Re:In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”
by lawnchair_larry on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @09:39PM
(#14199845)
I have seen offers or been given exact numbers from 3 of the 4 companies in your list at the "staff engineer" level or equivalent ("principal" at both amazon and microsoft), and they are nowhere near $500k/year.
I have heard that at FB and Google, a very small percentage of engineers got special stock awards a couple years ago that could put them in that range. But most top performers at these places at the senior/staff level are more in the 175-350 range.
Other than that, the only engineers making that kind of money got lucky in a startup lottery.
Re:In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”
by freyr on Thursday April 27, 2017 @01:47PM
(#14213371)
I wouldn't rule out $500k for Google. It's not a super reliable source, but Glassdoor lists the average total compensation for a Google staff engineer at $420k.
I doubt Apple, Amazon, or even Facebook pay that much on any regular basis, but I wouldn't rule out someone getting an outsized offer during a machine learning (or other flavor of the month) hiring frenzy.
[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Staff-Software-Engin...
In any case, somebody who thinks this represents a significant slice of the Silicon Valley workforce is living in a bubble. For every engineer making >$500k, there are many thousands making <$200k, at the thousands of other tech companies in the Bay Area that aren't Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple. While the $500k engineer has every incentive to stay in SV, that has no bearing on the vast majority of engineers.