I started a year ago fresh out of college at L60 and my TC this past year was ~220k. I've never been expected to work over 40 hours, and my engineering manager allows days off basically at-will (in addition to the prescribed 15 vacation). I also just got promoted, raising my expected TC for next year to ~250k.

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.

Damn dawg, I was there as a level 61 (or maybe it was 62? I can't remember..) a few years ago, and my total compensation was something like $180k in Redmond. I negotiated a little, but didn't push that hard

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

New hires can have inflated TC if they include the signing bonus in it.

I was under the impression that your TC stays similar as you get rolling RSU grants

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..)

Yes, my signing bonus is spread out over the first 4 years, so my TC will not go down until at least year 5, by that point I'd expect promotions/bonuses to cover the gap, or more likely I'll have moved on to a different company (nothing against msft, just not trying to stay in one place for too long)

Jesus. I think I've vastly underestimated the opportunity cost of sticking with digital marketing rather than making the shift to developer. My thinking was always "yo it took you 5 years to consistently get 6 figs wherever you go, do you want to have to do that all over again?" But You're telling me they let brand new right out of college folks make a quarter mil? Mother of god.

Would you mind sharing how much of this is cash comp or comes through in your standard paycheck?

>M$

Seeing that in 2020 reminded me of this https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22

Wow, man, and we're living in the dystopian hellscape the anti-Palladium people were worried about

I guess it's not as bad as they thought it might be

Hahaha I'll take the jab. And I guess I dated myself a bit. Should we start using Bezo$ instead? I don't think that is as visually pleasing.