> A majority — 194 out of 310 — total respondents said they were people of color. Also, 69 respondents reported feeling marginalized or at risk of being marginalized due to their gender or gender identity. In total, 22% of respondents said that their gender or gender identity had or might hinder them at work.
This indicates that it is not a representative sample of M$. Though which conclusions to make from it are much harder to say.
I think you're right about there being selection bias... people who are happy with their package don't spend their time filling out these spreadsheets (I didn't!)
Also, I note that if I had taken just my initial offer, my TC would have been much closer to the listed. But I went through the long and arduous process of sending one email to my recruiter asking for more money and here I am.
I guess I'm technically a "person of color" (Hispanic) but I have a ton of useful, valuable experience and so far as code monkeys go I'm pretty good at negotiation. I thought Microsoft was a horrible pit of vipers and a generally terrible company, but I definitely did NOT experience any racism.
Maybe the people who responded to the survey are generally just really bad at negotiation, and the HR people should've gone easier on them.. I don't think it's feasible to get a 50% pay bump without changing jobs, so they're all in a really awful position
I got unlucky and ended up on a particularly bad team, so I left before I could get any firsthand experience with it. It's weird if it works that way, though, since it's so easy to jump ship to another company and get way more money.. Microsoft's interview process is as hard as pretty much any other high end company (except maybe Google, which seems to expect you to grind on leetcode a lot more..)
Seeing that in 2020 reminded me of this https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22
I guess it's not as bad as they thought it might be
Also, I wonder if employees who feel they’re being paid well would have anything to gain by filling this out. So there may be sampling bias.
That salary, with stability, good benefits, and stock options, seems pretty good for entry level.
Though I guess there's no M in FAANG.
Now I am not sure on how hard it is to be promoted but it does look like you need several promotions at Microsoft to equal one promotion at Facebook or Google.
I have been recruited by a few FAANG companies (recruited in the sense that a recruiter reached out for an interview) and have only gone to public schools, nothing impressive.
I wouldn’t get passed a phone screen without prep for a software dev position.
I only recently ended up at a FAANG as a technical consultant. Even then, the recruiter reached out to me about a software engineering position and I asked about openings in the cloud division.
[edit: stock, not stock options]
> A lot lower than I was expecting
... I need to emmigrate
The part often left out of the discussion of how much better government benefits are in UK/Europe, is how much higher salaries are in the US.
I'd be surprised if most people at microsoft paid more than $100 a year in health expenses.
Premiums are about $12K for singles and $25K for families.
As a “high” (by UK standards not US ones) income earner in the UK the “cost” of your health insurance/benefits would be considerably higher than the cost in the US but the benefits won’t be dependent on your continued employment.
The reality is that the compensation in the UK/EU is overall rather pitiful especially when you account for the higher taxation and the employment costs to the employer are much higher which is one of the main reasons for the lower salaries rather than the employers don’t need to cover benefits.
For a taxable salary of £115K which is on the higher end of what you can get in the U.K. these days the employer NIC is £13,885 that’s 10% contribution on top of the salary alone the employee is then pays over £6000 in contributions also.
I mean, they normally aim to pay 90th percentile for the market, and that is definitely not true for London.
However, I did get a lot of offers at much less profitable companies for much, much better salaries based in London, hence why I'm pointing out this problem.
I mean, if you're fine with only hiring grads/relatively junior developers then the system works. I'm just observing that it didn't work for me, and for a lot of people I knew back it the days.
(The constant re-staffing of teams with new people after key members moved to the US was also maddening).
Rephrasing: the market rate in Europe is lower than in the US. Between 1.5 - 2 - much, much more.
I am surprised by how poorly MS pays for the Seattle area.
How are you going to afford a million dollar house on any but the top of these salaries?
Where on earth is someone on $150k, renting, going to get £200k in cash?
If you are young, you can easily live off $50k/year, if you don't have children, don't own a car, take the bus to work, and your employer provides health insurance. Food is not that expensive, and you can rent an apartment for 20,000-25,000/year.
If your take-home is 110k, you'd have saved up for a downpayment in 4 years.
starting total compensation: 150K. If your partner works a similar job, your combined annual income is 300K.
No income tax in Washington State, so Federal + FICA taxes would be ~70K (look up any online calculator).
Rent ~1800 per month or 22K per year (based on Zillow's data for 1bd/1ba in Redmond, WA). Living expenses of 2K per month or 24K per year.
You are looking at 300K - (70 + 22 + 24)K, or >180K potential annual savings. Let's double the living expenses or throw in student loan repayments on top, but saving 100-125K per year is easily doable for such a couple. And in a couple of years, you have 200-250K for your downpayment.
You can also get a nice large (3000+ square foot) house brand new build in the burbs in a great school system right in Atlanta for around $300-$375K with an FHA loan and 3.5% down.
Note: I’m currently visiting my parents in Atlanta from Seattle and, by god, is it miserably hot here.
But there are other cities with nearly the same salary vs cost of living ratio...Nashville, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, Raleigh, etc.
I recently bought a quite big apartment (140 sqm, one balcony and a terrace with a view) at a minute walk distance from St. Peters in Rome for 460k and the mortgage rate is 0.73% at less than 12k/year
You can get a pretty decent house in the Bay Area for $1M in areas like East and South San Jose.
Mostly all junior and that makes sense in terms of who is sharing. 60% said they were visible minority and 22% said their gender was an issue.
Does that lineup with recent Microsoft hires or is this dataset unrepresentative.
> Microsoft’s latest diversity report showed the company was mainly white and male, especially at the highest levels.
It is reasonable to believe that this data set is not representative.
There's definitely a lot more land to build housing on in the PNW, despite also having some of the geographic constraints that the Bay does, although it hasn't exactly kept housing costs in check.
Maybe "a bit" of a libertarian flair, but also in many ways the urban areas are arguably MORE progressive than the "old conservative NIMBY liberals" in the bay.
https://www.levels.fyi/# exists but might be inflated a bit.