Most of the time it's due to having some leverage (multiple FAANG+ offers).
the SWE ladder requires/expects for an L3 to get to L4 by makes no such requirement to ever get to L5.
Also career and personal skill wise, it's good to see how other companies work. Pay is in many ways determined by your negotiation skills, and that is empowered by creating better BATNAs via interview skill.
In NYC a senior dev makes that much or more in finance, and in a startup probably closer to 140-160 with bonus and fuzzy-numbered stock options. I don't count my stock options ("units") as anything worth anything at this point, not because I'm cynical but because there's no clear valuation.
All things considered I'm suddenly feeling underpaid - I know many quite senior folks barely breaking that.
We aren't talking about stock options, we are talking about concrete RSUs with real valuations.
A Staff Engineer at Google can easily be vesting $200k in stocks alone each year.
It's true that they make a lot of money, so do the owner of a SME or a director in a large organization. It's not a position most employees will ever attain in their lifetime.
That's true for non-public companies, but stock options at a publicly traded company like Google or Apple are much easier to value.
I'm trying to work toward the tech-adjacent side because developer comp tops out around 150k or 160k total in my area—and the top end of that's usually got one foot in management. Remote comp seems similar, unless you can do the hardcore algo interview thing—and even some of those don't pay especially well, if they're offering remote and feel like they're already doing you some kind of favor.
If your skills and what's shiny in the market right now are all concentric, you can add 100k's on top. (Just left FB on the internal React team? Been on Netflix's recommendation model team? SRE working with core Kubernetes? Cha-ching!)
~150k salary
~15k bonus
~100k stock
Good 401k match
This is the average of anecdotal evidence I have seen from friends and acquaintances with around your experience.
I was making a lot less not long ago. Then I went to an interview, knocked it out of the park, and when the ask TC reqs I just said $250 would work, and they made it happen. This is not in SF-area or NYC either.
Get promoted once at google / Facebook and you should be there. Promoted again and you’ll be 300-350k
If you don't mind, can you please share how much net you project to save this year after all taxes and expenses? Sorry if this is a little weird but as a poor person I'd imagine expenses to go up with higher income for ordinary people resulting in not that much (proportionately) savings.
My salary is $160K (that’s the max your salary can be at Amazon). The rest of my compensation (remaining ~$160k) is in restricted stock unit vests. I save 100% of that $160K after taxes. I max out my 401K from my salary. I also save 30-40% of each paycheck.
My husband and I don’t eat out 11 months of the year. The 12 month is a vacation where we travel within the US for a week vacation. Even then, we don’t go to expensive restaurants and will look for good deals... I mean my husband will open the McDonalds app on his phone to get a buy 1 get 1 Big Mac coupon. We don’t spend eating out... it is unhealthy and a bad habit.
We don’t have a car - so living in downtown Seattle, no expensive car tabs or parking. Also no fuel costs or car insurance payments. We paid off student loans and so there’s no debt. We pay for that with high rent ($2400/month excluding utilities).
Our only splurge is we have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, and we might get Disney’s new service. Our apartment is upscale (by our standard). Our furniture is nicer.
You called yourself a poor person - I’m sure you know this, but income is not a measure of wealth. We’ve built up some investments and liquid savings over the years, but I know coworkers from previous teams and other friends who earn just as much or more than us but also have $15K/month mortgages and are house broke or have expensive drinking or general spending habits where they end up saving practically nothing.
$28.6k - 401k contributions & match
$112k - RSUs after tax
$14k - Monthly emergency fund contributions from paycheck (yearly total)
~$16k - Bonus after tax
My expenses really haven’t increased in line with the compensation. The picture would look different if I had a family, but I’m in my late 20s. I suppose I could eat high quality sushi daily, but I’ll settle for weekly.
But this is actually rare across the industry as a whole in the US, and extremely rare when considering other countries. It's nowhere near as common as the heavily skewed HN comments will make you believe.
This isn't unusual at all for top talent.
http://visadoor.com/greencards/index?company=Netflix&job=&co...
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Netflix&track=Software%20Eng...
Netflix is known to pay at the top of market, so the highest few compensations there being >$350k make at least a little sense.
Filter the visadoor results with job=software to see only the software developer salaries. These range from $280K to $850K, have a mean of $373K, a median $370K, 24 of 66 are at $400K and above.
This is very much the same ballpark as the self reported average salary of $433K on levels.fyi (I'd expect PERM figures to be slightly lower than average for the company as a whole since I presume they would normally be filed in the first year of employment.)
This strongly suggests to me that the levels.fyi self reported salaries for other companies are also ballpark correct.
> Netflix is known to pay at the top of market, so the highest few compensations there being >$350k make at least a little sense.
47 of 66 in the visadoor figures make $350 and above. While I would expect Netflix's average to be higher than other comparable companies this is because it hires only at Senior Software Developer level and above. Facebook and Google certainly pay their senior and above developers in the Bay Area similarly, albeit with a different RSU/salary mix.
(Well not me, but..)
lol. really? what software devs are making 250k a year?