You can make much more than $125k in the Bay Area. You should try interviewing here just to see what you are offered.

I do actually live here. Hence the mention of the things I like about it. I was just using nice round numbers as an estimate and trying to say cost of living matters but the #1 thing I pay for here vs another American city is rent. Groceries, gas, consumer goods, etc. do not differ enough to be worth factoring into the equation. I think the big ticket is buying a house. THAT feels really out of reach because I can't do the mental gymnastics to pay around $1000 a square foot...

I have and can say that Seattle and the Bay aren't anywhere near 2x, yet COL is considerably lower (particularly rent) and no state income tax. None of the offers I received would have netted me more money, in fact all of them would have been less money overall.

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Citation. People throw around fantastical, ever-increasing numbers (250k, 400k, 500k, now a million) in these threads, but never any hard data. How many is “plenty”? I argue that it would be exceptionally few, if any.

I joined Facebook as a junior engineer a year before the IPO. After five years I was earning a touch over 500k as a senior developer and first-level manager.

The majority was from stock and significantly boosted by the rising price. If I stayed it would have decreased slightly over time due to the stock price levelling out.

If you achieved steady career progression at Facebook over the last four years (reach E5 level, a couple of promos) and not get fired them making 400k+ would be common. I’d hazard a guess that probably 50% of new hires achieve this. Base salary would be 200k and the rising stock price makes up the rest.

For what it’s worth I left the Bay Area and Facebook and cut my compensation by more than half to do so.

I'd have to assume a million includes stock compensation. Even executives don't make a million in cash base (eg. Alphabet's CFO makes $760K, chief legal officer makes $664K).

With stock compensation it's pretty easy because of the appreciation of company stocks. 5 years ago, Facebook was trading at $24/share. It now trades at $193/share, a roughly 8x increase. If your compensation package included $125K/year in RSUs - something eminently achievable even with just a few years of work experience - you're now making over a million a year as those stock grants vest.

And for purposes of comparing total compensation across regions, including stock appreciation like this is misleading. The value used should be the value of the stock at the time it was granted. that's effectively the intended compensation from the company. stock markets go up and down. especially using the past few years record bull market and including that as if the companies intended to pay that much is not going to help someone trying to compare total comp between regions.

Depends what the discussion is about. For someone deciding whether or not to move to the Bay Area, stock price appreciation should be excluded because you can't predict the future and if you could you'd be just as well off putting your cash into FB stock without working for them. For someone discussing the causes of Bay Area housing unaffordability it's very relevant, because having several thousand people earning a million a year who are all trying to buy up limited housing stock is going to seriously affect prices.

This discussion thread seems to be a mix of both, so...YMMV.

Intern converts at FB get a minimum of $150k RSU going up to $220k.

Over 4 years.

Yes

I know it sounds crazy, but it's not really crazy. People don't talk about it a lot, but it's not unlike commercial airline pilots making $300k a year. They extract their fair take from very profitable businesses.

Those numbers make working in tech feel like a modern day gold rush. I work as a programmer and don’t see anything near those amounts. I suspect most other programmers don’t either, even if they won’t admit it. Colleges and bootcamps selling overpriced training certainly won’t. Working in tech is beyond overhyped and it’s only going to get worse. I’m not talking about FAANG, I’m talking about everywhere else.

There's a lot of data points here: https://goo.gl/iHw7cj

This is what passes for "data" here? Self-reported with zero verification. You're not capturing rank-and-file software engineers here, only those who have interesting enough situations to report. A spreadsheet like this is bound to skew ultra high.

>Plenty of people (individual contributors, not managers) make over a million doing software in the bay area

As an absolute number - maybe

As a percentage - it’s minuscule

Did not know that individual contributors in F/A/N/G were making this much. Are we talking Jeff Dean level outliers or does this apply in a wider setting?

$1 million is definitely an outlier but more than $300k (total compensation) is not.

We need data to claim even something like this, especially for a dev position.

I don't have data to show you, I'm speaking from personal experience and I talk about salaries with my coworkers.

Jeff Dean isn't even an IC. He does manage teams.

The spreadsheet posted above seems to indicate that few positions have base+bonus salary of above $200k.

Are we looking at the same spreadsheet?

I was making low 6 figures in Austin and my TC actually almost doubled when I moved to the Bay. I had multiple offers, all with similar compensation. Like another peer has said you should try interviewing and see what is offered before making these kinds of judgements.