How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?

Re:How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Sti... by dlp211 on Thursday June 18, 2020 @12:50PM (#23564974)

Most Engineers do NOT make $500k total comp per year at FAANG companies, most engineers don't make $300k TC/yr at these companies, and those aren't the engineers I'm talking about anyways. These companies are made up mostly of engineers who make between $100k-$250k.

That's still not a small amount of money; and I never claimed that these people are poor; just that these salaries don't satisfy their needs and desires and these salaries certainly do not feel like you make $100k-$250k. Part of that is anchoring our expectations to what those amounts of money mean to when we first really began to understand the concept of money which is usually in our tween-teen stage of life, but it's also that these are in incredibly high COL areas.

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Re:How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Sti... by BeetleB on Thursday June 18, 2020 @06:12PM (#23568707)

I don't live in SV. Looking at Mountain View, there are quite a few nice 2000 sq ft houses to rent for about $6500/month. When I compare that to what I'm paying in a cheaper COL area, I can assure you that the difference in pay between me and typical Google compensation, after taxes, more than compensates for this increase in rent.

I won't say it's "luxury", but it's still better than most people get around the country.

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Re:How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Sti... by scarface74 on Friday June 19, 2020 @10:22AM (#23574788)

I pay $2200/month mortgage to live in the burbs of a major southeastern city. - 5 bedroom, 3-1/2 bath, 3100 square feet. It was a brand new build in 2016.

I just went to https://paycheckcity.com and did a gross up calculator. At first I thought you were underestimating how much more I would have to make to make the move worthwhile - with downsizing.

But if we were willing to downsize, I would need to make about $70K - $80K more than the average senior software engineer makes in my area.

I was off. $220K - $240K is about the average range for engineer with 3-5 years of experience in $BigTech so $6500/month is not unreasonable.

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Re:How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Sti... by amznthrowaway5 on Thursday June 18, 2020 @11:36PM (#23570694)

Not true. The amazon sde2 external hire offer I saw given to people with >=1 year of experience is around 250K in Seattle and higher in California. Amazon is known as one of the lower paying FAANG companies.

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Re:How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Sti... by dlp211 on Sunday June 21, 2020 @02:03AM (#23590201)

The average SDE 2 total compensation is around $215k according to levels.fyi which I have found to fairly accurate. I'm not saying you didn't see that offer, just that it isn't normal.

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Re:How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Sti... by amznthrowaway5 on Saturday June 27, 2020 @11:27PM (#23666559)

$215K in Seattle is still quite high. External hire gets a lot more than internal promo and that site lags behind the current offer compensation which is some part of the diff.

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