I read this here and there and don't doubt it, but then again I've never seen/met anyone IRL (outside of C-level) making this much money as an employee.
Are they just extremely rare cases or am I just not aware of the valley and their customs?
Yeah, I’ve worked at both FAANG and non-FAANG series C companies, and made between $450k-$550k between 2018 and 2021. And I wasn’t even staff level.
I decided I was tired of all that bureaucracy and decided to join a series C startup making $230k + worthless stock options. It was fun for a year, but it actually hurts now. And there’s been a bunch of nickling and diming on perks and benefits too, and no comp adjustments.
And here in NYC it’s surprisingly easy to blow through that paycheck. Didn’t feel that way when I lived in SF.
I don’t work at a FAANG so I could be totally off but I think there’s only about 1,000 L6+ at google [0] and they employ the most. So it’s not thousands of people at this level within a company. Maybe only a few thousand in total of all companies in the US.
I firmly believe you are off by an order of magnitude at least.
First, the comment you linked is 7 years old. Most FAANG companies increased their headcount many fold ever since.
Second, there is such a thing as title inflation, over time more and more people get promoted to their terminal level, which at my FAANG is very often L6, each tiny team has always at least one or two of them. There are many, many more than 937 L6s at my company. Hell, I know for a fact that there are several hundreds of distinguished engineers (L9) at my company, which is an incredibly hard level to reach, so do the math and then scale it across the entire valley.
Third, do not discount my comment about L5 compensation reaching that $500k+ level very often. L5 represent a very large portion of the talent pool, probably the first or second largest (after L4).
You clearly do not have to believe me nor take my word for it. Not a problem. I just want to make sure other readers hear both sides of the conversation.
I'm an L5 at Google and don't even remotely make $500k. About half that, depending on how GOOG stock does. Yes, that huge number is probably not unheard of, but "not unheard of" doesn't mean it's common. So either 1. I'm absolutely terrible at negotiation or 2. Online comp statistics suffer from bias where people excited about their salaries tend to report it and the majority don't. I know levels.fyi tries to correct for bias, but it's very, VERY hard to believe $500k is COMMON for L5. Yes they probably exist. Yes, HN commenters probably skew towards "highly skilled" so you're going to see a lot of high comps here. No, we're not all even within striking range of $500k.
And L6 is very, VERY senior. Not ridiculously senior like the aristocracy at L7+ but L6s are rare and there's probably one of them for every ten L5's. L5 to L6 is a major weed-out promo, and not many people get that far. I've been trying for 5 years.
Something is off here… are you based in the Bay Area?
I literally have PDF copies of offers I received in 2018 from both Facebook and Google for L5 roles in the $400k range, and things just went significantly crazier since then. And I am the most average engineer you can imagine, with most of my peers in a similar situation.
I cannot comprehend how your TC can just be $250k at Google after 5 years of refreshers. That’s like L3 comp in the pocket of the organization I’m at.
Yea, Bay Area. I believe you. Obviously there must be a very wide range for L5. I suspect all you see when people post online are the really great ones, because after all who wouldn't want to talk about their great comp?! So, when all you see are the very highest-earners sharing their comp, you might start to think that they're normal or "usual". I've got 20yrs experience in the industry too, but mostly in no-name companies.
In my experience, the discounted factor is that you don’t get promoted to the top of the next level band but people are hired into top of next level band quite frequently. This bias favors moving companies regularly.
however, in practice, few are able to land such positions when interviewed externally - I’d believe the pass rate for L6 is less than 1 in 10. Even after accounting for screening steps.
Ah, I really don't believe you now since much of that income is going to be from a once/year stock grant. There is no way you could tell how much they were making by looking at their paycheck (well, pay stub, who gets paychecks anymore?).
If you saw their w2 or 1040, your claim would be more credible, since that's when most of us learn how much we actually made in the previous year.
My "claim"? I don't know what else to say, buddy. You believe me if you want, I help my friend with taxes so I've seen everything relevant and simply called "paycheck".
I'm trying to be nice to you by sharing information you can use in your future negotiations, but it seems you're just angry you are not making as much as my friend. Maybe next time I should just let you leave 100K+ on the table and go on with my life.
Also, doesn't Google famously have an internal spreadsheet where people share their salary anonymously? You can check that too if it still exists.
The paycheck statements at my FAANG include the amount of RSU vested YTD, and each vesting event generates a separate paycheck as well. Vesting schedule is also typically monthly these days, with no initial cliff. What is yearly is any refresh grant, but then even those vest monthly.
If you look at one you have a pretty good way to extrapolate the expected TC for the year.
With a GDP per capita of just about 50k, that means each of those people earn no less than 10 shares of the nation's wealth...
That means 10 people have to be completely destitute to achieve that level of distribution...
Though GDP can always grow, the simple truth is that a nation has a fixed amount of production in any given year and this shit is a disgusting manifestation of the imbalances of its distribution.
I have many times, the point is the same: They all get an absurd percent of the pie despite being less productive for the essential needs of society than the average construction laborer.
Reading anecdotes like this blows my mind. The most I've ever made is $129k. Granted, I don't live in the valley and I don't work at a FAANG, but still...
There's a very strange phenomenon in US cities where it seems every salary is slowly converging to the $110-140k range. People who used to make $80k for borderline unskilled work (cold calling to sell business internet, for example) are now in the $110-120k range but people who were already at $120k have barely had any upward mobility in their pay.
Even at large "boring" corporate developer jobs that don't pay a fraction of the FAANG salaries, it seems the decent engineers either escaped this trap (promoted to $150k+) or have settled into the $130-140k quicksand with little to no annual raise.
That has basically been my strategy. After a bit more than a decade of working in the Bay Area, immigrating from Europe, I accumulated $4M in liquid net worth invested in fairly diversified assets, so I’ll be pulling the plug not too far into the future, and retire in Europe. I still cannot believe that these opportunities exist: in my own country, doing the exact same job I’ve been doing, I would probably have less than €200k saved up.
I understand that people’s circumstances are incredibly different, but to the extent that one is willing to go through the discomfort of uprooting their lives, spending a few years in the Bay Area and making a lot of money is a no brainer arbitrage opportunity that is still wide open IMHO.
I made that much for 4 years and have a total of 10 years work experience. I’m nowhere near retired. And I’ve been single the entire time.
$500k is more like $275k after taxes. Assuming $60k/yr in living expenses, which is pretty frugal in the Bay Area, that’s barely over $1M in savings in 5 years. Let’s say $1.3M after return on investments over 5 years.
Nowhere close to retirement money anywhere in the US.
3% is a pretty reasonable amount to take each year out of a lump sum you're trying to use to live the rest of your life off, which for $1.3M would be $39k/yr.
$39k/yr may not give you a life of luxury anywhere in the US, but there's certainly people surviving on less - and surely if you were OK on $60k/yr cost of living in the Bay Area it wouldn't be hard to find parts of the US where $39k/yr stretches further than $60k does there?
Of course there's many people who wouldn't want to move to a cheaper area, and especially anyone who is able to earn $500k/yr is likely to choose to work longer before retiring to not have to be as frugal - but "nowhere close to retirement money anywhere in the US" seems way off. I'd even be surprised if $1.3M wasn't significantly greater than the median amount of pension + savings owned by Americans at the point of their retiring.
edit: Actual numbers back up my assumptions above, for example "According to the Fed data, the median net worth for Americans in their late 60s and early 70s is $266,400. The average (or mean) net worth for this age bracket is $1,217,700, but since averages tend to skew higher due to high net-worth households, the median is a much more representational amount." from https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-net-worth-of-americans-a... or similar at https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewrosen/2022/06/16/are-you-... etc.
No this is not rare at all. Meta offers E5 ("senior" level) new hires a 400-500k total package in the US (given that you negotiate, I know the levels.fyi numbers are a bit lower), and this isn't some exception. If your performance is good and/or stock appreciation happens, then that number goes even higher.
I'm a very average engineer (probably way below average amongst the HN crowd) and I'm in that range.
Mix of the above. It’s not dissimilar to investment banking or other highly compensated field. You need to get to the top of the top firms. The top of the top comes from the population of peer companies. The population of peer companies come from the population of lesser peers and top schools.
It’s not as easy as some posters make it sound, but it’s still on the order of 20-50k engineers. If you wonder why these firms move faster than the rest of the industry, this is a major contributor.
I think there's a few other factors that impact visibility.
* The Bay Area is a place where you can make $100k a year and be classified as low-income [1].
* Tech employees tend to live low-key lifestyles that don't really show how much they're making. I know people who make $500k and still live with roommates.
* Income inequality and progressive politics combine to make people less reluctant to talk about their TC packages, unless you're also at a similar socio-economic level.
> Are they just extremely rare cases or am I just not aware of the valley and their customs?
Not aware. That's not unusual compensation for key contributors. Especially in AI or other niche fields. Even outside the valley.
We acquired something a while back in Montreal, Canada and it sure wasn't cheap. Salaries were in the same ballpark as our positions in the valley. We actually got most of the team to relocate to California on O-1s but still have some guys over there.
You are not aware. I have many personal friends, Engineers, making 600K+. These are old friends who have no reason to lie. I know a senior engineer who manages a small team who had a lucky take-home of over a million in a good year.
