Only a handful of almost surefire unicorns can reasonably come anywhere near matching that, and that only in the eventuality that they don't pull a Zenefits and leave you hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars short and in need of a new job.
Anecdotally, last year I was contacted by such a surefire unicorn for a role that was actually very interesting. We crunched the numbers together, and the best case scenario was them effectively matching my current comp. Which was actually a great proposition for startup comp, the best I've seen. Still, nowhere near compelling enough to upend my life for a higher risk position without any financial upside.
I worked in startups for the early part of my career, including a fairly well known one that exited. Neither me, nor any of my colleagues in that startup, nor any of the many other startup employees in my network, ever made more than a few hundred thousands on our options. Many very talented engineers made nothing at all on large quantities of options granted by several promising startups.
It's no wonder that none of the recent graduates I interview nowadays is at all interested in startups. When I ask where else they are interviewing, it's always FAANG and other high-flying profitable businesses. Even more so for senior engineers, whose opportunity cost is even higher, typically in the hundreds of thousands per year.
Even with 10-20 years of experience in the bay area at small, medium, large size software companies, I've never ever made anything close to that amount.
Hitting 400k total comp if you have the right experience (5-10 years, good brand university or companies) is totally doable.
There's a huge amount of variance, within FAANG and elsewhere.
As a simple example, SDE III at Amazon typically pays a bit more than $300k. Principal SDE, the next rank above that, will pay well over $400k.
And don't forget that during years of steep stock appreciation, like much of the past decade, actual compensation will often be higher than that.
There's your problem.
Getting paid in options is the exact mistake I've warned about repeatedly in comments throughout this thread.
Yours is a fairly common case in SV: worked in a series of startups that "paid" you in illiquid options that ended up being totally worthless.
I'm willing to bet these very same startups encouraged you to value these options very highly: high 6 and even 7 figures, right?
These places don't pay well, because why should they? Talent is apparently willing to work their ass off for these "worthless options" that are sold to them as vouchers for surefire multi-million-dollar jackpots.
Also bonus closer to 15-20%.
400k for senior is pretty good, but still doable at a lot of the big companies.
I make over 300 and I'm not senior yet.
GP has replied elsewhere that all his employers were startups that paid him in "worthless options".
Indeed, you won't ever see $400k or even $300k working for startups that "pay" you in illiquid 0.001% stakes in what will surely become a multi-billion dollar runaway success (in which unlikely case your share will be diluted to nothing anyway).
You can certainly stick your fingers in your ears and sing LALALA while the rest of us make real money,. Your life, your choice.
Experience and fast career progression shouldn’t be overlooked when looking at startups.
The exec in charge was fired, and a lot of their key staff had already jumped ship by then.
The key points are:
1. Startup valuations are highly volatile. There were plenty of startups that were valued above the billion dollar levels, then sold for 8 or even 7 figures.
2. While profitable established companies can also go south, such companies pay you in cash and liquid RSUs, so if they spiral down you just switch to a better performing company. Getting most of your pay in illiquid options means you risk losing multiple years of earnings in the best part of your career.
Specifically, tons of talented people took a job in Zenefits based on the assumption that their illiquid shares will be worth six-seven figures, and likely will never see anything close to that in real money. Same thing wouldn't happen for those paid in liquid assets.
For perspective here I, and everyone I know who have worked for startups as an employee, have never seen a single penny from stock options. Maybe one day I will, but I consider them to be nothing more than a potential pleasant surprise down the line.
At a previous company, I exercised my stock options when I left. This cost me about $4K. Two years later, I got $12K back... not a bad return, but certainly not the "potential for early retirement" I was told when I joined.
Real world example: low to mid level engineers at Uber joining in 2014/2015 at this point have stock worth over $2m over 4 years if Uber successfully IPOs at $100b+. By that time, Uber was already at "scale", offering RSUs (options strike price would be so expensive that it would be a huge risk to exercise), and that $2m is almost definitely more than what you'd otherwise have received in the same amount of time working at Google or FB.
The most valuable thing I have is the remaining time I have in this life. Not the number in my bank account.
Then why work for a startup? Most will demand a huge amount of your time compared to other jobs. Why not pick a job which demands a sane amount of your time and spend your free time on relationships and hobbies?
Worked at many startups. Currently run a startup. No one has worked 80h weeks at any of them, except myself in the first year of creating my own startup.
If you really have friends working at startups for < 10% equity and doing 80 hour weeks, something is wrong.
Doing that consistently is unhealthy and sort of antithetical to building a thriving business.
I feel like a lot of it comes down to how strong your management team and market position are. Our CEO had a pretty crazy track record, and drove the company into a really interesting, strong position, and then wanted himself to have a good, sustainable family life, and would constantly reiterate that he wanted everyone else to do the same.
I have other friends who have had roughly the same experiences, again, anecdotally.
People skewed older than I expected for a startup. Most people were in their 30s, and the C suite people were mostly in their 40s. No one other than me was below late 20s, and everyone seemed laid back but competent.
I probed at it during the interview and was told that everyone leaves between 5-6, and that the CEO wanted to go home to his family and didn't expect anyone to do differently. When I asked engineers things about how days and weeks went there they were very direct about how people didn't stay late and didn't dance around the subject.
The CEO had already sold multiple startups while raising his family, so I assumed that he would be able to make the company successful without setting a precedent of burning yourself out and without us being under constant threat of death.
Also yeah, I didn't make nearly what I make now that I'm at FANG. But I ended up in a higher role and with more leverage than would normally be possible at my age and experience level in the new company, and got some cash from the deal, so it's been pretty great. But yeah, if I was just trying to maximize short term dollars earned it wouldn't have made sense to work there, since I couldn't have realistically known that this was the outcome.
Consider the compensation package a company offers. Companies that want young go-getters are more likely to offer high cash and equity; great benefits packages are better for drawing in risk-averse family types.
Also don't be afraid to ask straight-up what the working hours are like during an interview, ideally from the lowest-ranked person they'll let you talk to.
Disclaimer: I don't have strong data supporting any of this, just my personal experience and intuition from working in the bay area.
My advice to folks is that if you don’t have a very significant chunk of the company, ie >1% then the payoff can never be good enough to compromise work/life balance.
If you’re a founder or very early and have 5% or some such the. That’s between you and your family.
Probably still ain’t gonna pay off.
Most people aren't going to lie to your face that a normal week is 40h if they expect 80.
one kind sent rockets and recollected them, made robots run and jump. The other kind, shrank blog posts to 140 characters, or added a timeout to short messages, removed the thumb down button, and called them a new feature.
Today, we still remember the names of da Vinci, Tesla, Turing, not because they had a successful family ...
I just want to keep the dream I had as a kid.
So you're living based on how you will be remembered by strangers? That sounds incredibly unfulfilling and doesn't sound like a good way to live. In a few hundred more years almost no one will remember the names of those people either.
>da Vinci, Tesla, Turing
It's incredibly safe to say that you are not going to be as successful as these people. Almost no one achieves this much success in the sciences. At most you will probably advance your field by a few useful steps and then be personally forgotten about except in research paper footnotes.
>not because they had a successful family
You know who cares about you and remembers you more significantly than as a research footnote? Your family.
>I just want to keep the dream I had as a kid
Man, don't we all.
"I" am the best witness to my existence. Not the person giving my eulogy. Who are you to tell someone how to define what "fulfilling" means to them?
Pursue your own balance of values with passion, and allow others to be meaningfully different from you. Their desires don't diminish yours.
I can live with failing. I can't live with not trying.
Maybe go to another big co?
I'd hope even the smallest of startups is thinking about how users interact with their software and organizing those interactions into some sort of prioritized backlog for development.
In my limited experience in talking with other people, FAANG tends to not have as much process as finance, IBM, insurance or other 'boring big companies'.
Why? Is that simply because you are more familiar with the language or does the project actually require the raw power of Cpp?
2. yes, familiarity.
Oh boy are you in for a surprise. Whether a company is a startup or not is almost entirely orthogonal to a culture of “filling out spreadsheets.”
The point about FAANG paying so much gets made a lot, and that employees of startups are fools for their decisions, as if everyone's handed a dozen offers and makes a choice.
Most of us are lucky to get a single offer, sometimes after months of trying, so we take what we are given. The rosy picture portrayed on HN isn't at all accurate to my experience.
Though to be fair my current salary, as far as it is from the unrealistic portrayal of salaries here, still feels far better than almost any other job I would remotely have the capacity to do, and certainly far more than I need to live and have a pretty easy life if I were honest.
I'm payed a crazy amount of money to do something I love.
> The rosy picture portrayed on HN isn't at all accurate to my experience.
> I'm payed a crazy amount of money ["far more than I need to live and have a pretty easy life"] to do something I love.
You're living the rosy picture portrayed on HN. You react to $400k the same way most people would react to what you're describing.
At one point I was close to giving up on being a developer entirely after months of failing to find work, though thankfully I had a friend from a former job who helped give me a legup to a startup he was working for.
It was that painful experience which made me grateful for what I have, even if its looked down on so much by my peers. I realized how lucky I was to be working at all.
The rosy picture I was referring too wasn't so much the salary as the ability of software engineers to get these jobs. In my experience it was a lot more like a professional sport (spend decades working and practicing in this field and you still don't have what it takes) than finding a store with a help-wanted sign and filling out an application.
I guess there's something of a paradox there... its a weird industry.
Conversely, if you can get hired to a unicorn in a position that's senior enough to have any hope of coming anywhere near top tech pay, then you are likely talented enough to work at top tech instead.
There a variety of companies that pay top dollar for talent, straddling early stage startups all the way through established companies. That doesn't mean it's easy to get those jobs. It does mean that you should apply your talents where it fits.
BTW, you don't need to be at a unicorn to earn top EV. 1% of a 100M exit is 1M, which is more than the vast majority of equity grants I've heard of from FANG. Many people put 0 value on startup equity. Those people decrease their lifetime EV through misconceptions of statistics.
I worked at both. Talent overlap is quite high, far higher than is commonly assumed.
> There a variety of companies that pay top dollar for talent, straddling early stage startups all the way through established companies.
I worked in startups for many years, and most of my friends still in the field are either founders or C-level execs. They are fully aware of the top compensation for top engineers in startups presently. Startups don't match top tech comp currently. Unless you factor in the options as a sure thing, and the startup ends up exiting at unicorn levels.
> Many people put 0 value on startup equity. Those people decrease their lifetime EV through misconceptions of statistics.
This is a reflection of how many people have spent precious years of their career working for startups, and generally seeing 0 return on these options.
It's also a reflection of the perceived lack of control over this sort of deferred compensation, and various nasty dynamics that often snatch value away from rank-and-file employees, even at the last minute or past it. See the LinkedIn exit and their infamous clawback policy.
Startup options have earned this reputation for 0 value over a decade of overhype and underperformance. Far too many talented people were promised the sky and ended up with nothing after years of hard work.