And in Europe, middle managers will earn 80-90k while senior engineers will earn 70-80k (excepting a few BigTech or Fintech companies.
As an American who much prefers life in the Netherlands to life in the US, I must admit the growing frustration at the pay difference... it's almost enough to make me go back home.
If the European companies don't wake up to this, they will gradually see a brain drain (especially if the US reverses its anti-immigration attitude).
As for TFA topic, to me most jobs are roughly the same. Only when I work for myself or directly with a small client (where I have total control over the technical decisions) is it close to "fun". Otherwise, it's usually 50% useful energy expenditure, and 50% wasted energy trying to improve systems where middle management is too content with status quo regardless of the potential profit gains from improved operations (and fewer engineers working smarter).
So honestly, unless you have your own company and (near)total control, you might as well be working for the highest bidder - excepting in industries you may have moral or ethical disagreements with.
> If the European companies don't wake up to this, they will gradually see a brain drain
I think the EU has taken a pretty consistent stance in wanting to avoid America’s massive wealth divide.
It’s nice to know that you can be on the benefitting side of such a divide, but it comes with social downsides. America’s rent, homeless, and crime problems are far, far beyond most places in Europe and a big factor in this is people with insane wealth happily paying insane amounts for formerly cheap properties.
I beg to differ. I am western European, I was born the poorest of my classmates, friends, colleagues, whatever. I'm also the one, among my circle, earning way more than everybody else. Despite that, my net worth is and will always be on the lower end of said circle. Most if not all of my peers have parents that own their house, some of them own activities which they've already basically partially passed on their children etc. I know it sounds bitter but I feel like I was born to work while most of my peers were born into rent-seeking mode. Due to the high taxation, I've an hard cap on what I can make with my life unless I get insanely lucky, the combination of high taxation and high rent is an enormous pressure, my life would be totally different if I had started with my own home. Maybe there are statistics out there about this, but it feels like that having your own home early (e.g. through the help of parents) is more important than whatever career or academic achievement (PHD, etc.) you go through. I don't think it's the same in the USA.
It’s not. I know people that that had nothing, moved to the US and now own multiple homes now after doing well in tech.
Life in the US is not easy, but it seems like upward mobility is still easier than most of Europe. Sure it’s great in Europe if your family has owned land since William I roamed the earth though.
> I think the EU has taken a pretty consistent stance in wanting to avoid America’s massive wealth divide.
Then raise the tax rates at higher incomes.
People can be 'psychologically satisfied' with having a large number given to them during salary negotiations for their gross salary, but then once income is greater than (say) 200'000, a larger and larger portion is taken at higher tax brackets.
And a refresher on how marginal tax brackets work:
Don't know where you live but Europe's wealth divide is bigger than America's. We just need to make the distinction between income inequality and wealth inequality which are completely different things.
Urban property prices for Europeans are far less approachable on our wages than they are for Americans on their wages. Munich has the same square foot/meter prices as SF but at a third of the wages. I assume it's similar in Paris and London.
When I was working in Germany for an engineering company, all the guys in the Dallas-FW office had bought big houses in the suburbs (yeah, car dependence though) while everyone in the Munich office was still renting (and not living centrally).
Europe had less income inequality, but much higher wealth inequality thanks to decades/centuries of accumulated old-money that keeps growing, especially in real-estate assets.
Europe protects you from becoming homeless but it's near impossible to accumulate wealth if you start from the bottom, while in the US you can easily become wealthy from the bottom if you're savvy and healthy but you can also easily become homeless if you're not.
all the guys in the Dallas-FW office had bought big houses in the suburbs (yeah, car dependence though) while everyone in the Munich office was still renting
that's exactly showing that the divide is less. less people in europe are wealthy enough to afford their own house, but also less people are so poor to have to live on the street. more people are in the middle renting.
Europe protects you from becoming homeless but it's near impossible to accumulate wealth if you start from the bottom, while in the US you can easily become wealthy from the bottom if you're savvy and healthy but you can also easily become homeless if you're not.
again the result is that europe has less of a divide between rich and poor. and society is better off as a result of it.
Europe has lower income inequality but greater wealth inequality.
When only a handful of people can afford to buy and are forced to rent that does not show lower inequality.
If you have 100 people when 50% of them can’t afford to buy a house you have lower inequality than if 99% can’t afford to buy one.
Europe overall has far greater divide between the rich and the poor and the wealthy classes are far more dominated by old money.
You have countries where the richest families haven’t changed in 400 years.
And this is despite the biggest wealth redistribution event that happened in history - WW2.
I’m not saying that Europe is a bad place to live, I live there well in the UK but there are major issues here.
I earn for more than £90K however buying anything outside of a 2-3 bed 800-900 square foot flat in London is out of the question. As houses in middle and upper middle class areas are easily £2M these days and these aren’t mansions either, these are 1000-1500 square foot Victorian houses.
Sadly that isn’t how we measure inequality because it doesn’t makes sense. By your method a feudal society is perfectly equal since only a fraction of the population has any wealth whilst the rest slave away in the fields…
Who is "we"? The gini coeffient does measure income inequality similar to that. And yes, a feudal society would be more equal...
For example, a feudal society of, say, 50,000 peasant and a single lord, where each peasant makes 80 units of money, and the lord's tax cut is 10% (a common tax at the time, called a "tithe"), will have a gini coefficient of 0,09 (where 0 = full equality, and 1 = total inequality).
It might be easier to start at the bottom and become wealthy in America, but it is not "easy". In fact, it's quite difficult, and for practical purposes may as well be impossible for the majority of such people. It usually requires an insane amount of luck. Sometimes it also requires working hard, but it almost always also requires a huge amount of luck.
Yeah, that too, although correct me if I'm wrong, but to me, Lisbon's housing issues seem to be self inflicted by prioritizing Airbnbs and housing for tourists and rich crypto-bro nomads at the expense of its own citizens.
Could probably be fixed if the Portuguese would vote right, no? Meaning it's more of a political issue than an economical one.
Here in Poland there's a lot of property not rented as the law is such that if someone stops paying it'll take you years to (maybe) throw him out. And during all that time you need to pay the bills for him because if he gets cut off from e.g. electricity for not paying you face criminal charges.
I would assume the situation is similar in many places across Europe.
That sounds like the worst. In Austria the tenant is responsible to sign the contracts to the utilities under his own name so if he doesn't pay his bills and gets cut off it's his own problem.
Also some landlords check your payslips to make sure you have a stable income so that evictions are less likely to be needed.
Here it is a choice and many wised up and require the transfer to the tenant or install pre-paid meters on e.g. electricity. Also checking the background has become now much more common.
But either way if someone like that starts living in your property removing him (legally) is really time and money consuming. Many don't take the risk and just leave the flat/house unoccupied.
What people don't understand that one of the major differences between the US and Europe is ownership - in many European countries your property is not really your property. Here the state is solving the possible homelessness issue by forcefully seizing the "private" property.
>in many European countries your property is not really your property. Here the state is solving the possible homelessness issue by forcefully seizing the "private" property
This doesn't ring true at all. What do you mean by this? Where I lived in Europe your property meant your property any way you sliced it.
Yeah, evictions done through the legal system and not via muscle can take a very long time because the system is low and someone squatting in your parament isn't a high priority vs more serious crimes, but that's still your property and the government can't take it away from you.
Mainly because interest rates are lower. In the US the mortgage rate is ~7%, in at least some countries in northern Europe it is ~3%. And it used to be 1-2% recently. This however doesn't mean there aren't also a lot of inequality in Europe.
> Mainly because interest rates are lower. In the US the mortgage rate is ~7%, in at least some countries in northern Europe it is ~3%. And it used to be 1-2% recently.
"Danish bank launches world’s first negative interest rate mortgage":
yeah, but they added fees on top, so it was never like your principal was going down without paying installments. Now the interest rates are back to 5%, and 6% might come soon.
The best period was last year when mortgages were already around 4% (because they’re driven by the free market and what was happening in the US) and on top of that you had negative interest on your bank account, because Danish National’s bank interest rate was negative, so banked passed off the costs to customers. The negative interest rate also didn’t help when the inflation was going up quite quickly.
> Europe protects you from becoming homeless but it's near impossible to accumulate wealth
I think you are actually making the point of a smaller wealth divide. You might have meant social mobility instead? I’d agree that this is better in the US.
I see frequent stories on HN about people not able to afford homes in Lisbon, London or Paris. Trivial to dig up rent stats and compare against median income.
> homeless
I was in Frankfurt in summer. Entire 3x3 block area next to the main train station reminded me of Tenderloin in SF. Homeless people, urine and poop, needles, stench.. you got it all. And this is apparently one of the richest city in the strongest economy in Europe. Let's not talk about poor parts of Moldova, Romania or Belarus.
I am looking to Spain. Know Ireland, not my place to live. Yes, we should specify the city or country involved. Beyond the traffic I have a good experience traveling by train in Ireland and UK.
Before COVID, companies in Paris were offering me 40-50k for a mid-level engineer, no WFH, maybe they'd pay for your commute.
After COVID, similar companies (I talked to around 10) based in Paris were offering 90k + equity (BSPCE), full remote, desk/chair/monitor paid for, lunch card (25 euros/day for a max of 180/mo), insurance, fancy off-site meetings fully paid for, and more
Still not competitive with foreign companies that hire remotely with a French entity, but not nearly as bad as it used to be.
Did it change in the entire France tech sector or did you simply find a much better company than your old one? Correlation!= Cazualisation.
Anyway, I'm glad if it changed in France but it didn't where I live (Austria) where the market is depressing and they're still paying 2020 wage brackets. Europe is very diverse.
Before Covid, it was 40-50k in Paris and 30-35k in smaller cities.
Now i'm way north of 60k and i live on the coast in a medium-sized city (our population doubles each long weekend and during summer). And i have my transport costs reimbursed, as well as twice as much paid training.
They were CDI and English-speaking jobs (even when the company was French, they'd have German/Spanish/Italian offices and insist everyone speaks English)
> I wouldn't move to the US for any amount of money.
As a Canadian I wouldn't move mostly for family reasons, but in a more general sense there are very few places that seem appealing to me.
I grew up and have always lived in an urban area, and when I look at the US there don't seem to be that many places that have the 'vibe' I'm into: as a high-level litmus test, it'd be places with good public transit that I could bicycle around as well. Given that a good portion of the US was built post-WW2, large swaths of it are very car-centric. (True in Canada too.)
Neither would I, but I also have trouble seeing myself working for a European company given the way they slowly circle the drain when making decisions instead of being more pragmatic.
Not everyone is happy to move around in the world just to earn more money. I can’t imagine that a lot of people from Europe would just move to other countries or even continents, just to make more money. So, I don’t expect a “brain drain” to happen anytime soon.
That being said, I’m sure the salaries in Europe aren’t so great, but that goes for many things and other sectors definitely have it worse than tech workers (e.g. healthcare workers).
And it sounds like you could try working for smaller companies that are more agile and don’t have such annoying management issues! (At least in Germany they also tend to pay better or equally well as big corporations.)
The Europeans might not move but they can starting working remotely. Similarly, Chinese and Indians will start working remote US positions rather than moving to Europe.
I work remotely from Europe, with a 4-hour overlap with my US colleagues and other folks in India, APAC, etc. I'm not alone, but it is a very rare kind of role, and some local positions pay more--but they are typically in heavily political/lobbied/traditional (i.e., old-fashioned and stodgy) industries.
As an American who much prefers life in the Netherlands to life in the US, I must admit the growing frustration at the pay difference... it's almost enough to make me go back home.
My impression is that with remote work this is changing. There are a lot of opportunities for working remotely with better salaries than in The Netherlands. Of course, it's not for everyone.
That said, I'd always take a cut for working in a nicer, friendly company where I can make a difference. I'd rather make a decent wage with work that I enjoy over an extravagant wage over something that I hate. Bonus points if I can work on FLOSS software.
> I'd rather make a decent wage with work that I enjoy over an extravagant wage over something that I hate.
I don't think this point of view holds up, really. When the pay difference is 10x, it's hard to conceive that working 10 years at a nice job has better utility than working 1 year at a not-so-nice job and spending the other 9 years at one's leisure.
It sure does. Putting up with a year of a not-so-nice job sounds much more mentally draining than 10 years of a job you're happy with. A good job can provide you with other things than just compensation.
Unless the 10 year job gives fulfillment. Eg. I currently feel extremely happy/lucky to get paid for similar work as what I’d do as a hobby. It’s energizing. Plus the company is very nice.
I've also transplanted around the world a bit in different tech markets, albeit I don't have as much desire to return to the California madness, just for the paycheck.
Life quality in Europe is great - sure, you maybe don't get paid raw numbers comparable to the states, but on the other hand (at least here in Austria), if I tumble down a mountain having some fun and break my arm, the state will take care of me so I can go back to paying taxes. :)
And really, can anyone really say they enjoy living in the valley? That commute, man. Europeans sure have that one up on the Americans.
There's also the fact that most technology presence in Europe (especially US based companies) is essentially sales and services (even if you get a FAANG job locally, expect 3-5 years of shuffling around internally until you manage to move to Engineering, and even then you mostly have to relocate either to the US or to one of their arbitrarily chosen "hubs", which are typically not in well-paying countries).
But I agree that European companies need to get their act together. Not just about salaries, but also about hiring processes--I've had instances in the past where they tried to ape Valley interviews (quizzes, on-sites, etc.) without any of the reasoning behind them (ok, bear with me on the quizzes here--they never made sense), and others where I'd be much more senior (or at least more experienced in running things at scale) than the hiring manager.
May I ask where in NL? Wife and I (and kids) are looking at moving to bloommerwede.nl/ in Utrecht. I want to walk out my door and not see a car.
I'm an American who moved to Ireland. The month I got stamp 4 (meaning I wasn't tied to my employer) I got a job working for an American company that hired remote (Auth0) and a 50% bump in base, and several hundred k in options (but that was luck since Okta bought us). Since then I started my own limited company and work remote for US clients. I make about 150k a year. What's crazy to me is that European companies pay just appallingly badly, while (many) American companies consider me cheap. I was on a call with a startup and they asked about pay requirement and I said "around 140k" (I shouldn't have given a number but I was pretty sure I didn't want to work there) and they were delighted. Only later did we realize they had heard me as saying "40k" and they thought my ask was utterly ludicrous.
Similarly, accelerators here offer peanuts. I looked closely (and got in to) carbon13, which looks great in many respects since I want to work addressing climate breakdown, but if you get through their phase 1 AND find a cofounder then they will invest.... eighty thousand GBP. To start a company. I could move to America and just save 80k in relatively short order, and not split with a cofounder. I don't want to live in America (every time I go back I remember why we left) but.. still.
If I talk to friends in Europe I feel awkward about how much I am paid, and if I talk to my friends back home in California I feel awkward about how little. I suppose it's valuable perspective but I _WANT_ Europe to be a strong counter to the US making amazing companies and instead they bleed talent to California. It's pathetic that Ireland's biggest business success story is the Collisons, who got the hell out as fast as they could and moved to California to start Stripe. To Stripe's credit, they're one of the only companies in Dublin with not-terrible pay.
>If you're so good, why aren't you making 600k at BigTech
First off, because I don't live in a region where these kind of incomes are remotely possible for an employee.
I make more money than many FAANG employees in my country as FAANGS here does not offer the same salaries. They ask for the same amount of work from employees as their SV counterparts but salaries are 10x lower.
And no, my wish isn't to move to SV as there are other things that are at least as important as money for me.
Same here in my region of the US. My house is on a half acre and is about 2,500 sqft (~230m2) and it costs less than a studio in SF.
I had an opportunity that would’ve given me some funny money that has gone down by 40%. I’ll take family and affordability over chasing FAANG salaries.
I’ve never understood the “I pay the same for a MacBook as you” mentality from SF/SV. I can assure you the housing, food, and gas costs are way higher than mine.
I've observed similar in Tokyo. FAANGs exist here but compensation is middling compared to what they offer elsewhere, it's even worse when exchange rates are taken into account. If you want to be paid at the top of the market you're better off working for a bank.
I'm in finance in the UK now, because my US-based SV tech employer wanted to cut my pay by about 30%, and cut my base salary by about 50% if I moved to the UK and stayed employed with them. In finance, I'm making about what I did in the US.
> Better in some vague notion of engineering goodness? Eh probably not. On average we're all about average.
This doesn't make sense. You're picking people from the top end of the income distribution, assuming they are average and using this as evidence that people from the top end of the income distribution are average.
It might even be true but the reasoning doesn't follow. It's more likely that it isn't true and there is a difference in skill but that difference isn't proportional to compensation e.g those people are 15% better than average but get paid 100% more.
$NFLX pays all cash, IIRC. But that's not the point.
The point is in most cases, you need to move to a Tier 1 city with homes in the $800s and above or rents in the $3500/mo+ range to get offered that much cash/equity/bonus mix. (That's the low end. Stuff isn't great in that range unless you move far.) The total package is less to much less elsewhere.
You also need to factor the risk of being called back into the office (or losing your job if you can't do that).
Also, it depends on what you value. Some people really really value that big vest. Same problem as those who go into law, medicine or management (out of an MBA), generally.
This is exactly the reason why Big Tech is in trouble. The candidates cram Leetcode for months to get the jobs, and since their practical skills are irrelevant in that process, we all wonder what the hell this army of engineers is actually doing.
They are building unnecessarily complicated systems that you will need to hire even more engineers to maintain, that's what they are doing. But you pay them well, so there is that.
Just want to back the most upvoted comment by highlighting how rare 6 figure jobs are in most areas of Europe. For example, $65k / year puts you in top 5% highest paid workers (P95) in France.
Capital flows like water in a river in the richest areas of the US, whereas the EU is more like a swamp. You can save thousands / month while many of your coworkers struggle to make ends meet.
Working individually can keep a person at a better level in terms of ego. If you have a mind that constantly compares yourself to others, working in a company can make you sad. Of course it varies by company. maybe you can be happier.
100% why I left the Amazon meat grinder and RSU weighted compensation packages. I am one million times happier working for a midsize business that actually treats me like a creative, not an assembly line worker.
> Tech compensation is funny. Yes there's engineers at Netflix and friends making 600k in "total comp", but that doesn't mean 600k hits their bank account.
I thought the common definition of "total comp" is that 600k (well, less tax) does actually hit your bank account? Is there another definition?
[For the record I've never earned anything like that or heard of any regular software engineers earning that, but I guess it may happen in SV.]
Total comp sometimes includes stuff like Options (which might never cash out), bonuses (based on things you cannot control like quarterly sales) or include benefits. So for example if your company pays a dental insurance that costs 2,000 a year it might say your salary is 50k but your total comp is 52k.
So an example could be. Your salary is 50k, your benefits are calcualted to be 10k, your options ammount to 20k and your bonus is 20k.
Your total comp is 100k, but because options vest slowly you only make 1/4 of that and the bonus did not work out, so your take home salary was 55k + benefits.
This can change depending on the company, role, country, contract etc. Its not really like total comp is a legal definition.
I've never heard anyone include the value of benefits in TC. TC is usually referred to as the cold cash you take home pre-tax. It can be stock, bonuses or salary. 100% liquid
In my HR portal benefits show up as part of the TC calculation, includes things like pension matching so it is not unwarranted entirely as cash calculation. But it also includes BS like will writting so yeah, I have seen some funky TC calcs out there
Total comp should never include options or benefits like medical/dental. It’s just cash or things with a liquid cash value. It’s not what hits your bank account, though, because it’s pre-tax. And yes, FAANG TC of >600k for senior IC’s is absolutely a thing.
The article is correct in a lot of its characterization. Your output is a lot of documents and strategic influence and not a lot of code (aka “getting things done”). But that doesn’t mean it has to be unfulfilling. You can get things done by making a compelling technical argument based on your experience and convincing hundreds of people to go build the architecture you envisioned. Do you get the thrill of debugging the code at 4am? No, you don’t. You only get that from skunkworks projects and side endeavors. But it’s still gratifying. And it pays embarrassingly well.
Part of his argument here is stock is funny money. I think that is less true at FAANG today. You start vesting in a quarter, vest monthly after that, and RSUs are treated as income unlike options. Yes stock may change a bit but it’s more likely than not to stay within the 550-650k range. It’s not at all like illiquid startups.
For sure. If you have 300k/yr in RSUs from a trillion dollar company, you may not be able to predict the exact value of that comp 4 years from now, but it’s pretty reasonable to assume its value isn’t going to be diminished significantly, unlike startup equity.
Because i intend to remain good and believe being surrounded by exceptional enginners is actually more easy, or influenced by my side in smaller orgs. Getting to code regularly is rather important.
+ Tax brackets makes it far less a difference between to earn some high end median salary vs top salaries. So even on the compensation side of benefits along with costs of living, the gap then becomes rather slim/irrelevant
There was a time I didn't believe anyone but execs were making over 500k a year in IT. Last year an acquaintance bragged that his daughter was making 500k at Netflix as a security person. Her job is to keep their content from being pirated. My first thought was "heck of a job Brownie" (not that most of you would get the reference).
BigTech paying those absurd figures is I think only a thing in the US. In Europe they pay well but no way that much compared to the national (or continental) average.
And if you think the work you're doing there in SF is boring then you need to be aware that most of the boring stuff goes to "low cost regions" usually. For the US that also means Europe, for BigTech especially.
It's only a thing in the US, in specific cities where big tech companies are present and poaching people from each other.
These jobs with big rates have a few things in common:
- Salaries aren't the only thing that have inflated price tags in the places where you might hope to get those. Rents, mortages, and cost of living are expensive there too. You kind of need 2x-3x what you'd need somewhere else. More for some places. Basically, you pay more for less for most things that matter.
- Those big rates are fairly hard to get for any random person. You have to be able to sit up be a good little code minion, do your code exercises perfectly, climb corporate ladders, kiss the right asses, etc. And you have to keep that up for many years. Not everyone can do that. Or even pretend to enjoy doing that.
- There's no such thing as a free lunch. These companies want value for money. The big salary is the carrot that they dangle in front of you. But they don't give it to everyone. They give it to some so they can give far less to the rest of the crowd. The median is nowhere near the top of the range.
- It's a pretty exclusive club that gets these wages. The exclusivity is what buys compliance from those outside that club. Max salaries are insane. Median ones, not so much. In SFO, median salary is still high but not high enough to live there comfortably.
- It's a corporate rat race. With all the negative effects as well. Like toxic work culture. Political games and a lot of tech bros (let's face it, equality is a problematic topic) slapping each other on the back and over using words like "awesome". This kind of behavior is common fiercely competitive places. It isn't necessarily very nice to deal with or be around such people. And it attracts people that are good at that kind of thing. I.e. sociopaths.
There's the corp job being unpleasant, but there's also the issue of getting a job through several rounds of interviews that seem to have little to do with the job. Even if you can do 90% of questions, you've got an under 60% chance of running a 5-question gauntlet. It's like a job in itself preparing for the leetcode.
As if one's market value is always coherent with their skills. There are so many variables that plays a role on how much one earns: where you live, negotiation skills, marketing skills, getting competent people to evaluate you properly, micro and macro economics, willingness to deal with bullshit corporate stuff, etc.
I'd love to work in big tech or finance but it's hard because even if I can make up for skills (on the job skills and interviewing skills), it's hard to fake the necessary background to get an interview (having good education or previous experience in a similar company).
There are also tons of under-intellectually stimulated BigTechCo engineers here who will upvote you if you can make an oblique reference to an internal system, but one where you have plausible deniability so the social media team at BigTechCo can't get you in trouble for talking about it. Look for weird non sequiturs in a BigTechCo thread that sit high on the comment chain.
Yes and yes, and yet I think you'll find most people here _are_ working for a boss.
Hands up if you've got a website selling printing cards for school, or an old cd business. These are the only ones I know here that printed a ton of money. The rest are just working long hours with golden handcuffs and a carrot in front of their nose.
hehe I'll repeat a cliche, that everyone's either working for one boss or working for multiple bosses. From my experience, working for a good boss can generally give more perceived freedom than working to satisfy investors or customers. When I was freelancing I felt like I was working to satisfy multiple bosses, having to do things that I didn't enjoy (i.e. customer communications, accounting) plus that I was forced to become the boss of myself, which wasn't fun. Whereas as an employee I've always been lucky to have bosses that act essentially like secretaries with executive power, shielding their staff from everyday nonsense, filtering what's relevant, helping prioritize and getting you what you need. Things can feel totally different if you have a bad boss, but at the very least, my take is that good bosses are out there and are worth trying to find.
The reality is that "$600K at BigTech" isn't as common as HN would have you believe. It's not easy to be at the $600K total compensation level at FAANG. It's not necessarily uncommon, but it's not like the majority of engineers there are at that level. Just look at https://levels.fyi and search for a FAANG company. For example, Google's L6 total compensation average is ~$450K. L6 (the rough equivalent of principal or senior principal engineer at many, perhaps most, other companies, including the one I work for) isn't easy to achieve at Google and the vast, vast majority of SEs at Google are not making L6 compensation.
In fact, I'd wager (not assert, as I haven't actually run the numbers from levels.fyi or industry salary data), that the vast majority of Silicon Valley software engineers plateau around the $300k mark on the high end.
Someone at Google came up with this internal spreadsheet for everyone to enter their salaries and total comp into while I was there. It made the news but afaik never leaked.
That spreadsheet made very clear that salary was distributed like a Bell curve with the mean being something like $120k and total comp somewhere in the $300-400k range.
The salient point is that a $600k/year salary is uncommon or even rare even at FAANG. There are a lot of engineers who could work at a FAANG or FAANG-like company, but most of them will never see $600k/year in compensation.
Also, sure, there's a distribution of ranges at a given level across FAANG (and all tech companies, really--though I think it's bimodal in that there is "FAANG" (and FAANG-like or near-FAANG) and "everything else"). Also, Netflix has a rather unique (for the tech world) approach to employment, in that they will absolutely let someone go if their performance is even slightly off or there is a pivot in strategy (rather than, say, relocate an engineer to another team). Employment there is a riskier proposition than at other FAANG companies. They have to bake that premium into the price they pay for labor.
Because a long time ago I understood that the value of my salary has to come from somewhere.
If that somewhere is ads, tracking, or other types of surveillance capitalism, then I'm not interested.
All of the biggest companies in the world are complicit. Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. They should all be burnt to the ground.
If you work at one of these companies and enjoy a fat paycheck, you should take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself whether you are ok with the price that society as a whole pays for you to be able to make bank.
Are you kidding me? People should feel guilty about getting paid? What a marvelous perspective, long live the oligarchy?
Instead of making 600k and using that to fund whatever political causes or charities I should work for less and allow that nicer company to lobby politicians on my behalf?
And then you wonder why corporations control democracies so easily.
For everyone else reading: if your work is honest and legal and you don't have to violate your conscious to perform the duties assigned to you the make as much as you can. Fulfill your responsibility to your family and community firsr and the worry about the world. Use your own money to influence politics instead of using employment activism, investor activism, social media cancelling,etc... to lobby for causes. Talk to and convince your peers. This is how you fight for democracy and democracy is dying because people are allowing proxies like their employers to speak for them. Companies have no place at all in democratic discourse. It is "we the people" not "we the corporations".
This is why shit like your healthcare being tied to your employer is a thing!
In general I dislike advertising industry, just like I dislike the banking industry, or the gambling industry, but I think the comparison to a crime syndicate is not a good one. The difference is that the existence of both is within the boundaries that are specified by law, which is the most objective mechanism that we have to define something as honest. I don't think the law is always right, but it's got to count for a bit more than each individual's subjective morals. Because in principle it tries to break down things and isolate exactly what is problematic, which is something we're not doing when we pass general judgement in the form of an opinion.
Wouldn't you agree for example that collecting and analysing user data for purposes of displaying relevant advertisements doesn't have to be dishonest, if the users consented to it? Maybe then the problem becomes that some methods of obtaining user consent are not honest -which would mean that there could be methods that are honest, and companies that can follow them.
And if the subject is so nuanced then maybe it's not fair to say that an employee that simply wants to work in their domain of expertise doesn't do honest work, just for failing to set more strict standards than the law with regards to their employer's activities.
i didn't mean to equate advertising with a crime syndicate, just that dishonest is dishonest, and obviously there are different degrees of how bad something is.
there may be some honest and fair advertising, but a lot is deception, and maybe an ad platform isn't dishonest by itself but they are enabling deceptive advertisers.
Wouldn't you agree for example that collecting and analysing user data for purposes of displaying relevant advertisements doesn't have to be dishonest, if the users consented to it?
no, because the majority of people do not understand what they are consenting to and when they consent they have no way to verify that the data is actually used in a fair and honest way.
to elaborate:
people need to be protected from sharing personal data against their own will. say for example you share your address. and then somewhere on a public forum you indicate that i am your neighbor. suddenly you shared my address too, against my will. therefore i have an interest to stop you from sharing your address. people do not and can not understand the consequences of consenting to share their data, because the ways to abuse that data are way to complex and subtle.
No you're not. You got paid to feed people. Only those make decisions with intent are responsible for the outcome of those decisions. If the army is doing something wrong then you must actively stop them, not quietly say you won't cook for them lol. If it was that clear that which war rarely is. The strawman you and others are using is crime ot war or something but the subject here is a legitimate corporate entity.
Make the activity you disagree with illegal first before comparing advertisers to a pillaging army.
My point is, don't work for a company you don't like but don't you dare take this high and mighty morally superior attitude when others work at those legitimate companies so they can make a living. You cancel and judge instead of vote and convince others.
if as individuals we want to make this world a better place then we need to take responsibility for our lives and the influence we have that goes beyond earning a paycheck. if your moral attitude is so low that you don't care what your employer does, as long as it is legal, then you are not making a positive contribution to this world. i won't cancel you, but it's also unlikely that we would be friends.
I agree we can't be friends because you would sacrifice your friends and family for a cause. You do not understand your basic moral obligations as a human, that a world better off by sacrificing those who need you or even yourself is a world built by unneccesary sacrifice. You would introduce more suffering into the world when you have tools like democracy and free speech that were paid for by ages of suffering and anguish that have made that unnecesary. You will cause yourself and others to suffer all while not solving the actual problem or making the world better one iota. You would alienate anyone that you need to convince to make change happen so you can feel morally superior.
You do not understand that the many rights and betternments you enjoy now was built by people working at places they did not approve of, using their position and power to make change happen.
You do not undersrand your contribution into the social divide today that is making the world much worse in every way you can imagine. Not just I but many others are also not your friends and cannot even begin to have discourse with you to have our opinions changed because you have erected barriers of moral outrage and socio-economical activism that forces others to be with or against you. It could be adverising, fossil fuels, finance, insurance, military and this is just for employement we are talking about lol.
A house divided is what you have contributed. Witness the not standing part.
you would sacrifice your friends and family for a cause
there is a difference between avoiding people i don't like and abandoning friends or family. you are making a claim that has no basis in reality.
i stay away from people who are primarily materialist, so those would never become friends to begin with. the special case that a friend suddenly turns materialist is unlikely to happen.
my basic moral obligation as a human is to make a positive contribution to the world. i can't see how i can make a positive contribution to someone who is materially oriented, but there is no need, because i get to choose how and who i contribute to. there is no obligation to work with anyone specific except my parents and my children (and siblings) but you can rest assured that my conviction here is how i grew up so everyone in my immediate family is similarly oriented. there is no risk of abandoning any of them.
You would alienate anyone that you need to convince to make change happen so you can feel morally superior
i am not alienating anyone. i am staying away from people who try to push their worldview on me like you are doing now. i am holding my ground on my beliefs, but you try to keep telling me that i am wrong. i am not trying to feel morally superior. i am just trying to explain that i reject your moral basis.
You are a materialistic person who pretends you are better than others by denying reality. Feeding yourself and family in your view is being materialistic while usually that word is reserved for someone pursuing pricy things like fancy cars and houses as a way of life which obviously no one suggested in this thread.
> i am staying away from people who try to push their worldview on me like you are doing now
To the contrary, it is you who are judging others and avoiding them as a tactic to push your "holier than thou" worldview. If you said you don't want to work at a company for whatever moral reasons, I have no objections or opinions on that, the subject here is that you think others should fall in line with your world view. I am not telling you that you are wrong, I am telling you telling others where they should work or judging them based your very subjective beliefs in morality is wrong. Your alienation of others to get them to follow your moral code is my disagreement.
> it's like saying being a janitor for a crime syndicate is honest work.
If the crime syndicate is legal? Yeah, that's exactly what I am saying. Your hypocrisy amuses me, are you telling me you would starve and let your familu starve rather working for a legitimate company because instead of voting to make thay illegal you chose starvation? Or is your claim that because other people are not actually starving, the suffering and hardship they and theirs endure is tolerable?
People work to live.
If you're going to play the indirect moral culpability game then by simply being a voting age adult you are morally culpable for everything the US government does and everything it refuses to do (including regulate ad business lol).
And how much of your tax money went to weapons that kill someone else's innocent child continents away? So why do you pay tax? Shouldn't you be refusing to pay tax or is prison the line in the sand you won't cross?
Unlike democracies, corporations do not derive their authority from their subjects, their authority comes from their owners. Only those with the authority to make decisions are culpable for those decisions. Hitler's janitor is not responsible for the holocaust.
are you telling me you would starve and let your familu starve rather working for a legitimate company
that's not fair because most of the times you have the choice to work for another company. i do refuse to work for google or microsoft or other companies if i have a choice, but if i had no choice i would accept their offer. it's a matter of degree and opportunity.
by simply being a voting age adult you are morally culpable for everything the US government does and everything it refuses to do
yes, you are. i don't blame my american friends for being american, but i do listen carefully which activities of their country they support, and which they reject. unsurprisingly most of my american friends agree with me on many issues. i do keep an open mind though if they disagree.
obviously as an individual we have little power to make a visible change on things we disagree with, therefore i consider it sufficient to focus on one particular aspect where one can make a small contribution.
but if your attitude is that you don't care what your government (or employer) is doing, as long as you get your paycheck, then we will likely not become friends. in fact we are more likely to become friends if we disagree on issues but are able to have honest and open debates about that.
So why do you pay tax?
first of all, refusing to pay tax won't change anything. if i want to change my country i do need to be a lawful citizen and try to influence my peers until we have a majority that will be able to influence the country to stop spending taxes on such things.
Unlike democracies, corporations do not derive their authority from their subjects, their authority comes from their owners
which is why i prefer cooperatives.
Only those with the authority to make decisions are culpable for those decisions
disagree. following the orders of your superiors does make you culpable if those orders turn out to be illegal or cause harm, and you knew that they would cause harm.
Hitler's janitor is not responsible for the holocaust
hitler's janitor was most likely carefully selected as a trustworthy person, and probably would not have been a person that i would have liked to be friends with.
> that's not fair because most of the times you have the choice to work for another company. i do refuse to work for google or microsoft or other companies if i have a choice, but if i had no choice i would accept their offer. it's a matter of degree and opportunity
And for yourself that's fine. Do what you want. But the problem here is you are expecting others to follow suit or they are social pariah. If someone can make 600k at facebook and 500k at amnesty internarional and they choose facebook, as much as I abhorr facebook(even called for mark to be jailed!) power to them for evaluating their needs and obligations and making a choice. It is not your place to ask othere to morally justify their choices of employment so you can cancel them, to the contrary, doing so makes any problem worse because now you've alienated one more person (with a fat wallet) that you could have convinced to be onboard with your ideas.
> but if your attitude is that you don't care what your government (or employer) is doing, as long as you get your paycheck, then we will likely not become friends. in fact we are more likely to become friends if we disagree on issues but are able to have honest and open debates about that.
I never said that, I said I don't care what other people are doing to make a living. You seem to confuse governments and companies like so many today. Companies have no legal authority to make laws or influence politics except by playing this "with me or against me" game you are giving them that power.
Earning a paycheck at a company you disagree with means you take money from them and are free to spend it on contributions of your choice. And not alienating people who work ar companies you don't like means you can be their friends and convince them to regulate or criminalize whatever practice you think companies should not do and make actual change. But your cancel mindset just alienates people and makes things worse. If I decided to work at some company and people like you tell me I should quit to be their friends, guess what, we could have been friends and made change happen but now I will oppose you not because you are wrong because you chose to make me your enemy and to control and manipulate my life by trying to force me to make employment decisions.
> first of all, refusing to pay tax won't change anything. if i want to change my country i do need to be a lawful citizen and try to influence my peers until we have a majority that will be able to influence the country to stop spending taxes on such things.
Yes, I agree. You are right in being a lawful citizen and convincing your peers to make change happen. The disconnect here is you think paying taxes to support a government you disagree with is fine but working at a company you disagree with and in a similar way by earning as much as you can and exposing yourself to others and changing their minds, making change happen inside the company and outside the company by using your finances is wrong. It is fine to support a government you don't like so long as you work to civically promote change but your hypocrisy is that you think it stops being fine when others do the same thing except the organization is private instead or government and unlike paying tax people get paid money enabling them to have more power to make change happen.
> disagree. following the orders of your superiors does make you culpable if those orders turn out to be illegal or cause harm, and you knew that they would cause harm
I did not say that. Following orders is making a decision. Following orders to cook dinner or to kill someone are different decisions. You are culpable for the orders you follow, you are not culpable for feeding the other person who followed the order to kill. Big difference. However, if you could have stopped that person from killing or if you could have reported him after the fact and stayed quiet, you are culpable to some degree,but still, not for murder.
> hitler's janitor was most likely carefully selected as a trustworthy person, and probably would not have been a person that i would have liked to be friends with.
I agree, but he is still not responsible for the holocause and I am sure was not tried at nuremberg.
you think paying taxes to support a government you disagree with is fine but working at a company you disagree with and in a similar way by earning as much as you can and exposing yourself to others and changing their minds, making change happen inside the company and outside the company by using your finances is wrong
i can't avoid paying taxes, but i can choose where i work. you missed the point where i said that it makes a difference if someone works there just to get a paycheck (and doesn't care what the company does) and someone who actively tries to change things in that company. the latter is fine.
Yes you can, you get sent to prison though. And you can choose to get paid less then that means less medical care, more suffering in other ways,etc...
What you are saying is the suffering of prison is too much but other suffering other people have to endure is not so bad so in order to comply with your moral code, they have to accept the same amount of suffering you can accept.
A moral code that is worth getting paid less but not worth prison is not only cheap but very much hypocritical when you hold others to it. "Suffer what is right but only up to my endurance level, not more and not less".
And you can choose to get paid less then that means less medical care
not where i am from. everyone gets the same medical care, only those that earn so little that they can't pay the normal rate get extra support or a lower rate for the same service. that's a problem you should fix in your country so that people can actually live to their chosen moral code without having to suffer for it.
A moral code that is worth getting paid less but not worth prison is not only cheap but very much hypocritical when you hold others to it
how is that? not breaking laws is part of my moral code as it is part of the moral code of most people in this world. so if you were to accept prison for something you believe in you would be violating my moral code.
how is that hypocritical? we do the best we can to improve the world, with the means that we have, within the legal framework that we are in.
i come from a culture that values social responsibility, and working for a company that exploits people or pollutes the environment, is not socially responsible.
>Instead of making 600k and using that to fund whatever political causes or charities I should work for less and allow that nicer company to lobby politicians on my behalf?
What % of your money do you spend on political causes and charities, badrabbit?
"Take care of me and mine" is a fine way to burn the world down to cinders.
Can you honestly tell me that how surveillance capitalism has unfolded over the past twenty years has been a net positive for democracy or for world stability?
I say no, and those well paid cogs in those machines are complicit. They don't need to feel shame. They need to accept the scope of what they are doing and be mindful of its impact.
Honest and legal doesn't necessarily mean "right". Those that work in the fossil fuel industry are for the most part doing what is honest and right. They are also (as are we all) complicit in catastrophic climate change.
I don't think things are as simple as that. Maybe for example there are some technological or scientific breakthroughs with cross-domain application that come as a result of work that at present is practical only with the resources of giant companies like Google/Facebook/Microsoft. I think it's fair that engineers and scientists get to work for whatever employer they choose, doing what they do best and advances their expertise, without being judged negatively. I think the acquired experience and knowledge itself will leak, one way or the other, in applications that bring a net positive, even if the activities of the specific employer are not directly positive. Morally-wise, I think the onus shouldn't be on the workers any more than it should be on the consumers, so someone working in the fossil industry shouldn't be considered more responsible to the climate change than someone consuming fossil fuel.
someone working in the fossil industry shouldn't be considered more responsible to the climate change than someone consuming fossil fuel
right, they shouldn't directly be more responsible than consumers, but they should be responsible for the influence that they do have at their job.
obviously consumers are responsible for the pollution they create. just today my son had a fit because a friend tried to use plastic to start a fire. this may not have been the right response, but he knows that burning plastic is bad, and he acted on that.
i have more sympathy with the oil workers because their options most likely are to quit and be out of work. but anyone who studies to work in the oil industry is making a questionable moral choice. (depends on their attitude, maybe they are trying to contribute improvements to make the impact of fossil fuels less damaging. that would be good)
The reality is that fossil fuel is still necessary, choosing to not work in the oil industry doesn't change that. If suddenly no people chose to work in the business under some belief that it would be morally wrong, then what would happen? Wide spread energy crises, affecting everything from heating to transportation/travel and all production chains.
I don't think anyone except the most hardcore climate activists would be willing to accept that cost, so I don't think it's consistent for anyone except these to judge negatively people who choose to work in this industry. This doesn't change that we as consumers should try and use as little fuel as possible, opt for renewables where possible etc., that's the only way to guide the change. If we do that, the market will take care of the rest as the conditions allow it.
If suddenly no people chose to work in the business under some belief that it would be morally wrong, then what would happen?
salaries would rise, making it more costly, but motivating a few people to continue working there. in the long run it would contribute to make oil more expensive, which is really the only way to stop people from using it.
salaries would rise, making it more costly, but motivating a few people to continue working there
Sure, and they wouldn't be wrong to do so, just like they're not wrong now. We can't admit that on one hand we need something because there is no viable replacement and on the other consider that those that choose to work on that make a morally questionable choice.
well, we wouldn't need it had we focused on cleaner energy earlier. we already predicted climate change half a century ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358759 ). had we acted right then, we would not be depending on oil now. therefore already 50 years ago someone made a morally questionable choice.
hm soldiers are only expected to follow orders that to the best of their knowledge are lawful, and are held accountable for following unlawful ones. The law actually covers a lot of the cases that are very clearly wrong (i.e. torture or execute prisoners).
That leaves ambiguous situations where for example there is an order saying "get satellite data from that location". In this case, if the data end up used for something unlawful, I think the responsibility doesn't lie with the soldiers at the bottom of the chain, no.
Now for the case that best serves your comparison, generally serving in an army that very clearly wages a war of aggression. In this case yes I think soldiers carry the responsibility to not help in any way (which realistically would mean stop being soldiers). The difference in this case is that we can't compare an army waging an aggressive war, which is as clear an evil as we can imagine and is in fact considered a crime internationally, with a company that analyses data collected by consent, where the question is whether the mechanism for obtaining consent is good enough or not.
I work in a FAANG and I e always loved my job (switched teams and companies a few times) if you don’t love it anymore, find a project you do love, that’s the glory of a big company tbh. This was a pretty surface level article. There isn’t any industry on earth where you can be an IC making 600k except tech. At a FAANG 600k is reaching your bank account(stock is real comp)
Are those numbers on levels.fyi realistic? And those stock/share grants, presumably vest at one quarter of the amount every year after the award, or something like that?
So if you're there for only two years, you might only collect your basic salary, and that's it.
I don't think companies take this shallow view of recruitment. yes, they will choose the one that is beneficial for them, but the example you gave is not a situation that can provide any benefit in the long run. in other words, companies that prefer this will probably turn away from this decision in a short time.
Why? Isn't it us who defend remote working to death and say it is the same or even better output as opposed to our in office counterparts? At some point during that argument, somebody is going to realize that you can get exactly the same quality of output for 10th of the price elsewhere in the world and it will not be a shallow/short termist move.
even if it is "shallow/short" termist...thats okay, most tenures in tech now are two-three years...we turned ourselves into short term cogs working commodity tech
its not just overseas competition, devs in Iowa think 170k is a dandy salary
I do not mean whether the employee is valued or not. the things you write are the results that can be drawn from an emotional point of view. I don't think what you wrote is beneficial for the company.
As an American who much prefers life in the Netherlands to life in the US, I must admit the growing frustration at the pay difference... it's almost enough to make me go back home.
If the European companies don't wake up to this, they will gradually see a brain drain (especially if the US reverses its anti-immigration attitude).
As for TFA topic, to me most jobs are roughly the same. Only when I work for myself or directly with a small client (where I have total control over the technical decisions) is it close to "fun". Otherwise, it's usually 50% useful energy expenditure, and 50% wasted energy trying to improve systems where middle management is too content with status quo regardless of the potential profit gains from improved operations (and fewer engineers working smarter).
So honestly, unless you have your own company and (near)total control, you might as well be working for the highest bidder - excepting in industries you may have moral or ethical disagreements with.