first of all no one's making $160k right out of college. Second of all, no, that's not even FU money. Maybe after a 20 year career, yeah you can retire well.
That’s the return offer one of the interns I mentored got when they came back after they graduated. They had no reason to lie to me. They work remotely and decided to move back in with their parents. But even if they didn’t, they could live some place cheaply.
I don’t work for some hip non profitable startup surviving off of VC money either.
These are standard offers - go to levels.fyi and see what the starting wage is for the BigTech companies are in America.
Some of the younger cohort who are just coming out of college getting FAANG jobs (including the one I work for) are talking about FIRE (financially independent retire early). They are saving/investing $50K+ a year.
It's annoying to argue, but (1) that's an anecdote, not data, (2) levels.fyi is a biased sample of people obsessed with / want to brag about their compensation (like you, because even though this post was about FU 'skills' you started arguing about comp), (3) FU money is in the single digit millions at least, if not $10 million, like I said you may get to that level after 10-20 years with good investments, but it's really not guaranteed. For a startup it's even less guaranteed, but you will certainly get much more than that ($10s of millions at least), faster (5-10 years) if you have a reasonably successful exit. Of course billions if you are a unicorn, so a nice fat tail of upside. (4) This post was about FU skills and not FU money, and the difference between startups and big corps is even starker for that. At big corps you barely do anything for the first two years you get hired, but at startups you are working on something mission critical from the start. It's a much deeper experience, skill-wise. There's really no comparison. So if you're goal is FU skills, you'd get it at a startup much more than a big corp without question.
You really think that it’s some great conspiracy? Any random entry level developer working at any of the big 5 companies will get an offer in the low to mid six figures at least.
Are you that unaware of compensation at any of the top tech companies?
How much do you think they are making?
You don’t need “10-20 million” to live a decent middle class lifestyle in the US.
> For a startup it's even less guaranteed, but you will certainly get much more than that ($10s of millions at least), faster (5-10 years) if you have a reasonably successful exit
Yes all you have to do is choose the one startup out of 10 that don’t outright fail and then choose the subset of those that have an outsized exit.
> At big corps you barely do anything for the first two years you get hired, but at startups you are working on something mission critical from the start
Have you ever worked at any large tech company?
I literally just went to a customer’s site with the former intern I spoke about and they are the only hands on keyboard consultant (I work in the cloud consulting department at $BigTech) of a six figure contract. I was there in an advisory role. All of the new grads go through a six month training program and immediately get put on projects.
In my department they get to learn about working with “cloud technologies” from people who are inarguably the best in the business.
I’m sure people at other big tech companies also learn a lot more about working at scale than you can learn at a tiny company.
Besides you are suffering from severe survivorship bias if you think more than an insignificant percentage of people working at a startup ever leave with any significant amount of money let alone “millions”.
