and do you also get the $BigTech 400K/year salary? that would be sweet.

Do I get the $400K salary? I’m not at the $400K salary level but neither are most people who work for $BigTech. The salary bands for the AWS consultants/solution architects/engagement managers are the same as the equivalent SDE roles. I would think the same holds true for GCP and Azure.

I can tell you according to levels.fyi that my salary is the same for my level as someone living in Seattle. I also know an SA living in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska who is making the same for his level as someone in Seattle.

This is a good reply. At 400k a year, expenses really cease to matter. But at 180k a year, there is a difference between Seattle and Nebraska.

More like $210K -$250K for an L5.

Edit:

Would I move to the west coast for $225K compared to what I could makes locally? Heck no, $400K, maybe. At this point in life, even my local pre-Covid salary was “enough” for us to comfortably meet our short and long term goals.

The extra $70K-$80K basically just gave us enough to tell my wife don’t worry about going back to work surrounded by Covid when school starts back and the rest is going straight to long term goals - save more for retirement, pay off the house faster, etc.

Doubling our income wouldn’t make any lifestyle differences. What are we going to do travel in a post Covid world? Buy a larger house for three people and within a few years 2?

Thanks for the data :) For me, extra savings would just go towards automating more things in my life. All of the things that are broken or malperformant in my house could be resolved with a few phone calls. If I still have money left over after that, then it would probably be invested to generate more secure and reliable income. If I only have 500k in the bank, I feel weary about putting half in dividend stocks that might not pan out like I hoped. But if I have 2 milliom in the bank, then $200,000 in dividend stocks feels like child's play in terms of risk :)

That brings up another interesting and off topic aside.

I made plenty of $bad_life_decisions until 12 years ago. So early retirement is out of the question. But that’s okay, I’ve never hated my career, my previous jobs at times definitely.

But, with a paid off house, the amount of savings I should be able to amass in 20 years by the time I’m 65, and hopefully social security is still a thing. With today’s rules, your spouse can either collect their social security or half of yours while you are both still living. We could easily live off of an (inflation adjusted) $4500 SS + the hopeful retirement savings.

> I pay $2150 a month for a 5 bedroom 3100 square foot 4 year old house in the burbs of a major metropolitan area and work for $BigTech remotely. I wouldn’t trade the arbitrage opportunity for anything.

Congrats, you don't live in silicon valley. Woohoo. Your life is not everyone's nor is it representative of what everyone can get.

My employer will only keep people who will show up at the office. If I found employers regularly paying $400k+ for remote - I'd consider it... But I don't see them often.

Well, most people aren’t making $400K at $BigTech either according to levels.fyi

I had two choices when I could see myself topping out locally as a bog standard enterprise dev - either I could go the r/cscareerquestions route and “grind leetCode” so I could reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard, and move to high cost of living area or I could focus on gaining experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant” somewhere where most of the jobs are remote with travel.

Right when I was about to pull the trigger and start applying for local companies, Covid hit, the local market dried up and I got an email from an Amazon recruiter.

I thought I might as well try. I can answer the “tell me about a time when...” questions with the best of them and I had the relevant experience.