Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by exstudent2 on Friday December 18, 2015 @10:58AM (#10759073)

I don't think you can go into a company as large as Google and expect your salary to double in five years. HR will have set limits to how much of a raise you can get in any given year and even with promotions you would be very unlikely to see that kind of bump. I also don't think the middling programmers he mentions would hit the 250k year mark.

Orthogonal to the point of the article, but the only time you can really get a salary bump is before you start, so make sure to negotiate like hell before you get in. Once you're in, you're going to be grinding to get a 3% raise (contrary to what the OP states).

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by ryandrake on Friday December 18, 2015 @12:32PM (#10759623)

The idea of starting fresh out of school at a company for $130K, doubling up to $250K seems to me ludicrous, besides for a rare few outlier roles at a rare few companies. I can say I've got close to 20 years of experience and I don't make anywhere close to that.

Not saying there are no roles like this--just saying this probably several standard deviations from the mean, and not useful as a "back of the envelope estimation of big company tech salaries in general"

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by Retric on Friday December 18, 2015 @02:21PM (#10760360)

I personally know someone that went from 130k to over 1 million in 7.5 years at a large 20,000+ person non valley company. Skills, luck, negotiation, and HR will get ignored.

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by ryandrake on Friday December 18, 2015 @02:34PM (#10760444)

Totally believe it, but he or she is a clear outlier, when considering the huge breadth of tech positions out there.

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by bigcothrowa on Friday December 18, 2015 @12:38PM (#10759659)

Yeah, this is not the median or low-end compensation package profile OP thinks it is.

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by charleslmunger on Friday December 18, 2015 @11:25AM (#10759238)

Counterexample: I was hired straight out of school at a big company 2 1/2 years ago, at slightly more than the author describes (100k and change salary, ~100k equity over four years, 15% bonus target). I've been promoted twice, and my income over the next year will hit the double mark for total compensation.

I've been promoted faster than most, but my numbers stretched over a 5 year timespan still work out.

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by bigcothrowa on Friday December 18, 2015 @12:53PM (#10759753)

I think the important distinction is that the author claims to be discussing the low-end or at least middle, but your example is in fact significantly-better-than-average.

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by thedufer on Friday December 18, 2015 @06:40PM (#10761767)

No one's arguing that doubling in three years is average, but of people that get jobs at Google, doubling in five years seems very reasonable.

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by wan23 on Friday December 18, 2015 @03:02PM (#10760606)

Google has a salary band for each role that they are very careful to maintain. If you're getting promotions then you're also getting substantial raises. The trick is that those promotions are very (very) hard to come by and require some skills beyond coding as well as luck to be on a project that people care about.

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by walshemj on Saturday December 19, 2015 @01:14PM (#10764309)

Out of interest what sort of competition was there back when I worked for British Telecom they only had promotion (boards) every 18 months and had around 550/600 apply for less than 20 roles and that was for MPG 1 to MPG 2.

MPG1 is the entry level grade BTW

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by matwood on Friday December 18, 2015 @11:35AM (#10759291)

Usually the number is total comp, salary + stock. So maybe $150k/year salary and $100k in stock that vests over X years with more possibly added. At that point, ~%10 raise/year would get someone close to $250k. I assume someone would have to bust their butt for a 10%, but it is not an unheard of number.

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by wahsd on Friday December 18, 2015 @12:00PM (#10759448)

10% salary increases through internal pay increases? That sounds quite unheard of. Maybe if you constantly gun for internal promotions that everyone else is gunning for, but that still leaves everyone else behind that is going to get marginal increases at best.

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by bigcothrowa on Friday December 18, 2015 @12:35PM (#10759645)

Yeah, that has not been my experience. I've worked for a big company for 4-ish years. Started 40% below article's suggested "middling" salary because I didn't negotiate (and starting salaries were 30% lower 4 years ago, apparently).

Negotiated a 40%(!) raise after 1.5 years because I was kicking ass and had +40% offers in hand(!) from other BigCo's that I interviewed at.

Since then I've been getting 2-3% cost-of-living raises annually. I would say my performance is above average, but that's my opinion.

Definitely not seeing 10% or $30k annual raises and my total pay is significantly below $250k still. Maybe I need to do another round of external interviewing again.

That being said, I like my work and have good benefits and really good compensation compared to non-tech work.

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Re:Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation by taurath on Friday December 18, 2015 @01:55PM (#10760181)

Offers in hand help a lot. If they don't want to keep you at or near what other people are offering, they don't care enough to keep you.

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