What’s missing from this post is how common it is. E8 at Facebook is extremely rare. I can’t remember the exact percentage when I was there, but it’s around 1-2%.
E5 at FB is a terminal level, many engineers don’t get beyond that. I worked on a team of several hundred engineers and we only had one or two E7s, and nothing higher.
To put this in perspective: at FB, E8 is the individual contributor equivalent of engineering director.
Even when told, most people still refuse to believe the compensation numbers achievable by even fairly average engineers.
Of course, there's other stuff - 30 (working) days of paid vacation, solid and cheap education, solid medical coverage (I consider $50 medical bill damn high) etc.
I worked at FAANGs in Silicon Valley for many years. I always got at least 20 vacation days, 10-12 holidays (like Christmas or July 4th), excellent insurance plans and could pay off my 40-45K education loan in a breeze. Total cost of private education is ~25K per child.
If you have a Software job at a FAANG in SV, it will be better than almost any other arrangement in Europe (exception: Zurich) even after taking into account vacation days, insurance premiums, California taxes, private schools cost and probability of gun violence.
Unfortunately none of these are uniform across Europe. I only have 20 days of vacation, medical coverage is horrible, with 2-3 month waiting lists for even an MRI, and education is absolutely horrid.
I wouldn't even call them free, nor cheap: income taxes come out to about ~35%, and VAT is the highest in the world.
And to add on to that, achieving compensation above ~80k usd is basically impossible. With ~3 years of experience I barely get half of that at a Google L4 level equivalent.
One simply sees their paycheck cut by ~40% monthly and in case of crisis situation is always put at the end of the queue as a low priority applicant. That's ranging from irritating to infurating depending on the urgency of one's problems.
Besides housing, healthcare, and maybe barbers, everything is either cheaper, or costs the same as it is in most of Europe.
How statistically common/likely is it for EU based engineers to move to the US on a L-1 visa, specifically at google?
I guess that stops counting as Europe fairly soon, though.
Contractors always earn more than employees though don't they?
You have a chance to complete for free a long queue of take home assignments which might end up with an employment for 2k EUR net monthly.
We’re engineers, not royalty. There’s nothing any one of us could do that would justify these wages, if it wasn’t for US immigration policies causing an artificial supply/demand issue.
This is business after all. Your value is a combination of what you bring to the company and how hard you are to replace. FB makes $$$, the $$$ didn't just appear out of thin air, it happened because of the people who work there. Giving engineers a share of all that money seems much more reasonable than giving zuckerberg a second private jet.
Executives, CEOs and shareholders are all highly compensated for their risk in both time and money and are not "royalty." I would argue that being royal implies birth as an unjustifiably paid skill.
That too is wrong. Paying wages based on supply/demand instead of based on the value an employee actually provides leads to exactly this kind of heavily distorted labor markets.
I admire Europe for achieving a good lower bound on the standard of living of a person in society. If it were my way, all labor laws would only apply to those making less than 100K a year.
The same laws which protect lower income earners by making hiring/firing expensive, make the cost of hiring/firing well paid employees astronomical. That puts a serious damper on the fluidity of labor markets.