I generally like the article but the author seems to have a really inflated view of what jobs are paying. At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k.
Even assuming that’s including taxes so divide by two, and constraining to just software employees for that claim. There is no way the average pay is nearly a million a year. The average software engineer in the US is making around 135-150k a year and that average is including all the faang engineers with the top end salary
The whole post is hyperbole with not much to add beyond interest rates go up and VC money goes down. Even including benefits, those numbers are wildly overinflated, certainly there are some individuals that make that number but I was always told that it was the unicorn OG engineers at google that were making $1mm+ total annual comp.
well if you're a technical person in the current economy it
It's decent enough resource that packs all the issues (except S178) into one convinient package to point to next time someone asks "why does the market suck". You can argue the hyperbole takes away, but it adds some engagement (the nightmare stories are probably not even that far from the truth, given my experiences).
If nothing else I was intrigued (but maybe am not 100% onboard) with the "hire the safe middle" process for modern interviewing. "Overqualified" is mostly a weasel term, but I can see it coming up from interviewers who truly do not understand top talent (note: I am very much not top talent).
It's not a typo. The author alludes to these inflated salaries several times.
Examples:
"while other people who just picked a better company to work at 20 years ago and never left have been growing their wealth by a couple million dollars per year every year for almost their entire career"
"What is it like to join a company where all the co-workers your same age have made $10+ million over the past 4 years while you are joining with nothing?"
You'd have to be very high in the org chart at a FAANG style company to make that kind of income.
The hyperbole drummed up as realistic (not sarcastic) made me give up. If it was sarcasm, I might have enjoyed it, but the author clearly heard some false anecdotes and thinks we’re all millionaires while they aren’t
I can't tell if the author is being funny / hyperbolic or has never looked at levels.fyi.
Google pays basically the same salary as a series A startup would (ie: $150 - $180k / yr). Yes, you'll get your salary again in stock but you aren't necessarily getting left behind by choosing to punch lottery tickets because you enjoy it.
People need to, and I need to say this to myself too, smell the roses occasionally. You are paid an absurdly comfortable salary to basically solve puzzles all day. The meetings and people can suck occasionally but I can't imagine a much better life if I have to work for a living.
The only thing I can think of is the author is calculating these numbers as if employees never sell the stock they are granted until retirement.
If you work for 10-15 years at a tech giant, bank your $150k in RSUs per year and then sell them all at retirement then maybe the numbers add up, if you're extraordinarily lucky.
Inflation stats are just measuring the prices of a set of goods without regard to whether you need them or how much you need them. If inflation stats say you can buy 2x the number of cheeseburgers today that doesn’t mean you will.
I specifically mention housing because it is one of the main things (aside from education and healthcare) that our neoliberal economic system has not been able to import, and which have skyrocketed in cost since the 70s. And everyone needs housing.
You're incorrect. Inflation numbers do account for substitution effects (ie. People buying a cheaper replacement good). Something no one buys that goes up in price 100x has no substantial effect on inflation, while food that everyone buys going up 10% goes straight into it. Depends on the agency doing the stats and calculations, but it's probably in the ballpark.
Adjusted, people have more purchasing power today, even if they are spending relatively more on housing.
High house prices suck, and definitely are a big problem, arguably self-bflicted in most places by increasingly onerous regulations (zoning, building quality, minimum sizes, and so on). Certainly there are some benefits to that, but all comes at the cost of increased house prices.
The other thing is labour has become relatively very expensive compared to most goods today, and houses embed a huge labour cost component - so their price (along with other labour-intensive sectors like, well, education and healthcare), have gone up much more than eg. Food, which can be produced largely with capital investment (tractors and so on)
Unless you are suggesting that Americans’ standard of living should not rise for the last 75 years (despite productivity increases), that would only be relevant if buying houses at 1950s standards was possible for most people.
People don't want to live like their grandparents did in the 50s, so the market mostly doesn't offer it. So, instead of working much less and buying a 1950s-liike house, people prefer to work the same amount as their grandparents worked, and afford a fancy 2024 house.
His problem is that he thinks L10 is the benchmark to compare against, when the vast, vast majority of engineers (including many with decades of experience) would never make it to L10.
I think L8 is equivalent to vice president. L10 is labeled as "Google Fellow" on levels.fyi. There is a Wikipedia category for Google Fellows and it has 9 people listed. I'd be surprised if this count was off by more than an order of magnitude or two.
L8 and L9 are Director/Senior Director positions. In the software engineering family of career ladders, it is part of the Engineering Manager career ladder, which generally starts at L6, with occasional L5 managers (L5 SWE individual contributors transitioning to manager track).
The technical/individual contributor track also has L8 and L9 Director/Senior Director levels. Sometimes it's referred to as a "Principal" level in Product Areas like Cloud, but there are far fewer L8+ people on individual contributor career ladders (i.e. tracks) than on management ladders.
L8 is considered the start of Google's "executive levels," where individuals at this level and above are privy to executive-level training, perks, etc.
Google Fellows are generally L10 (i.e. Vice President equivalent level), if I recall correctly. Jeff Dean would be a canonical example of a Vice President equivalent level, however Jeff Dean also ended up being a manager/organizational head of the Research Product Area for several years as a Fellow. Vint Cerf may be another useful example of a Fellow / Vice President equivalent.
(My statements here are from having personally done statistical analysis of career ladders and levels at Google and Alphabet as a whole)
HN commenters do this all the time, though. They'll take, say, an "L6 Google + Bay Area + Top End + Most Favorable Stock Market" compensation number, and then say "Most tech employees make this much."
Annual mean wage for Software Developers, 2023, according to the BLS:
Metropolitan areas with the highest employment level in Software Developers
Metropolitan area Employment Employment Location Hourly Annual
per 1000 jobs quotient mean wage mean wage
New York-Newark-Jersey City,... 119,010 12.53 1.15 $ 73.12 $ 152,100
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 96,590 84.60 7.75 $ 96.06 $ 199,800
San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA 83,920 34.65 3.18 $ 87.13 $ 181,220
The numbers HNers claim to be "usual compensations" change every year, but they are almost always what would be a top compensation for a top employee at a top faang in a top cost-of-labor locale in a rapidly rising bull market.
> Google pays basically the same salary as a series A startup would (ie: $150 - $180k / yr)
Entry level. But with ~5 years experience and two promos you’ll be pushing $400k.
If you joined Google 5 years ago then you had at least one annual stock grant double in value.
If you work at FANG for 10 years you should be able to hit retirement money. If nothing else you’ll have invested 600k into your 401k which should be enough for CoastFire. IE it’s all the money you’ll need at retirement age.
I've always heard the L5 ($210k on levels.fyi) is generally the highest the vast majority of people will ever get.
Is that incorrect? I know I've just heard that promo boards are really difficult to get to Senior and anything above that basically requires a miracle / someone far above gunning you.
EDIT: See above. I already addressed the fact TC is much higher. I am only talking about cash comp.
> Yes, you'll get your salary again in stock but you aren't necessarily getting left behind by choosing to punch lottery tickets because you enjoy it.
The typical software engineering employee at a company like Google will be L4 or L5. Staff-level (L6) and higher is a relatively small percentage of employees.
The base salary and bonus component will be in the ballpark of $200k/yr USD (base salary * 15% of base salary). Annual RSUs will often be $100k/yr.
> Yes, you'll get your salary again in stock but you aren't necessarily getting left behind by choosing to punch lottery tickets because you enjoy it.
But you are. $100k in liquid stock is worth about $100k. Startup options are expensive lottery tickets. One is worth substantially more than the other. Therefore one amounts to substantially greater compensation than the other.
You're talking about it wrong. RSUs are functionally equivalent to cash, and taxed as such. You can't talk about only cash comp. If one person is making startup $200k cash + lottery ticket and another person is making $200k cash + $200k RSU then yes the startup person will get left behind if their lottery tickets never hit.
> heard that promo boards are really difficult to get to Senior and anything above that basically requires a miracle / someone far above gunning you.
Nah. I don't know Google's exact ratios. But I would estimate that ~10% of their SWEs are L6 and 3-5% are L7+. I think pretty much anyone can hit L6 if that's a goal. The percentage of SWEs that have 15+ years experience and are L6+ should be relatively high. The bulk of the workforce is quite young. Varies by company and I haven't worked at Google but I have worked at FAANG. They're all pretty similar afaict.
From direct first-hand experience the numbers for SWEs on levels.fyi for Google are accurate.
You almost always get your full bonus (or more) and (depending on the size of our RSU grants) you vest either quarterly or monthly and can usually sell immediately (barring an imminent earnings release).
So for all practical purposes (at FAANG at least) the total comp is cash equivalent (even though it's a combo of base + bonus + RSU).
FANG 401k plans all support the Mega Backdoor Roth IRA. Which every single elgible employee should be maxing out.
The pre-tax 401k limit is ~$23,000. But you can put in another ~$46,000 post-tax. (Limits go up a little each year). High end 401k plans allow this post-tax contribution to be instantly auto-converted into a Roth IRA that grows tax free.
It's maybe a little hard to max out at L3. But every L4+ SWE should be maxing it out. Do this for 10 years and you'll actually have tucked away $700,000 plus growth. Assuming you're a couple of decades away from retirement this will compound and grow into millions of dollars for retirement.
It's "Mega Backdoor Roth" -- no "IRA." It's in your 401k, not an IRA plan. This is wholly distinct from the "backdoor Roth IRA" contributions which also have backdoor and Roth in the name.
As always, level matters. $180k/yr is quite low for Google and frankly and near or post IPO company at least at a non-junior level.
> You are paid an absurdly comfortable salary to basically solve puzzles all day
No, you are paid commensurate to the value you can deliver. This "be grateful" attitude is becoming more prevalent in tech and is leading to companies getting away with lower pay and worse working conditions.
Companies are waking far more $$ from you than they pay you. Especially profitable tech companies.
> Companies are waking far more $$ from you than they pay you. Especially profitable tech companies.
Well of course they are. But then asking to pay more will not help. What's the leverage of people who should be paid lot more ? Because IMO if any of those engineers have leverage they are not taken for chump and get paid appropriately when they negotiate.
Top reps at Caterpillar, Komatsu, and John Deere actually do make that much. I used to work in that industry.
Most people here are in tech and have no idea how heavily incentivized industrial sales is. Selling a fleet of D10 dozers to an excavation operation and selling a maintenance agreement is going to net caterpillar $1.7mm a dozer multiplied by number of dozers. They aren't paying someone 60k a year and free kombucha for managing those sorts of accounts.
These are the TOP folks though. I don't think most entry level college grads are going to making that any time size.
I believed the author of the blog was referring to tech roles specifically (not sales or similar).
I can say from personal experience that, at least in Australia, tech workers for mining companies that work in city offices are paid fairly similarly to other non-FAANG tech workers (e.g. banks etc). I also just checked levels.fyi for a few big mining companies and verified that this is the case.
Engineers (mining, geo, tech, whatever) that work out in the field do make quite a bit more. MAYBE around what FAANG would pay, but FAANG still pays more after a few years of refreshers and/if one manages to climb the ladder.
I think the author is quite off with their estimates of what people make in "heavy industries". At least as far as my experience goes for AU. FAANG/HFT still beats everything, and by a vast margin.
I think they're using some kind of "daily equivalent average pay, factoring in exponential growth of the stock divided by actual days worked over a career" -
> Under the modern tech landscape, stable “hyperscale ultra-growth” companies are paying experienced employees the equivalent of $10,000 to $50,000 per day if we include the value of their exponentially growing yearly stock grants.
Assuming a $250k salary, that's only about $1000/day. But if you're able to bank $50,000,000 in stock grants over a 40 years career (invest early and often in a high-growth company), that averages out to $5,000 per day.
Kinda dodgy math, should been better clarified, and that's still somewhat ambitious; but I think that's the idea behind it based on a couple allusions throughout the article.
Not even that makes sense because a "tractor company or heavy manufacturing company just churning out results for years" (that supposedly pays $10k/day) doesn't have exponential stock growth.
The entire article is just the whimsical fantasies of someone with no understanding of market reality.
On the author's resume is a link to a L10 salary at google under "available for employment" and a distinguished engineer at Amazon. So author is in the top 0.01% (or even higher really) of salary expectations for the SWE ladder as I understand.
It's absurd. He has no concept of market rates (and frankly I'm unsurprised that he's not getting hired if his expectations are this out of whack).
His resume even confirms this[0], because he seemingly thinks the appropriate level at FAANG would be L10 which is extremely rare. There is a 0% chance that his experience would level him that high.
The entire article can be chocked up to a massively inflated sense of entitlement.
He took 2012-2013, and 2016-2021 off work to travel? That large of a gap doesn't look great on a resume. He basically worked half or less of the 2010s? Ridiculous.
His resume starts with a quote of himself stating that he has “seen things you people wouldn't believe.”
It goes on to highlight that he purchased a domain name in 1997.
He claims to have developed “the highest performing in-memory database in the world” but complains that “nobody really wants to buy it when free worse performing choies [sic] exist.”
The part about nobody wanting to buy his product is in his resume.
His current status is “Waiting for AI apocalypse.”
This is either mega-cringe, or the best satire I’ve read in a while. Unfortunately, I think it’s the former.
An inflated and grandiose view of yourself and your actions is classic bipolar II during bouts of mania, I skimmed the article a bit and immediately got those vibes. Particularly in how long and rambling the content is, it strikes me as something written all at once, without any real review.
(I grew up around a bipolar II individual. I am not an expert.)
I'm shocked that you're the only one pointing this out. This is clearly a manic episode. You can tell this was written in one go. Some users have pointed out the authors absolutely absurd resume.
And despite the fact that this article is filled with absolutely wild claims and martyr-laden tangents, the response here on HN proves that passion is worth more than substance in the tech world. Which explains a lot.
My guess it's the perfect HN bait. Starts with a meaningful factoid. Makes grand unhinged claims. Then starts rambling about everything under the sun.
If you had a preconceived topic you care about: this blog post gives you every imaginable opening. Free of any substance which might define a direction for discussion.
I think this topic is on a lot of peoples' minds, and it would be nice to get a discussion thread going about it with a quality article at the focal point instead of this completely uninformed one.
I think there may indeed be some satire or silly fun going on, for instance: "By the power of drawing two lines, we see correlation is causation and you can’t argue otherwise" and the "goal is to earn $69,420 per month"
This is probably just a "public resume". He obfruscates company names ("social network company in 2008" huh...) and admits his timelines for technologies is a bit fuzzy. Probably a mix of ageism shielding and privacy despite being a very publicly spoken person.
That or he truly did work at a "nepo company", as he phrases it. Not many people can just travel the world for 5 years, let alone boast about it on their resume.
I did not recognize the quote. I haven’t seen Blade Runner.
The quote is attributed to “Matt,” and it’s at the top of Matt’s resume. The speaker in Blade Runner was Roy Batty. If Matt was trying to include a famous quote on his resume, why did he attribute the quote to himself?
Regardless of the answer, I don’t think a technical resume is the right place for quirky call-outs to films. Particularly if you are substituting your own name as the speaker of the quote. Maybe I’m being too harsh, but in the context of this resume, IMO, it’s just another red flag.
well, given his experience and assumed compensation, people will perceive him (not necessarily that he is, but companies will think) as some 200+ IQ genius that can get stuff done. It'll come off as snarky to the non-elite, but I guess that's what you do to get top dollar here.
He claims further down that some make 50k per day. I've met a lot of cashed out founders. I've even met someone who could be called a billionaire. None of them were pure software engineers that made "50k per day" at any point in their career. If you amortize what becomes a 50m grant over 4 years it's about 35k per day, but how many software engineers have done that?
I was thrown by this too, but I think the author is in his 40s and making comparisons to the VP-level comp that some of his peers are making after spending 20 years climbing the ranks at a single company.
He talks about making millions per year, so it’s not a typo.
> At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k.
Seems a bit strange to call the tractor manufacturers non-tech companies. The modern tractor you can see is essentially just a case around what is a rather advanced computer. Hell, the Right to Repair topic that has garnered attention in semi-recent times centres specifically around tractors having become computers. What is tech if not that?
Sure, the typical worker – even when constraining to software engineers – isn't making anywhere near that much (nor are they at any company, not even FAANG), but it is likely that certain key players are.
Yeah I had to stop reading when I got to that part. I get making a mistake and adding a zero accidentally but all of the daily compensation values were so far off from anything approaching reality I wasn't going to bother reading whatever other analysis he had for fear it would also be wildly inflated.
I honestly picked up a calculator and converted my annual salary to daily (based on 45 weeks per year) just to verify the absurdity of what I just read.
Average salary? Salaries are determined by the size of the company, how much value software engineers add, supply of software engineers, and the location of the office.
Even assuming that’s including taxes so divide by two, and constraining to just software employees for that claim. There is no way the average pay is nearly a million a year. The average software engineer in the US is making around 135-150k a year and that average is including all the faang engineers with the top end salary