Indeed, and even well-funded startups can't afford to burn $400k on a single engineer.

They basically have to give out generous equity to compete, but they and the VCs would rather be greedy and dole out fractions of percents under the cynical misleading pitch that these scraps will be worth millions when the startup exits for billions.

To their credit, This scam did work for a while, shortly after a whole lot of early employees really did make millions on generous equity grants at early startups like Google.

Being an "early employee" means nothing now. You get the token 0.01% bottom-preference shares that will net you 0 in almost every imaginable scenario, and somehow this is supposed to cover the 200-300k/yr difference you'd get at a profitable established company.

I'm not really interested in arguing about these numbers, it's not really relevant to my point. I was basing this off of https://www.teamblind.com/article/google-engineer---total-co... where 250-350 includes the majority of L4 and L5 engineers. Based on this your numbers look off by one level or so, at least for Google. But again, I don't think this is very important for my point.

I always feel like every developer on HN is making like $200k-$400K without blinking, maybe that's true. Just for a perspective on these numbers, the top 1% of income in CA is $450K - https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8qhh3x/ann...

How do you explain these numbers?

http://www.h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=Senior+Software+En...

Those are not Google and not Silicon Valley.

Try:

http://www.h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Google&job=Staff+Softwa...

And keep in mind that base salary (what's reported on that page) is usually about half of total compensation. (Bonus and stock being the other half.)

Also this appears to be the H1B database. I'm not sure how H1B salaries compare to the overall average.

> I'm not sure how H1B salaries compare to the overall average.

H1B salaries are typically lower than average. Why do you think companies spend millions lobbying for more H1Bs? To pay them more than average? :-)

Also, keep in mind Google only has to disclose base salaries for these H1Bs. For a staff engineer, most of the total comp would be in bonus pay and especially RSUs. They can easily be making $400k or more through those means.

Do you have evidence that people coming on an H1B visa get paid less than their non-H1B coworkers (at same level / same seniority / same office) at Google?

I would suggest that while new hires of H1B might not get paid less, the market dynamics of not having as many alternatives would invariably lead to less valuable retention efforts by the employer. i.e. fewer raises, fewer promotions, smaller bonuses, etc.

As I understand it, H1Bs aren't too bad (transferability is a thing here), but other forms of visas are brutal in this regard.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13579226 is one example. In addition to the article, HN is in near-unanimous agreement on this issue from the contribution of many H1B visa holders. I've seen it pop up many times.

> To pay them more than average?

No, to get a bigger talent pool.

H1b data doesn't include rsu or bonus. Many are getting 16-17% bonus and ~50-150k/year in rsu.

For a staff engineer, I'd say even $150k is very low. Even for an H1B, I'd guess $200k/year at least in additional pay beyond the base salary.

I work there and I'm surprised by the numbers you propose, they seem too high to me.

rough numbers on http://levels.fyi