There are 4.4 million software engineers in the USA. I'm sure the graduate -> $200k move happens, but it's only an extremely small number in terms of the occupation as a whole. People on this forum seem to casually mention it as if it's some kind of default.
But, I mean, new grads at MSFT can get pretty close to 200k, even though the comp scales up poorly with career progression compared to FAANG. There are a bunch of other companies where you can hit numbers that are in that ballpark, and they also employee a non-trivial number of engineers: Snapchat, Uber, Lyft, Twitter, Square, Stripe, Doordash, Roblox, etc, etc, etc. Sure, add them all up with FAANG and you probably barely touch 200k. But, uh, 200k is roughly 5% of the software engineers in the country (_very_ broadly classified; I think a more reasonable classification would put it closer to 10%). So, sure, it's not the _default_ outcome, but "top decile" is hardly shooting for the moon.
Also this is specific to the Bay Area - they don’t pay these rates internationally or even everywhere within the US. And finally, it’s not every grad & stocks massively inflate this number.
I’m sure some people reading this will have done it - it’s not ‘common’ and definitely isn’t the pay of the top decile of developers in the world, the West, or I bet even in the US.
Yep, they don't even hire mid-level engineers. They hire seniors and above. But their size is tiny compared to the rest of those top tier tech companies, so Netflix could be ignored for all intents and purposes here.
>Also this is specific to the Bay Area
Not really. Seattle has pretty much the same level of comp and no state income tax. And pretty much all of those companies discussed above have significant presence in Seattle too (minus Netflix afaik). But yes, still an expensive place to live in.
>stocks massively inflate this number
How is this "inflation" or an issue at all? You can sell stocks immediately as they vest and treat it just like cash comp. Or you can hold and hope they grow in price (which a lot of times is a valid strategy). But for all intents and purposes, stock compensation at publicly traded companies is just as valid as cash compensation. It isn't some stock options that "might be worth a lot when we go public, but currently is just a monopoly money you cannot do anything with" in a privately held startup.
>it’s not ‘common’
It depends on how you define "common". Among my peers who applied to those top tier companies and got the offers, around $200k starting out of college was way more common than not. And no, I didn't go to Stanford or anything like that, it was a public state college in Georgia (albeit a very good one, but still, nothing "exclusive" like MIT/Stanford/etc.). There were a couple of people who were truly exceptional, and their starting offers reflected that appropriately (closer to $300k than $200k), but $200k seemed to be the baseline.
And no, none of those companies require some wild credentials or experience to interview. Pretty much anyone can get a Google interview at some point (everyone I know from my school who tried applying, got at least one shot at the Google interview process; I also know a lot of people with either no college education at all or those that went to colleges that no one has even heard of, and they all got invited for Google interviews), the problem is that most don't pass. But it doesn't seem to be just pure luck (even though it is a non-insignificant element of it), given that the people I know who studied the hardest were also the ones who had the highest pass rate for those interviews (as well as the highest offers).
No way. Amazon might be coming close (I don't have a very good idea of their size, but my guess is they have like ~75k software engineers); Google probably has about 50k, Apple has like 10k.
How about we stipulate that you can convince Facebook to pay you $70k to work for them. But they’re also happy to pay you $300k, so if I were a fresh graduate I,would benefit from taking that on board and adjusting my goals and strategy accordingly.
More accurate knowledge of reality.
After all, if someone on a forum is talking about $300k graduate salaries while the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks the median pay of programmers in the US is $89k [1] I gotta take both of those numbers into account in my world view.
Otherwise you end up being out of touch with reality, thinking that bananas cost $10.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
From your perspective, they only ever need to do that _once_. To you.
The takeaway is "Facebook will pay me $400k if I work on convincing them to do so." That's a much better thought to have in your head than "maybe somebody will pay me the median developer salary."
Of course, you're welcome to approach life however you choose. Personally, I chose that higher number for myself (for the handful of years it took to retire). And I'd recommend anybody reading this do the same.
Edit: I see this same argument coming up every time salary is discussed here. Somebody will say "look how much you can make", and somebody else will pop up saying "sure, but look how _little_ you can make!".
It's as though they're trying to justify not having to ask for more money by convincing themselves it's impossible. But it's not impossible, and all you can accomplish by thinking negatively is to make less money.
I'm not talking about setting personal-level goals used to guide your career planning. I'm talking about knowing the broader, population-level facts in order to inform discussions about public policy and advise the actions of others.
After all, knowing your country's median bodyweight is 170 lbs doesn't preclude you setting your personal goal weight as 135 lbs.
Obviously that's top of the market, but it exists.
2 years of software engineering experience
2 years of teaching experience
Education:
Bachelor information science
Bachelor psychology
Master game studies
Research master computer science
(and tons of failed studies, extracurricular courses, student boards and jobs)
Notable fun achievements:
Graduated from first bachelor within 2 years.
Published my homework as a paper to a conference and it got accepted (with a lot of help from my teacher, this was no solo effort).
Hobbies:
Music (I think about it obsessively since I was 4, not great in making it though, I do beatbox okay-ish)
Mindfulness (not meditating, simply applying it)
Reading Hacker News (this is a legit hobby :P)
Hanging out with friends and talking about all kinds of things
I used to be the kind of person to want to know everything about the world and that's also how I studied. I gave up on that recently though.
---
Now you know me a bit better, albeit on paper, it's something ;-)
For you, I would need to answer "don't know" for all of these.
Having a strong github would go a long way in making it possible to answer one of those with with something other than don't know.
Basically you need something more tangible than a resume for a stranger to go out on a limb for you.
4 day work week.
Its not societies job to manipulate the job market so some ones hobby me to "startup" becomes viable.
Its the same with mc jobs as a tax payer I am happy to subsidise nurse, doctor training but not subsiding a MacDonald's franchisee's business
Frankly, I don't get the hype. I've interviewed FAANG engineers and have given a thumbs down almost as often as I did for engineers from other companies.
Re: the hype .. what I would say is, as an employee of a FAANG, is that I work with really smart people. Some of the smartest and most competent people I've ever worked with. Most much smarter than myself.
But after 9 years, I'm not convinced that their intelligence always yields results that exceed that of other companies I've worked at. In some ways, yes, but in other ways no. So, I dunno.
Having clearly articulated processes certainly help consistency.
Even if you are doing the wrong thing consistently, one has a much greater chance of knowing what parameters can be tweaked to alter the outcome.
Consistency is easier to monitor/log.
It is easier to experiment.
Without consistency, it is much more difficult to know which of your decisions changed the outcome, or was it just good or bad luck.
Toyota and McDonald’s are successfully companies, but they are not perfect.
Kaizen and consistency are not mutually exclusive.
But in my experience striving for consistency means that before improving something you have to go and change everywhere that pattern appears in 400 different code bases going back 20 years (and all of the documentation across however many platforms). As a result nobody ever improves things.
As with all things YMMV.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I'd really, really like to see some actual numbers on this.
My biggest gripe with this theory, is that it assumed all responsibility and decision-making on a single worker. In every other industry I've worked, where employees have the access to some extremely costly "kill switch", where you can basically bring down the whole system, it's always - ALWAYS something that needs to go through multiple people.
That also goes for more fundamental roles, like design and implementation. These things go through multiple people, reviews, and later audits.
I'd be amazed if internal guidelines and regulations at FAANG behemoths allow potential multi-million decisions to rest on single employees.
It's not a knock on the companies or employees, but my initial reaction was that embedded code in safety critical systems like what operates infrastructure, cars, airplanes, etc. would be less forgiving in terms of mistakes