sometimes hours/stress, are of a kind only found in law or medicine elsewhere.
It's very hard. Not having FANG/unicorns on your resume probably contributes massively to this. FANG style interviews are a skill of their own - I recently had a 6 hours of interviews back to back with Amazon and it was a mix of pretty tough technical questions and very specific behavioral questions. Even with practice solving sole of the question was very hard. For instance, I solved a DP question in a top down and interviewer asked me to then solve it bottom up for him in the remaining 5 minutes. You can't do this without a solid amount of practice.
Yeah, personally, I constantly receive calls from FAANGs for interviews, but I pass on them all. My current lack of free time to work on interview prep is the sole reason. I almost feel like it's impossible to find the time to prep without quitting my current job first... :-/
What's always been a little baffling to me, though, is how easily these companies hire fresh grads. I have several friends that walked straight into FAANG jobs right out of school with little more than a couple quick phone interviews. One recruiter told me that the bar is lower for fresh grads because they can be more easily molded into the company culture.
I dunno. I think they just treat fresh grads differently. They probably look more at one's graduation date than at one's (lack of) experience at that point. They want really fresh meat. ;-)
My views here are purely anecdotal, and based only on interactions with former peers (students) and something an Amazon recruiter told me at one point.
I've done both, in my experience at a FAANG you choose your own WLB. If you want to go for a promotion, you're going to have to work a lot. If you want to just get by for a couple years and vest stock, that's an option too. I think people also put a lot of pressure on themselves because it's unclear where the bar is and they don't want to get fired for performance reasons.
At a smaller company there simply isn't that much work to do, nor is there much of a path for promotion (when your boss is the CTO...)
> At a smaller company there simply isn't that much work to do, nor is there much of a path for promotion (when your boss is the CTO...)
Ouch! That’s exactly right. Ultimately I bailed on small/medium companies because of the “boss is the CTO” promotion problem. There’s nothing to grow into at a smaller company. Also, most of them have no technical promotion track for Individual Contributors. You start at Junior Engineer, maybe get promoted to Senior Engineer, and that’s it. No more level ups unless you want to people-manage, which is a whole different skill set.
Contrast that with some place like Google, that has something like 7 or so distinct engineering levels with huge pay bumps and responsibility bumps between each of them! If you are a ladder climber by nature, the smaller company will infuriate you.
Correct, this what I understand. Before the remote workplace, they were just too comfy in their location to think about locating to the limited tech cities where these salaries are being paid
I mean, I'll be honest, I make around 50k in a non tech job in a low cost of living area.i really don't want for anything. Maybe I just don't like really expensive toys, but anything I want, I buy. I go on nice vacations in country, plenty of wilderness around me. I don't have to look at receipts or bills before paying them and I never think about my bank account. I'm really totally unsure what making 500k instead would do for me, besides retiring super early.
Once you get to higher levels of income it sounds cliche but certain doors open up. You start rubbing shoulders with “influential people.” Now that money is no longer on your mind, you realize the value of your time over everything else. It’s a different perspective on everyday situations.
I don’t think money is a prerequisite to have this mindset, like you said, you don’t want for anything more. but once you get a taste of the luxury it’s hard to go back
The less obvious one is save a shit ton of money so you never have to worry about big healthcare expenses, whether it be illness or injury. It's amazing how quickly life can go from pretty good to pretty not good when you're unable to work for a while, especially when your health insurance is tied to your employment. One bad bike accident took me from a six figure income at the beginning of my career to struggling for over a decade, including a stretch of homelessness.
Financial Independence is a big thing. (Not just retire)
Do you have kids? Have you thought about generational wealth?
These are the things that are in people's minds. If you want to understand more visit subreddits like /r/FIRE or /r/bogelheads or /r/personalfinance?
At 50k you can easily provide for one maybe two people, but at higher salaries you can support a larger family (aging parents, children, relatives) and create generational wealth.
Not for most people. A silicon valley job means a silicon valley house and mortgage - you're in for at least a couple of million for a house in those parts, and it'll be fairly modest by US standards. If you have kids, you have silicon valley school fees and activities. And since all your new friends are silicon valley friends with silicon valley money in their pocket, all your own activities are going to grow more expensive too.
If you don't make a very conscious decision to step off that flywheel, a lot of people find themselves in the position where that 500k is mostly going to maintain your new normal lifestyle.
Ah, I confused this a bit with another remote thread. My intended point is that you can get that TC full-time remote from at least F and G now. They scale down salary based on the market, but not that much, for a 6+ position I think you’d definitely still be at that TC.
And that would be easy if you didn't raise kids or have a spouse that will very quickly be acclimated to all of this. Yanking the rug so you can retire early? That's a quick way to ensure you'll be back at work anyway, because your spouse may take the kids and bail.
It's only a for-sure viable option for those that never marry or have children. And even then I'd caution someone to do it as long as you possibly can stand, you have no idea what lies ahead expense wise in life in your long retirement.
Assuming you didn't buy too close to the annual forest fires, and neither the mortgage crisis or the pandemic wiped out housing prices in your area, yes.
Unfortunately hard to predict those events at the time of house purchase. Some people do very well on Bay Area real estate, some not so well.
> Yeah, it's hard to predict events like that in any asset class, what's your point? Keep it in cash?
Obviously not, but do diversify your investments.
A lot of homeowners are putting the vast majority of their portfolio in real estate due to the inflated home prices. Most folks taking on a $1 million mortgage with $200k down, don't have an addition $500k of other assets to fall back on if the housing market drops half the value of their house.
Anecdotally, it's either they can't relocate because of reason x,y,z (family usually) or they can't pass the interviews for those highly paid positions (or some people just aren't pursuing money above everything else).
This skew is not obvious to people outside Silicon Valley, but it's discussed more now that sites like levels.fyi are providing data. Even more shocking is the split between SV/NYC/SEA salaries and the rest of the world. When the Google internal Salary Spreadsheet was created, people were amazed and the difference in salaries between LON/EU SWEs and US SWEs given that both groups are equally skilled.
Getting a FAANG job is hard, but it's worth it for the ability to retire after a decade of hard work compared to working for multiple decades at a normal tech company.
Equally skilled at engineering, but is there something special USA engineers bring to the table to warrant a higher salary? Easier to work with? More business sense? Longer hours/less holidays? Better understanding of the target market?
Don’t get me wrong. it might just be that life’s not fair.
I'm American but have worked in the EU, France specifically. There's no comparison in how hard you're pushed in the US vs over there, as you're insinuating. Everyone knows that part. And most of us on the US side are not in Silicon Valley nor do we make those wages. The EU guys have the better deal. They just need to actually secure full-time employment at all, which is hard to do there outside of Germany. That's the part no one will tell you.
It won't happen here, because our working class is asleep to the economic game being played, but the best blend is probably the UK and it's where we need to head as far as our demands.
This is really confusing with the link being the actual "ask us anything" and people asking questions here that others are answering, yet OP hasn't written a single response.
How do you account for stock/option appreciation? Which number is displayed on the site?
There might be a huge difference between a person reporting their total compensation from their offer letter (according to the fair market value at the time) vs what it is after a few years of appreciation.
We think of data points on our platform as snapshots of salaries in time. Currently, we ask for the last reported year of compensation which would include stock appreciation. You can distinguish this on our compensation page by filtering the "Years at Company" field: https://levels.fyi/comp.html?showFilters
When the Years at Company field is 0 it is a new offer.
by mixing offers with tax returns, you are creating way too much noise.
if you want to educate people and also raise awareness, you get a lot of pushback from people that do not believe anyone is making these amounts, people will literally debate the point because they are barely making $90k, and then your site comes along and the only source I can give shows people making $500k but really their compensation package would have said $320k annually. These are unnecessary hairs to split with an audience that understands none of it. They wouldn't believe the $320k or the reported $500k.
I think your site should either choose one standard, or add further metadata to what compensation people are getting/reporting. A scatterplot or graph that showed offer vs annual compensation would help. Reaching back out to people that uploaded offers to upload their tax document would help.
Yeah agreed, we're working on a better way to collect this in a new form. The plan is to initially collect the original offer as a standard and then having another stock compensation field + a description text box to account for appreciated value and also any details for refreshers etc.
The problem is that right on your front page I see that the estimated annual comp for a G6 engineer at Google is expected to be $226,673 salary/$212,061 stock/$50,939 bonus. The stock portion, however, includes both brand new offers and those which have benefited from many years of appreciation, making the number effectively meaningless.
Even after digging in, there is no way on the site to restrict it to only new offers.
I personally have not reported my salary on levels.fyi or any similar website because my shares were granted pre-IPO and I don't want to further distort expectations for what an average software engineer is expected to make.
I think this is a great point. You need some way to account for what the stock has done over the period.
My understanding of tax is that escrowed shares (common for longer grants) aren't beneficially owned by the employee until the vesting expires, at which period the income is considered "earned" since it's yours (i.e. you can spend it), and taxed.
This means tech salaries are being somewhat artificially inflated by the huge run-up in general US equities (stock market). If the market is flat/down over the coming years, you're going to see these numbers crater for no reason other than that GOOG didn't double/triple over the past decade.
Yeah definitely, we're working on improving the home page experience since that's what a lot of people land on initially. It's balance of keeping it simple vs having way too many options.
If the company has a few good quarters of stock appreciation, your employees are now effectively tied in ("golden handcuffs") and will not be able to get matching offers elsewhere.
This might be a cynical take, but in addition the things you typically hear, like improving cashflow and aligning incentives, I think it makes it easier to manage employees out. I.e., if you want to replace someone who it would otherwise be hard to fire, you could start refresher grants late or make them small enough that come year 5, it makes more financial sense for the employee to leave willingly.
Some explanation, in case people aren't familiar with "big N" or FAANG comp schemes: when you get an offer, you're given a "base salary"—somewhere between 100 and 250k unless you're quite senior—a four year RSU (stock) grant with some vesting conditions, and info on typical year-end cash bonuses and RSU refreshers. The annualized four year grant is usually somewhere between 50% and 200% of your base salary, depending on seniority. See levels.fyi for details. A "refresher" is a four year grant given in each of years n, n + 1, n + 2, ..., where n is typically year 2. The refresher is usually a quarter of your initial grant, but companies often given themselves a lot of legroom to adjust this number depending on market conditions, employee performance, etc.
I'm not from levels.fyi but I think some reasons are
* Its cheaper for the company than cash (stock is the company's currency, they can issue more of it, decrease the supply, use it as collateral in financing etc)
* It can be better for the employees (pay less in taxes, more opportunity for growth)
* Incentives become aligned (I now care about the continued success of the company more so than I otherwise would)
For employees you pay the same in taxes. RSUs are treated as income just in Stock based compensation vs USD. RSU vest is the same as taking a USD based salary and purchasing the shares.
The Employees do get the benefit that between the grant date and vest date, the RSU value could increase. And the employee gets the benefit of capturing that growth.
E.g. if 100k of RSUs granted, and 25% of it vested each year. Say in year 4 the value doubled. So they'd get 50k of RSUs and when it vests the employee is taxed as if it is income, and pays income tax on the 50k value.
Levels is showing that the average senior engineer at Netflix is only getting $11k stock though. If employees were allowed to choose what percentage stock they wanted, I'd expect most employees to choose a larger percentage than that.
Stock is likely to grow in value over the course of the year while cash is almost guaranteed to lose value due to inflation. You'd have to be pretty pessimistic about Netflix's future to choose the all-cash option. And even if you're only neutral about it, the stock is the better choice because it's inflation protected.
If I were a Netflix employee, I'd probably choose $200k cash, $300k stock. The fact that levels is reporting such wildly different numbers tells me employees don't actually have that level of freedom to control their comp.
You can always buy NFLX with cash in your brokerage account. It's not like you are going to get any discounts if you choose to receive part of your salary in stock.
If you're granted stock on a vesting schedule (even if its 1 year), doesn't it qualify for long term cap gains if you don't sell? So you only pay potentially long term capital gains.
versus
If you get cash, pay income tax on it, and then invest it, and then pay cap gains, that's another round of taxes you pay no?
No, pretty sure not. First of all, the “buy” date is the date it vests, not the date it was initially granted. Secondly, you pay normal income tax on stock grants. So if $100 of stock vests today, you pay normal income tax on $100, and the cost basis and “buy” date are set to $100 and today. If you hang one to the stock for a year, then sure, you get long term gains, but then it’s the same boat as if you just got cash then bought it for $100.
ESPP can be a bit different, because you get a discount on the stock, but that discount is also taxed at normal income rates, and anyways is capped at like 15% or something.
Their compensation philosophy is to pay at personal top of market for most roles. That said, compensation packages can differ significantly on a case by case basis depending on candidate experience. What they may not capture in title / level, they capture in variance of salary.
One level, but different compensation. For SWE IC, it can range between 300k and 700 (plus in some cases). The same for higher levels, there is a big variance in comp. You can use up to full salary to get options (not shares) at 40% (used to be, I don't know now).
They pay market value. Let's say that you come to Netflix with a Facebook offer (or current salary), Netflix wants you, they pay >= FB offer or current salary. If you don't have any offer, they have tech-wide salary surveys that give them a market range for you.
Clearly, nothing is set in stone and a hiring manager can "bet" monetarily on some candidates (i.e., pay them more of what the data points would recommend). When I was there, I was making a (very generous) x and others in my position were making 1.8-2 x no doubt.
I don't know why no one else has been asking this but why are you keeping us EU engineers high and dry? No wonder we're making half or less of our US compatriots!
Hi, we collect both self-reported entries and proof documents such as W2s, offer letters, and pay stubs for verified entries (https://www.levels.fyi/addcomp.html). We also collect verified offers through our negotiation service. While we don't display these on our site or make them public, they anchor the data on our site to a ground truth.
We've added thousands of companies recently for a push to get more information, check out our company directory at https://levels.fyi/company/. We also take requests on this page if you don't see a company. The biggest limitation for us is getting salary data for a company – if we get 3 or more submissions for a company, we'll create a page for it. We encourage everyone to help us out by contributing at the link above!
Median compensation around Toronto for C$158,000 seems quite high. Real numbers of course might shed light on surprising facts such as this. How do you combat the bias of people feeling that higher salaries are more important to report, however?
Yeah fair point, we need to collect more salaries overall to present a more accurate picture of the labor market. One way we plan to tackle this is to provide more incentives to share your salary.
Perhaps this is more of a social stigma issue around sharing your salary, but we encourage everyone to submit their salary, it helps everyone else out: https://levels.fyi/addcomp.html
If you consider US political polling, one key correction is demographics of people who respond well to optional polls. Of course, they have eventual ground truth and are only predicting a 1bit outcome. Still, do you guys have any thoughts on corrections on the data you get in?
We currently make most of our revenue by helping job candidates negotiate their compensation packages by connecting them to someone on our team of experienced tech recruiters. We've helped thousands of people to date negotiate their salaries up!
Somewhat related - do you know if those companies will hire US-based engineers for the same European positions? Or are those positions primarily set aside for engineers already in Europe?
This is partly a labour law thing. The EU benefits from freedom of movement and work, so people can apply to different countries without worrying about immigration. Residents outside the EU (third countries) may have to prove why they'd be a better choice than an EU applicant; rather the onus is on the company. That will also depend on the role and the employee but generally companies will prefer to hire locally if they have international offices. It's easier to move an existing employee to a different country than hire internationally, usually there are specific visas for that case.
Google Zurich is the European research hub. They do a lot of very cool stuff, particularly mobile deep learning. Salaries are commensurate with the Bay Area, but Switzerland is as if not more expensive (though arguably higher standard of living than SF). Zurich in particular gets a lot of engineering talent out of places like ETH.
I'm curious how people here advise specifically negotiating work-life balance?
WLB (fewer hours per week/more vacation) is the single most important factor for me, but I always feel weird asking/pushing for it because it feels like I'll give a slacker impression.
Even asking how many hours a team works feels delicate.
FAANGs literally won't negotiate this sort of thing (we've all tried). If you are applying somewhere that isn't offering FAANG comp, it seems a fair play during negotiations.
You know, "this offer is a little lower than I was hoping for, but if you can throw in an extra week of vacation time we have a deal"
My observation, as a hiring manager, is that levels.fyi data for my company is consistently representative of the highest compensated 10% of my team, but presents itself as reflecting something closer to median compensation for a given role.
my observation is that most companies present offers that are 30% lower than they should be to have a comfortable lifestyle in tech metros and not worry about school, housing or retirement costs. is this deliberate?
I wonder if this problem flows both ways. I suspect that at least housing and school (or the overlap, housing in good school districts) is to some degree a zero-sum game whose costs are set at the margins.
In tech metros, where those marginal market-clearing prices are set by those tech salaries, it makes sense that they would settle at precisely the point where they're no longer quite comfortable to the average tech worker. Otherwise, what's to stop you from paying a bit more for that house than the second best offer?
As others have pointed out, there's a bit of selection bias at play. We don't manipulate any data. Keep in mind most people come to our site / contribute when they have a new offer, are in the job-seeking process, or savvy about their pay. As we grow, I'd hope this effect fizzles out more. New offers tend to be higher than compensation of existing employees and plays into this as well.
Is this just a really well kept secret? I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class. I'd expect most software engineers would jump through hoops at the prospect of doubling their salary.