All of the friends whom I helped, and myself included have transferred from Amazon to Facebook/Google/Apple located in Seattle.

I went from ~$150 total comp to ~$260 after a couple of rounds of negotiations with the companies who gave me offers. This was a couple of years ago, and I was happy to see another friend who left Amazon for Google get offered over $300k recently at the same SDE II level.

Damn, 260k and 300k?

Why are these so high? Do you and your friend have some valuable speciality?

Total comp, I assume, includes presumed vested stock payout. Even as a FE developer (sr level) these numbers aren't unfathomable when they include stocks.

Why are FE devs paid lower? I'm not a FE dev but I don't see why they deserve any less..

That's nice of you to say, but I think a few things play into it:

1) I've found most FE devs are not classically trained software engineers (most don't have CS degrees)

2) There's still a stigma that all FE is is writing HTML, CSS and JS (when, in fact, there's now entire build management layers, and the frontend stack is as complicated and nuanced as that of any OS' SDK). This is a holdover idea that is starting to diminish.

3) Because of 1, the market likely has more FE developers available to it. I'd be curious to see what your typical self-taught Java, C#, Python, Ruby or DBA makes.

4) I've also noticed a trend of BE engineers showing interest in front-end work, given its new challenges and such, further saturating the market. This is completely anecdotal though.

When one bedroom apartments cost $5,000 per month, you need a minimum salary of $200,000 to even qualify at the low end, but then over half your take home pay goes towards rent. A safer salary is easily $250k to $300k. Those levels of salary get you above the line of working just to pay for your overpriced apartment.

I live in Seattle, as does the person who mentioned the salaries, and I would be hard pressed to even find a 1BR that cost $5,000/mo. I recently lived in a very large 2BR for $2200, full of amenities. Even if you want a really nice place in a great location I'd have no trouble finding a 1BR that was absolutely fantastic for $2000.

This ain't SF.

It might be that some companies offer near-SF salaries to make it a slam dunk for the new hire. From the point of view of a Valley giant, they probably churn higher-salaried people in SF/SV all the time, so one more located elsewhere is not a biggie. At 10% less it's still a win, and because of the differential from local prices, the new hire will be super excited to join and stick around, so why not? The more you push down towards average local salaries, the more you have to compete with local businesses and the more you risk getting average performance out of the hire, all for a relatively small cash saving.

doh. It didn't occur to me people would stay in Seattle after getting Google jobs.

Perhaps Google should COL-adjust SF employees up to about $500k/year.

There's a weird life trap where you're making what most people would consider "a lot," but over half your take home pay is eaten by rent and food that costs 3x what it would somewhere else. So your "a lot" turns into "can't afford a car" or "can't save up enough to get out of the cycle" without moving to less desirable places.

Better to serve in hell (SF/NYC) than reign in flyover country?

Be glad you don't live in Vancouver, where the average house cost is the same as the bay area, but the average income is the same as reno nv. Rent although seems to be almost half the price of a house mortgage, so there is strange business going on in vancouver.

Food in SF is cheap. So are car costs. Actually everything except rent was considerably cheaper when I lived in SF vs Toronto.

> It didn't occur to me people would stay in Seattle after getting Google jobs.

It's actually pretty fantastic.

It cost half that in most south bay cities. For $5k you can easily get a 2000 sq ft 4 bedroom independent home in most south bay towns (except palo alto, los altos etc)

Note that a $5k/mo mortgage means a $1.2m+ selling price, for ~2000sqft. That's still insane (and doesn't include property tax, maintenance, utilities, or any of the other homeowner costs). Imho, anyone is crazy who thinks spending half their take home on a mortgage is acceptable.

Let's say you make $150K salary, plus 15% bonus and $75K per year of FB/Google/Apple RSUs.

That gets you to $247K.

At these very successful companies they almost always pay out your full annual bonus and the stocks are outright grants, not stock options.

This is not captured by salary surveys, which only ever talk about base salaries.

Don't quote total comp. Everyone has a different formula for total comp, with recruiters and HR departments being the masters of padding that number, so it's useless. Just quote salary.

I normally agree with this, but I think it's ok to make an exception when bonuses are paid out in full each year and stock is grants, not options.

curious to know how many years of experience do you have?

I think I probably should have done more negotiating.

All three have offices in Seattle.