Once you’re coasting in the 400-500k FAANG range, what’s the optimal move to get 700-800k+? Seems there are too many graybeards to get a Principal title. Better to switch to manager role? Or VP eng type at some startup and hope your stock hits? Or maybe VP at some non tech company?
> What sort of software do you have to be writing besides magic money printing machines for it to be worth that amount of money?
My understanding is that you have to get into FAANG or be in certain roles at certain HFT firms. I’m also pretty sure these are TC numbers are large chunks of those numbers are stock options.
Even in FAANG I have a hard time understanding how any developer is worth that amount of money though.
I know a solid number of FAANG and ex-FAANG devs -- the stuff they work on (from what I've heard) isn't much different from the sorts of software I assume most people in SaaS startups work on. Outside of scale (which is significant). A lot of it is internal tooling though, which never hits absurd amounts of scale.
I do know that there are x100 devs at FAANG that put out the groundbreaking projects that change landscapes -- but that's generally these well-known outlier developers for which there are a tiny handful in the world.
HFT and quants I understand, that's money-printing business, FAANG I don't. But also, I've never worked or applied at FAANG, so I can't really form a valid opinion I suppose.
>HFT and quants I understand, that's money-printing business, FAANG I don't.
According to 10-K reports, they print far more money. The net income per employee figures are never before seen for organizations of that size, for so many years:
For Amazon, you have to strip out the non tech employees, but similar numbers exist at AWS. That is the beauty of near zero marginal costs, winner take all markets, and extremely high barriers to entry.
I work in one of the data platform teams at a social media company. Between our 3 HDFS clusters, we're storing more than an exabyte of data. At our scale, we have to tune our workloads carefully to make sure that problems of scale are not noticeable to internal customers (data scientists, analysts, etc.).
We basically have an entire org of highly paid engineers focused on making sure people can use that data efficiently. So we have a team of people working on storage, on Spark, on Presto/Trino, on data ingestion, and so on.
So my understanding is that we're investing in engineers to improve data science productivity, so that they can do analysis without having to understand the internals of all our systems, so that executives can make informed decisions backed by data to continue printing money. Or something like that...
This type of infrastructure is worth tooling out and productizing. I know a few places are doing it and it's hard to not have Software Engineers behind the scenes supporting clients.
Maybe you make it a SaaS so companies only need to hire daa scientists if you can optimize the ETL process.
Google and Facebook are making hundreds of thousands of (almost endirely advertising derived) dollars per employee. They have functional monopolies on search and social media advertising respectively, so every company in the world looking to use those advertising vectors is at their mercy. Maintaining that extremely lucrative position is worth paying an excess to achieve even small advantages in staying ahead of the curve.
Years ago, I heard that Google made $800,000 per employee, I wonder what its at now?
This is why Amazon is as big as it is, because the vast majority of their employees are warehouse and delivery workers at low wages - so the margins they make per employee are insanely higher than Goog...
From their latest earnings release [0], they had 61.880 billion dollars in revenue for the second quarter and 144,056 employees so a simple annualization of that quarter would put them at 1.718 million dollars in revenue per employee.
You don't make doctors go through 8 years of med school and residency because you want to make them great at treating colds and sewing up stitches, you do it so when the edge case appears they don't accidentally kill someone.
In the same way, even 364 days a year the dev is doing completely boring work that someone making 80k could do, the one day they have the potential to do work that takes down the site for even minutes is worth the $ delta!
This doesn’t ring true to me. Everybody makes mistakes and it seems to me that popular big engineering companies are more likely to try to understand root (technical) causes of outages and mitigate them rather than blaming people for being around when a fragile system fails (which is what it sounds like you are suggesting with the emphasis on not making errors.)
The point I was trying to make was that even if 99% of the job doesn't involve any algorithmic knowledge and is boring crud work, the one day a year (or even less) where one of those engineers has to recognize how to do optimal graph traversal or memoization makes it all worth it.
When seconds of latency even for hours can be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, hiring to make sure someone is less likely to screw up one day a year is worth it.
Currently at a medium-large company. I’ve saved the company 10 years worth of my salary in the first 6 months of my position and continue to make decisions to multiply spending power on things like research.
I also try to make damn well sure everything we use is contributed too financially and we open source as much as possible.
I think with FAANG it’s mostly just down to them having insane valuation and being able to give out those stock options. The base salaries don’t seem particularly high, until maybe the highest levels.
If you look at FAANG earnings, their annual gross revenue (before expenses), is at least $1M per employee. Last time I looked Apple does $1.5M including all their Apple store employees.
It's not just insane valuation. If the employees are bringing in $1M per head, you can afford to spend more on those who are making stuff.
It's still the case that most of the total comp is from RSUs, and often the people making $500k+ are making that because of appreciation in the stock price. Their initial offer wasn't that high.
They’re not stock options, they’re RSUs or restricted stock units. And you can sell them whenever you want, inside the quarterly trading windows. It’s basically cash, it’s just tied to the company’s performance.
A developer is worth whatever the local market pays at the time to retain them. If you have a look at housing costs in the bay area/Seattle (close to work 2000 sq ft ~ 2 million US dollars), you will understand why anything below 200k makes almost no sense in these areas for an experienced dev, and why 400k+ is fairly common.
I agree with you - hence why it is very hard for early stage startups to give meaningful offers in the bay area.
Personally, I never understood how you could even pay someone 100k TC… it’s just that some companies make a LOT of money, so much that’s it’s just impossible to fathom.
> Personally, I never understood how you could even pay someone 100k TC
I grew up fairly poor (what Americans consider "poor"), home was a double-wide trailer, best my mum could do for food was peanut butter and crackers.
Got better in later years towards the end of childhood.
But a combination of: the above, being homeless for a while, and working a lot of jobs like manual labor/landscaping, dishwashing, food service, retail etc for minimum wage gave me perspective.
I honestly don't have any clue why I get as paid as much as I do.
I'm not complaining. Employer, if you're reading this, don't take my money away lmao. I'm finally not poor anymore.
But my life was fucking miserable for $8/hr and in tech now I make (what feels like) ludicrous money for work that isn't even hard.
Would you rather more money go to management and stock holders? Folks doing the work and making the world more productive deserve a larger share of the pie, not a smaller one.
RSUs - way more liquid than options, they're practically cash in the bank when they vest, but watch out for cliffs (i.e. vesting schedule). Amazon is particularly bad (tail weighted), Google is particularly generous (every month).
Well sure, if you don't have enough to add up to a share every month then you won't get a share every month. If the price continues to rise and there's no stock split that will probably become more likely in the future.
FAANG are magic money printing machines. That’s why they can afford so many bs side projects that don’t make any money. And I write software that consumes 50-100x my salary in resources, so I’m probably underpaid.
you could do performance optimization for a team on already established services inside GCP/AWS... you are literally saving Millions of $ a year if you optimize the services used by tens of thousands of other companies.
CS grads can start at $225/yr at most FAANG cos. With zero years of experience. There’s really no secret here. It’s well known. Get a CS degree, know you’re interview questions well, and you’ll likely get in. It’s the interview that’s the real test.
Also to be clear, that’s total comp. Not salary. Salary is closer to $150. I think most FAANG cos top out around $200k for salary, but I know several people making over $1m a year.
I think much of the software might be the same as at any another company. These companies are so profitable that they're willing to offer more $$$ to get slightly better people to do regular work slightly better than it's done on average.
I told myself I'd be fine at 300k. Now I'm there, and I've picked up more hobbies. Doesn't stop me from looking for new gigs, from time to time. Going super deep into optimizing for one thing might be a good short-term, but bad long-term proposition. A lot of getting to 700k, I imagine, is luck. So long as you're competent, it's right place, right time. You can't force that situation to happen, so it's wasted energy to invest further.
Is this a joke? No I don't care about the companies I work for in the slightest. A company is only as good to me as their last paycheck, to paraphrase from The Sopranos.
Not the person you're replying to, but I think there's a whole lot of mistaken assumptions in this comment.
There is one employer in the world that will reliably give me work I care about and am happy to work on for its own sake, and that employer is myself. Unfortunately, I can't afford to hire myself full-time. I tried it once, and it turns out (unsurprisingly, given my career) that I'm interested in working on interesting infrastructure problems and not interested in building a product, let alone marketing or selling it. I got some PRs into an open source project and then I ran out of money.
So no matter what I do, I have to settle for an employer I care less about. At that point, the choice of employer is just negotiation.
Also, it turns out there are a handful of employers who pay really well - to the point where if I work a job I'm fairly happy with, I can then eventually save enough money that I can hire myself full-time for the things I care about.
There is no hypocrisy here, and bluntly you're being scammed by your employer if you've let them convince you there is. The way the employer wants to treat you is to pay you money in exchange for services. That's it. Would you feel hypocritical if you were an Uber driver who took rides from people you didn't care about? Would you feel hypocritical if you were a barber who cut one person's hair, and then the next day you cut a different person's hair?
I didn't make a vow of faithfulness to my employer, promising to be with them for richer or poorer, for better or worse. (And even that agreement is two-sided, and you can non-hypocritically break that agreement if the other party isn't holding up their end of the deal.) I signed an employment contract, promising them that I would do work for them and they would pay me, and that they could stop paying me at any time and I could in turn stop working for them at any time.
I think I'd sooner go back to drugs and homelessness than face the thought of waking up every day to give the majority of my waking hours to something I don't care about. For almost the rest of my life.
Or even worse, something I disliked/working for trash people.
I used to have panic attacks thinking about this when I worked mundane, dead-end jobs.
Pardon my language but: the fuck is the point even?
At least if you're high, in a park reading a book or papers on the internet you're enjoying life.
I'm being genuine and not trying to be antagonistic, I'm not sure I understand why you bother to work at all?
If you don't find anything in the world interesting, what gives you the will to live and not commit suicide?
Here's another viewpoint: just because there's no job that I I would enjoy doing doesn't mean that I don't enjoy anything. There are so many things that I enjoy doing, but no company is going to pay me 100K a year to just do whatever I want.
Furthermore, what I enjoy changes radically from month to month. Earlier this month I was enthralled by geology and thought about how awesome it would be to be a geologist. Now, something else has captured my attention and I rarely think about geology. Soon, I'll move on to something else.
So, at best, a job can keep my interest for maybe 2 to 3 months, I'm burned out within a year and I can usually manage to stay for about two years total before my productivity abruptly drops to near zero. To me a job is solely a means to obtain money and time off so that I can go do what I actually enjoy.
To me, you're just as much as an enigma. How could you possibly enjoy doing the same thing for a long period of time? What do you do when you are consumed by the euphoria that comes when you finally find something new that finally scratches that insatiable itch inside of you? The indescribable joy and obsession that makes everything that's come before seem empty and jejune by comparison?
Though I have been diagnosed with pretty severe ADHD, so that probably explains a lot of it.
No issues, I get what you’re saying. Funny though, although it’s mostly a “rose colored glasses” sort of thing, I think fondly on my time working shit dead end jobs because I was at least working towards something better whereas now I have to constantly question whether I’ve peaked.
> Pardon my language but: the fuck is the point even?
When you find out let me know. Some people seem to get lucky enough to have all sorts of other, non work things to keep them going, family, etc. so I suppose if you have that it’s motivation.
> I'm not sure I understand why you bother to work at all?
Because the alternative is throwing away both my past and any potential for the future, even if it looks grim. As stupid as it is, I’ve thought about though, if not at least because it would give me a blank slate and something to work towards again. Though the few fleeting moments of content was I find are generally at times I wouldn’t be there if I wasn’t wageslaving the rest of the time.
> If you don't find anything in the world interesting, what gives you the will to live and not commit suicide?
There’s plenty of things I find interesting, just nothing that anyone would ever pay me to do. Maybe they aren’t commercially viable, maybe they’re not really career related things, or maybe I’m not smart/wealthy/educated enough to take them on.
I and my partner don't have family either really. We have living families, but not the way most people consider family I think.
> There’s plenty of things I find interesting, just nothing that anyone would ever pay me to do. Maybe they aren’t commercially viable, maybe they’re not really career related things, or maybe I’m not smart/wealthy/educated enough to take them on.
This hits close to home for me. I got lucky with my interests/hobbies, but your scenario is identical to my partners.
6 years of a wildlife biology + animal behavior degree and she says she can't find a job doing what she wants.
I'm convinced it's possible, but that it would take a lot of hunting people down, knocking on doors, networking, emailing random people, basically taking every measure and avenue available.
I could also be wrong though, who knows.
But, she doesn't want me to do that and has something else she's doing so I go "Okey, if that's what you want."
I have no idea what it is you like to do, but if there's any earthly way for you to do it for a living, or make your living off of something tangential IMO you should quit tech and do that.
I'm sure you have pursued that at this point though.
In addition, work doesn't need to consume the majority of waking hours. If you have a high-paying job at a company with a nice culture you can spend ~4 hours a day or less working, with the rest of the time spent reading articles on the internet, browsing hacker news, occasionally replying to Slack messages etc.
I wouldn't leave my job for a "slight" increase in pay, though that's subjective and we haven't defined concrete amounts, other than 300k and 700k in my previous comment, and such a jump (more than double) could not be characterized as slight-- it's substantial.
I need to be paid a risk premium for the new gig having potentially worse colleagues, poorer WLB, or whatever things I find after the interview process. With my current job, I know all of these things. So jumping from 300k, to say, 325k would be unwise and immaterial (8.3%). I might jump for 350, definitely for 400.
Why would you ever work for a company that employs that many people and would treat you like shit?
For the (slightly more) money? Well then that's your own doing, innit?
The great thing about having any sort of skills is that you can pick and choose what you want to do with them.
If you choose to work for someone like that, you're willingly subjecting yourself to misery, and to (probably) wasting some of the best years of your life working on things you don't give a flying fuck about.
For people who also don't give a flying fuck. There are no fucks to be given -- the organization is, for lack of a better term, Fuckless.
Working in a Fuckless org does not, as Marie Kondo would say, "Spark Joy".
If you have to choose between:
- $150k Salary @ small startup working on something you're passionate about with a close-knit team
- $250k Salary @ $BIGCO to be COG_IN_WHEEL_#3356
The tradeoff you're making there is pretty clear
I'm not a judgmental person and don't ride moral high-horses. Personally, I value happiness, mental wellbeing, and have a fulfilling life more than slightly more money.
If you don't and you choose to subject yourself to all that awful stuff for the money, that's well and good, but you also can't turn around and complain about it or act like it's the only/a normal choice.
Bud you said you make 110k and we’re originally responding to people talking about 300k, 500k, and more.
There is no reasonable way to look at ~300%+ increase in compensation as “slightly more”.
You’ve got a point about working for a company you believe in, but that’s part of your total comp. You chose a package that’s lower pay + fits your interests. When people drop the “fits your interests” requirement they are able to get more comp as part of the package
Been in both roles before at Small Fun Startup and BigCo and I'll take BigCo every time now because that extra $100K/yr (and its usually way way way more than that compared to the startup) get me closer to my life goals of total fiscal independence and retirement quicker.
So yea, I'll sell my soul and eat shit for enough $$$.
Probably not since your government will most likely always require you to pay taxes, but you may be able to achieve financial independence for some definition of the expression.
How many companies are building something worth believing in?
The ones who are (few) defintiely don't worry about this problem as much. If a company is having problems with it it's probably that their estimation of their own moral self worth is what's incorrect, not the attitude of their employees.
I work at my current job because I used their OSS tool at a past position and felt like I had my life changed. Then wanted to share it with every other developer.
So I got in contact with them and told them how I felt, and now that's what I do.
If I ever feel like the tool doesn't represent the same quality as when I started or the company values have changed, welp, then it's quittin' time and on to the next thing I go I suppose. But I don't see that happening -- or at least I really hope so.
Nobody's integrity and happiness should be compromised or up for sale, unless that's what they want.
I've slept under bridges and I'll go back to it again before I sell myself out, tell lies, or pretend to be someone I'm not.
Here's some examples of things I think are genuinely valuable and jobs I would do:
- Software for addiction treatment centers and rehabilitation
- Bioinformatics and genomics for disease, especially making information accessible to regular people. Genomics for fitness/sports performance.
- Software reform in partnership with state/governmental agencies for criminal justice
- Anything to do with LLVM. LLVM is fucking cool.
- GraalVM is fucking cool.
- Music software -- production (DAW's), plugins, education software to make music theory accessible
- Software to make learning programming accessible. Stuff like repl.it, Codesandbox, Scrimba
I could go on and on. The world has so many serious issues, and interesting problems/challenges to work on -- just pick one you like and relentlessly hunt companies + people down + study (if you need to, to learn the domain) until you get a job.
If I can claw myself out of poverty, drug-addiction, and homelessness as a highschool dropout, into a white-collar career then I'm pretty sure most people with less disadvantaged life scenarios can too.
---
Not to pull the cliche, stupid "by-your-bootstraps" argument. But look, humans are driven and intelligent beings that drive the force of history.
Don't tell me that there's no company in the world doing something you believe in, and you can't get a job doing what you like, etc.
> Here's some examples of things I think are genuinely valuable and jobs I would do:
- Software for addiction treatment centers and rehabilitation
Where's the money in that? San Francisco can't even scrounge enough funding and will to effectively treat its own addiction-afflicted citizens and homeless population, the local VCs are likely even less interested in that line of work.
> - Bioinformatics and genomics for disease, especially making information accessible to regular people. Genomics for fitness/sports performance.
23AndMe, Verily, etc. are in this big industry. Of course, a considerable of this is going to lead to people's medical data being resold to Big Pharma, which is where the big monetization in.
> - Software reform in partnership with state/governmental agencies for criminal justice
They do exist, but again where is that funding coming from?
> - Anything to do with LLVM. LLVM is fucking cool.
Apple has that locked down, sure.
> - GraalVM is fucking cool.
That'd be Oracle's baby.
> - Music software -- production (DAW's), plugins, education software to make music theory accessible
That does exist, sure.
> - Software to make learning programming accessible. Stuff like repl.it, Codesandbox, Scrimba
Plenty of projects like that exist, sure.
> That's really pessimistic and defeatist.
Any industry with the amount of dumb money and hype as tech is going to lead to these emotional consequences. Ask yourself how much world-changing prosocial visions are on Wall Street, how many sunny optimistic dreams left unscathed by Hollywood. Silicon Valley is just another face of the bleeding edge of capital generation.
> What ever happened to working somewhere because you believe in what you're building and the people you're around bring you joy?
Sounds like capitalist propaganda, unless you work at some sort of co-op which is employee owned or something, ordinary rank-and-file employees are compensated with absolute pennies in terms of equity.
If you’re in that range, VP Eng at a startup is probably a lower expected value than staying put, unless you have very credible reasons to think that an exit is 9-18 months away.
Even a super well funded startup isn’t going to pay you half of what you’re making at a FAANG if you’re at that level, even for a VP job. The best a startup will be able to do is mid 200s, maybe 300. Why not just stay at a FAANG if you’re already there and coasting? I couldn’t mentally handle working for a FAANG but if you’ve done it long enough and well enough to get to $600k per year you might at well just stick it out until you’re 40 and then retire.
Fake it til you make it. The game is all about perception/value. If you have a higher perceived value than actual value it plays to your benefit.
You really need to turn around the interview on the interviewer. Best means of accomplishing this is to run through the technical evaluation as quick as possible, then turn the question around in terms of whether it would solve their current problems with what they're working on. It likely won't, so try to identify current problems within the organization/team/project. Dig into those problems and help identify solutions. Question the tradeoffs with the existing system and their current approach.
