It’s certainly true that senior people are unlikely to get hired at a FAANG in a senior role for their first year.

Being a high achieving senior engineer is about delivering on communication and prioritization, more than anything else. It’s very hard to evaluate a prospective hire’s day-to-day willingness to communicate and prioritize, no matter how impressive their resume.

If you do well, you’ll quickly get promoted, though.

And the salary difference is pretty negligible, relative to RSUs, and people who think of themselves as senior can often get pretty senior RSU packages, so this distinction isn’t super relevant for total compensation.

You mean like downleveling? Sure, that happens a lot. The top paying companies mostly only consider engineers from similarly high paying companies to be known quantities. So if you are a staff engineer at a smaller tech company or a startup, you'll probably end up being "only" senior at Google or Facebook.

> You mean like downleveling? Sure, that happens a lot

Yeah, so that's a major factor here to consider, right? We're talking about moving to a FAANG from a non-FAANG in another region. If most non-FAANG people lose a level, then it really does make the salaries less when you consider cost-of-living.

Downleveling happens, but the $ calculation almost always makes it out very much ahead. At my previous job at a startup, I was making $160k base with stock options as a tech lead/engineering manager, but at my current job at a FAANG, I was offered the same base but with $15k signing bonus and $105k RSUs that are now almost worth double as a high mid-level engineer. For me, accepting the offer was an absolutely a fantastic financial decision. Responsibility-wise, I never felt like I was given less responsibility than at a startup either.

What the downleveling does is align expectations correctly, since most people not at a top tier company likely need some time to ramp up to the expectations of the next level up. What senior/staff/principal mean at companies like Google/FB/Apple is very different from what it means at most companies.

Well, not really. Look back at the salary levels from the levels.fyi PDF. Most people downleveled from senior will end up one or two levels up from new grad. That puts you below the numbers from my comment, but not by a whole lot! And after one promotion you'll be at or exceeding my present situation.

I am much closer to the floor (new grad) than I am to the ceiling, as far as FAANG salaries are concerned.

Does up-leveling happen too? If you were senior or staff at Google, can you get a Principal job at a smaller growth company?

Yes. That's really common when someone very senior at a FAANG wants to achieve a greater level of autonomy and "impact". Once you hit L5/L6 at Google/Facebook (or equivalent elsewhere), the promotion rate slows down quite a lot. So one option to continue career growth is to jump ship for a smaller (but promising) tech company in exchange for more responsibility and a title increase.