Is there any data on what the big companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, ...) are starting software engineers at? Anecdotally, friends starting at Google out of school are getting base salary offers closer to the senior numbers here than the junior numbers.
For context, salary at FAMG is in the range of 100-110K for a new grad. So its in the lower half of the "Junior" area, which would make sense. Total comp though puts you into the 80-90% Senior territory.
For exact numbers, I believe Amazon starts people at 103K in Seattle, Microsoft at 107K in Seattle, and Facebook and Google both start at 110K in South SV.
But the caveat is that
- Amazon provides ~50K in cash over 2 years, and 65K in stock at a 5/15/40/40 vest, with the expectation that the stock value increases
- Google provides ~100K in stock over 4 years
- Facebook provides 100-120K in stock over 4 years (and up to 100K in signing bonus for returning interns)
- Microsoft provides 30-120K in stock over 3.5 years
And all 4, as far as I know, have target bonuses in the 10-15% of base salary range. So 4 year annualized total compensation numbers can be close to (or even beyond) double base salary.
For example, a 103K base Amazon employee expects ~130K/year. A Google employee would take 150K, and an above average Facebook intern approaches 180K/year, if you average out everything.
And that's prior to any negotiation or stock appreciation.
Just to add, negotiation using competing offers from hedge funds, prop trading firms, and certain unicorns goes a LONG way here. Easily 3-4x as much equity if you bring in the right competing offer (i.e. from Citadel, Five Rings, AirBnB, HRT, etc.).
One of the guys I work with has been working in NY for 30 years, his newly graduated daughter got a first job at Facebook and earns more than him in her first year.
Either
* SV is a bubble
* NY is a bad places for devs
* being an old dev doesn't pay
For what it's worth, a big company in NYC that we work with definitely pays contractors with lots of experience (10+ years) $1000 a day. That's closing in on a quarter of a million dollars a year and you probably won't even have to invert a binary tree whilst juggling martinis in your interview.
Not quite though, as you get zero benefits or job security with that- in the UK you’d need to knock off 4 weeks of vacation, a couple of weeks for additional training, maybe a week or 2 for sick leave, and then budget a month or so between contracts. Plus buy your own laptop, fund your own retirement fund/pension etc. Plus it can be harder to get credit if your contract can be terminated at any notice.
And your next contract might go down, which is unlike a salary. and you’re exempt from climbing the ladder to a corporate position where the really big bucks are.
> And your next contract might go down, which is unlike a salary. and you’re exempt from climbing the ladder to a corporate position where the really big bucks are.
My impression is that the big bucks are actually in contracting, unless you're near the top of the corporate ladder.
Contracting in the UK seems to be a sweet gig. It has good tax advantages for the contractor right? And companies like it because it is easier to scale up or down based on need?
Yes and yes. However the government seems keen on making the tax situation worse, introducing new laws which tighten the noose every couple of years, so it's entirely possible that it will get bad in the next 5-10 years. Also, for non-British people, Brexit may make it make it hard/impossible to contract in the UK.
Is he working for a company with comparable revenue and reliance on software as Facebook? If not then it's like comparing the salary of a newly minted cardologist with her pediatrician father.
Disclosure: I work at Google. You can consider looking at Glassdoor[1], bearing in mind this includes data from several years ago before the wage-fixing bust and excluding natural growth. Looking at offers that I have friends have gotten at both bigtech and not, a good rule of thumb for new offers is to take the upper end of what Glassdoor says and add ~10%. If you want you can also look at H-1B data[2] which usually quotes only guaranteed base salary (and excludes bonus and RSUs). As far as I know there is no public data on this.
I'm one data point. My new grad offer from Google this year was 116k base salary, 15% target bonus, and approx 250k stock vesting over 4 years. I turned it down for a higher paying offer.
That's nothing. Linda Evangelista, who was probably at her peak fame before you were born, famously said she wouldn't even wake up for less than $10,000 a day!
All employees hired on H1B and some other types of work visas typically have the salary and job titles disclosed in public via an LCA. given Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc usually hire hundreds of employees this way you can often get a reasonable picture, there's a few websites out there collating the data. I'm no expert and there may be issues with these numbers I'm unaware of, but for companies whose remuneration I am familiar with the numbers seem to usually be correct.
