I did HR at one of the FAANGs (the alphabet one). This is not true.

What is not true? That new employees make this much? The standard new grad offer at Google is about 180k (and you can negotiate 50K+ more with the right counter offers) for your first year and average L3 makes 210k.

Juniors definitely don't make ~250k. Mid level, maybe. Senior, definitely.

L3 won't, but L4 at Google will easily. And you can get promoted from L3 to L4 in a year in ideal circumstances.

Actually with another FAANG offer L3 can pull that salary if they compete hard enough

Well, Amazon and MSFT will not provide offers for new grads that will even match the entry level Google offer. So that leaves FB who isn't paying new grads as much as they used to. There aren't too many companies that will give offers that will allow you to negotiate to 250 which is really high.

Meanwhile, I got an L4 offer from Google last year that was below that.

Some junior engineers do (most don't). There was this thread from a while ago [0] where someone negotiated a 300k offer. I believe they were a new/recent grad.

Most of the time it's due to having some leverage (multiple FAANG+ offers).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057514

If your not incompetent, its pretty much guaranteed you will reach sr in 5-8 years. It's the levels after sr that are the hard part.

L4 to L5 is no cakewalk. you have to be rock solid in the core SWE disciplines and have excellent communication, organization skills, and very good leadership skills too. looking at the stats, promoted as a % of total for L4 to L5 just makes it into the double digits and only a little over a quarter of all SWEs are L5.

the SWE ladder requires/expects for an L3 to get to L4 by makes no such requirement to ever get to L5.

That is why you don't play the promo game and get promoted via interviews at other companies. When you reach staff, that is usually when you have to practically start playing promo games. Not everywhere is google with their slow promo processes.

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.

How big is stock though?

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.

>fuzzy-numbered stock options

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.

Staff is even one level above senior.

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.

Directors are equivalent to staff +1 or staff +2. Staff engineers are usually equivalent to 2nd level middle managers, with 1st level are managers of teams that are just ICs). Jr Engineers can be 30-50% of an engineering organization. So it's not that impossible.

Director (L8) is two levels above staff engineer (L6) in Google. But promotions get exponentially more difficult after L5, particularly if you intend to stay as an IC.

I meant director as a general title in corporations, not google specifically.

> fuzzy-numbered stock options

That's true for non-public companies, but stock options at a publicly traded company like Google or Apple are much easier to value.

RSUs are easily going to be half or more, unless large bonuses are involved (which does happen). Keep in mind RSUs aren't options.

I wouldn't say "easily". The shit offer I got from Google past year was about 60% base salary. The non-shit offer I took from Twitter is about 55% base.

Why didn't you use the good offer from Twitter to push Google up?

Well, the good offer came a couple months after I rejected the Google offer, and it was for one level higher (which I didn't think Google was going to budge on).

Stock options are distinct from units. They have a clear value, current market value, discounted by your fear of the future.