It seems like a lot of HN readers are continually playing the "maximize salary" game and use like articles like this one to figure out how well they're doing. If you want to play that game, then good luck, have fun. I understand the desire.

But it's not for everyone. Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year? Do you enjoy what you do and the people that you work with? If so, I don't think there should be any shame in staying where you are. Don't feel like you have to chase every last dollar.

I'm also not into trying to maximize every dollar and care a lot about other factors like WLB. But these days I'm feeling a lot of pressure due to inflation. Everything is going up and I feel like I need to switch jobs and increase salary just to keep up. Yesterday, I read a news article that Social Security benefits are increasing by 5.9% next year due to inflation. And that's from Social Security which historically was under-adjusting for inflation (usually like 1.5% per year). So if the stingy SS program is going 5.9%, what does that say about the actual inflation?

And I've never seen anything close to 5.9% for COL from any company. Most companies don't give that even for top performers. I don't think companies are prepared to give 5.9% COL, most companies are already so short sighted they would rather lose their entire engineering department instead of give raises to keep up with the market rate (even though they would be willing to pay that market rate when hiring a replacement). That kind of short sighted thinking simply does not allow a massive COL increase, no matter how much data is out there.

Inflation is not a universal metric, it's individual. Every person, every household has their own inflation rate depending on spending profile. I would not use government figures to make decisions about my financial affairs.

Everything else being the same, it's better to make 300k than 175k/year. And not everything is the same, normally in those better paid jobs you have better Engineers, a lot of challenging problems, many nice perks, etc. What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week. Also you don't get highly ethical companies, just average ones at that (and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k).

So as far as general advice goes, it makes sense to recommend trying to get those FAANG jobs if you can.

i had to read this twice to make sure i was reading it correctly:

  and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k

this really triggered me. you basically say its ok to do shady things as long as you give something to the poor. sounds so much like "indulgence" in Christian churches where you could pay off your sins. sad.

i'd say money is not a permission for you to do bad things, and it should not make you fell better about bad things you did (and continue to do) just by giving some of the money away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence

Oh sorry I didn't mean it at all like that; not condoning doing shady things at all! Slightly more ethical !== the other one doing shady/bad things. What I wanted to point out is that, people normally overestimate the impact they can have in a social cause and underestimate the impact some $ well situated can have.

To put an example with Open Source, Amazon is pretty bad considered, while e.g. Red Hat is "one of the best".

But I don't mean those extremes, I mean more mundane companies. Let's compare say Apple (neutral-ish?) and Stripe (neutral-to-slightly positive) (note: about Open Source!!). What do you think would have better impact in the OSS ecosystem, to work at Apple for $300k and donating $125k to open source projects, or to work at Stripe getting paid $175k and not donate anything?

It sounds pretty much on par for American approach to everything. It's ok to have shitty healthcare for the poor and pay less taxes, as long as you donate from time to time. Student loans? Medical loans? Shitty care for vets? No worries, Americans are the highest donating people on Earth by capita - so it's all fine. That last argument I keep hearing all the time - Americans are such good donators that they don't need a robust social net, after all if you are really in need then someone would have donated to you already /s.

Way off base, we (I?) are not talking about paying taxes vs donations. In fact as an European myself now living in Japan yeah, tax the shit out of everyone, and stop bombing/gunning everyone and instead pay for healthcare+university with that money :)

Now since I'm not native I think I might have explained myself wrong; see sibling comment (to yours) I made clarifying what I meant.

You have to be careful with health care, otherwise socialism will creep in.

Everyone knows that socially paid things are wrong, and that everything should be private.

No one wants public fire departments, schools, legal systems, police, etc etc. Only socialist countries do this.

Don't be so glib.

Where I live, we have private fire departments because the government one's are not maintained and the ambulances are being used as taxis.

Socialism + corruption (and that the only kind we get) is way worse than you can imagine. Especially for the poor.

> Socialism + corruption (and that the only kind we get) is way worse than you can imagine. Especially for the poor.

Can imagine still don’t see it. Communism + corruption, sure.

I agree with you, but consider the possibility of donating the difference to a political organisation whose aim it is to eliminate shady behaviour by companies.

There's a broader spectrum to donation than just donating to the poor.

You could argue any profit-seeking endeavor is unethical. I look at every FAANG company, and they all do pretty nefarious things. One might be in the news now for particular reasons, but the others are equally bad for other reasons. Imagine factories overseas pushing people to suicide, warehouse workers without bathroom breaks to collect extra billions for the boss, or equivalent advertising businesses morphing the minds of the masses, as examples.

of course :) breaking system from within. I'm being sarcastic here. sure there are more charities than for the poor, but what triggered me is the reasoning that i can buy my self peace of mind for things i have done. and this is on paper. i suspect that when money are in hand, the question comes, "after all why should i not keep it" or "i already donated last year, this should be enough"

This is a very specific situation. Someone WILL fill that position at Evil Corp. and they will also get the 300k. The amount of evil done stays the same regardless of whether you take the position or not. But, if you take it and donate 100k to charity each year (especially one that works to undo harm done by your employer), more good is being done as well.

X harm + Y good > X harm + 0 good

You're missing several important factors there.

- with fewer people interested in working at Evil Corp, salaries there will trend up and they may not be able to grow as much as a consequence.

- if the most skilled people don't want to work at Evil Corp, that also makes it harder to do evil.

I really hope people aren't using oversimplified analysis to justify working on evil stuff.

> Someone WILL fill that position at Evil Corp. and they will also get the 300k.

That’s not actually how it works. Maybe it’s 90% true, but the 10% matters, even if it is difficult to evaluate.

What is the impact of a position at Evil Corp staying open for 6 months longer than it would have otherwise if GP doesn’t take the job? I don’t know, that is a difficult question. But I know it isn’t zero impact.

Our actions matter.

The difference between the two options is saving 125 lives / year at GiveWell’s current estimate.

In ten years, you will have saved more than Oskar Schindler did during the entire Holocaust.

But of course you have taken one path to the Trolley problem and Schindler (who joined the Nazi party) has taken the other. Now it remains to be seen whether history remembers Oskar Schindler the Nazi Party member or user vincnetas who avoided FAANG as the more ethical.

i doubt that Schindler was weighting his options of joining nazi to be saving jews. it was after he joined he saw whats happening and acted in good faith. so he was saving lives not because he joined nazi, but because he mostly could not be not saving them.

this is tangential to slavery where slave owners where treating their slaves very well, but fundamentally they still were slavers.

Ultimately you don’t want to save the 125 kids a year. That’s fine. But that’s the active choice you’re making by choosing no FAANG over FAANG plus donate.

You might have better engineers in FAAnG but it’s not given that you love your work. Many of my colleagues in those places are bored out of their minds because of how silly or numbing the work is. Part of the reason why I’ve not tried the transition yet.

Yes, of course, that's how statistics and probability work, you are not guaranteed anything. But chances are higher.

plenty of low paying silly and mind-numbing work out there too tho

>What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week

This isn't true. Google allows you to "scale" your work (eg 80% pay for 80% time).

> This isn't true. Google allows you to "scale" your work (eg 80% pay for 80% time).

Well.. sort of. My partner was doing 80% for 80% at goog for many years, which sounds like a good deal. Except the demands were more like 40-50 hours/week, with management always saying that full-timers were working way more than 50 hours, so at 80% salary you better be working 40-50hrs/wk.

That reminds me of the old “120% time” problem at Google[0]. Sounds like your partner had a bad manager. Much easier to change managers than companies if your partner is/was otherwise happy with Google. Or, given the CV mojo of a Google job, to go to a different FAANG.

In Europe such scaling is generally guaranteed by law, and I don’t think any big company would be stupid enough to be caught cheating. And based solely on anecdata I think at least as many people are “phoning it in” at Google as at any other company regardless of salary.

Hope it worked out for your partner. Being exploited with lots of privilege is still being exploited.

[0]: Google famously used to let workers spend 20% of their time working on anything they wanted (for the company’s benefit) but bad managers, which turned out to be most managers, did not reduce the load of “normal” work, so it became known as 120% time.

[edit] past tense, they may no longer work there

Do you have a source for this? I know a lot of people at Google and have never heard of this. In fact, a few years ago I explicitly asked a Google recruiter about this, and they said it wasn't an option. Is it a more recent thing perhaps?

It was absolutely an option 5 years ago when I worked there. I knew lots of engineers who worked 80% and took every Friday off.

Not sure if your manager is forced to give you that option but it didn't seem to be hard to get at least. I think by default such requests gets accepted and your manager would need to give a good reason why you couldn't work part time.

I think it depends on the team and your role in it. I worked at one of the Google X moonshots and never heard of this. There were a couple engineers from other teams that were donating one day a week to helping us, which is a similar 80/20 split. These 20% were somewhat common at Google, I believe, but it was never to take time off work.

Okay in Google it's a official perk, bad example; my point still stands that you have more negotiation power with specific personal perks in smaller companies than in larger ones.

I'd be interested in 4 different jobs at 1 day a week for 20% of pay.

But everything else is _never_ the same. Once you're paid more, you move into a bigger house, have more needs, and without knowing it you're just as tight on money as you were before.

But then you just have more stress at work, and you just can't quit that easily bc there arent so many jobs that pay as much as this one...

Just to provide the other side of this general advice, that is really everywhere, but rarely delivers in regards to happiness.

>Once you're paid more, you move into a bigger house, have more needs, and without knowing it you're just as tight on money as you were before

This absolutely isn't a given. Lifestyle inflation to the extreme is in one's own hands first and foremost. Which is the most audacious part in this whole topic: yes your CoL is likely to be high if you earn such a giant income, but you are given options the majority of the west, let alone the world, will never have. As long as the percentage of one's income spent is roughly similar across all.

>This absolutely isn't a given. Lifestyle inflation to the extreme is in one's own hands first and foremost.

yes, but most people do that lifestyle inflation - by most I'm going to go with 90+ percent

I've 4x my salary in the last 4 years and barely spend more than in the beginning, that's definitely up to every and each one of us (and TBF you would spend more at least to match the inflation even with no life changes, but in Japan there's almost none).

It's worth highlighting that this was the opposite device a decade ago when the large caps were IBM/MSFT/CISCO etc.

The marginal value of a good software engineer is very high when there is good cash flow. It's difficult to increase cash flow without engaging in some software activity. Organizations tend to find that growing a large software organization is counterproductive to effective development vs. growing a better software organization.

> Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year?

Most people can't live comfortably while holding a full-time job, esp. a demanding one. The job just eats too much time and energy.

The exceptions are people with very high energy levels and people for whom the job is their passion (but even for them, it's usually temporary - passions change over the duration of one's life).

I believe it’s good practice to think about your compensation not only as “what you get for what you do”, but also as “what you get for not doing what you would rather be doing”.

Some companies, some products, some teams, some (lower) level of stress, some amount of learning you are getting, some work/life flexibility - at some (temporary?) point in your life - might make a lot of sense to be considered together with the $ you get paid. I am all up for maximizing what you get out of your job, but you might want to optimize for multiple factors, not just salary.

Also, this discussion is very centered on yearly comp. It’s good practice to ask yourself how risk prone you are? That early stage startup equity comp might turn into much more than you will ever get paid at a large established company.

So when you are maximizing, ask yourself over what time horizon you want to maximize? One year?Three? Five? Ten years? It’s rare to get truly great things instantly.

Honestly, I make 300k TC and joined one company out of college and stayed there for the last 4 years. I live in Seattle.

I just want to show that not everyone making > 200k switches companies every 2 years trying to minmax.

How much of that is from your stock that you got 4 years ago vesting while the market has gone up? Or is your newly infused grants and cash 300?

That's both currently the amount I am getting per year towards my bank account and the amount I'm being granted per year * 4 + cash (I got promoted ~a year ago, meaning my new grants though missing the time value have a higher dollar value at grant time)

The argument is money isn’t everything.

You left after the 4 year cliff. That’s hardly an argument against keeping the same or higher TC though.

Actually I'm still there :-) Nothing against people trying to move and make more, but I just want to let people know that you don't _have_ to do that to be successful (plus refute people that might claim that it's the only way to do so in tech)

If you have a family that loves you, manageable stress levels and a purpose in life, I think you are doing a lot of things right. I am sure you are worth more! There are probably ways to increase your compensation and maintain your quality of life, but is it really worth it?

This is a great point and worth emphasizing.

Don't forget good health and time to keep it that way.

I taught my friend to code in a year and he did one of the intensive bootcamps. First job ever. A healthcare company in NYC is paying him 155 + 20% bonus. You're getting hosed

At the same time, I see mostly listings for director of data science or vp analytics at a ton of small businesses or startups that require a PhD and 5 extra years experience offering a cap of $80k.

Remote or in office?

remote, nyc based though

I'm also based in Boston, senior dev (FAANG generalist, ~10 years of experience). I make about $200k plus ~$100k RSU/year on average. Previous FAANG paid ~$140k + ~100k RSU/year. I believe my peers make more, and the info I have on CTO salaries at various startups would put $175k on the low end of the CTO pay scale.

If I were you, strictly from a financial point of view, I'd probably test the market to see what offers I get.

Fellow Bostonian here, You need to look at large cap publicly traded tech companies.

There are a few home grown publicly traded Boston employers such as HubSpot, and to a lesser extent Wayfair which pay competitively. However there are also large presences from Salesforce, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, FB, Spotify and others who pay more competitively.

I live in Boston, 6 years of experience. I just went through the big tech thing for the first time. I got an offer from two of them and ended up almost doubling my total income (salary about the same but adding a ton of RSU and cash bonus). I did not grind leetcode, but I do know my data structures and I practiced enough to code basic algorithms without googling for method names or syntax. I spent more time practicing anecdotes, which is the part of the big tech interview where they ask questions like “describe a time you identified a customer issue and went outside your role to resolve it”

From my experience no company founded in Boston pays top end wages. This job search I only considered big tech side offices in Boston and remote roles for Silicon Valley companies.

My recommendation: find some data points on Levels.fyi that match your experience/level, location, and desired TC. If there’s a bunch of data points, then it’s possible. Interview with every employer listed in these data points, and don’t take a job if it’s less than your desired TC. The market is hot and you are in control.

You are doing something very wrong. Look at that median and ask yourself: Why would you compare yourself to median income if you have 20 yoe and two books? That is far more than the median SWE has accomplished. You are paying a lot in opportunity cost for whatever you are doing now.

Of course, it could be worth it! That’s for you to decide.

The best thing I did for my career was leave Boston for an entry level FANG job on the West Coast 10 years ago. I currently make more than 10x what I was making in Boston. But it has been a grind no doubt. And probably some luck.

Sorry, 10x seems like a crazy difference when talking about salary. Could you be more specific? I’m trying to figure out numbers that make sense. Like you were getting $30,000 a year in 2011 and now getting $300,000+ in 2021? In the same field? Either the Boston salary was crazy low or fang salary is crazy high.

It's not actually that crazy, and less so if you look at total comp.

I made $55k 10 years ago, and just took a pay cut from $225k to $160k in a much lower cost of living area. I've had jobs with consistent $25-50k yearly cash bonuses, where some folks got as much as $250k of bonus in a year. And then options and RSUs are just the icing on the cake. Big lumbering public company? Starts at 100k a year worth of RSUs. Early stage at a unicorn? Easily $1M a year.

I've mostly worked at pre-IPO startups you've heard of -- forget FAANG.

East coast salaries a decade ago outside of New York were abysmal compared to their west coast counterparts, and still are for the most part, but due to the rapid growth of remote work, things are improving greatly.

I’m not the OP but if they’re L7+ the current salary (total comp, really) could be 800k+

Mostly the same. I left Austin for SFO and FAANG 10 years ago. I made so much more, that when my previous company sold and some of my friends got 1m+ in stock, i had made more simply in salary moving.

I had the chance to do that in 2009 and my wife (then fiancé) and I decided to stay close to family. I often wonder if that was a mistake...

Depends what your goals were or are. It is also unproductive to evaluate previous decisions with information that was not available at that time.

I did the opposite of you and question if I made a mistake. I’m not sad about it. Just thinking through the “what ifs” after being gone so long. It’s natural. But if you’re happy today, why change?

How many of your employers have the cash flow that FAANG companies have. The idea that non-FAANG companies should be able to match FAANG salaries regardless of what non-FAANG companies have to spend on staff seems a rather distorted concept. As the article mentions, FAANG could actually be paying their employees much more. They can afford it, easily.

Ok I have but a fraction of your experience and make more. And live in a much lower cost if living area.

I’m extremely mobile. Not like permanently move mobile. But I’ll take contracting work that require me to move to NY or London or whatever. Very job bumps my salary up. If I have to switch continents I will.

Home is always my low cost of living place, and in practice I spend the majority of time there.

I know most people aren’t like this. And most people don’t have spouses who tolerate this.

My wife is either very understanding, or maybe she just doesn’t like me that much.

But if I’m like, honey, I have to move to Austin a for six months, she’s like “Ok, just be home for Thanksgiving.”

I just landed a staff+ faang role over 700k and I’m 20 mi outside Boston.

Boston is a joke. Growing up here my whole life I thought we were right behind SV. Boy was I wrong. Seattle, NYC, and Austin have all eclipsed Boston as a tech hub. It’s embarrassing.

Apply for remote. Now you’re exposed to companies based in SV. This is the time to do it - The Great Resignation has made jobs plentiful with unreal comp.

Also study up. The best positions are the hardest to get into. Give yourself 3 months to study and these opportunities will be yours for the taking. You clearly have the skills, you just need to put yourself out there.

The levels.fyi number you're looking at is across companies, so it's skewed by the type of companies hiring SWE's in Boston vs the Bay Area, which have different pay scales. Large Bay Area tech companies (e.g. FAANG) pay Boston SWE's pretty close[0] to what they pay SF SWE's.

If you use the "Robert Half" site[1] from the original article, it says Boston is +34% compared to US baseline (vs SF's +42%, NYC's +40.5%) which roughly lines up.

[0] Google: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi... vs https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

[1] https://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guide/specialization/techn...

Just at first look it seems the 50th percentile is roughly the same (slightly higher) on the Robert Half numbers.

But either way, not everyone can work for FAANG, so I think looking at the overall picture is fair.

I'm pretty confident even with 20 years of experience and I can't even get a FAANG interview (let alone pass it), I'm just not their type.

Robert Half only includes base salary. I can't cut and paste from their pdf, but see https://www.ficpa.org/Content/Files/Docs/Futurecpas/2019%20R... , page 11.

The levels.fyi median seems to be on total comp.

The Robert Half data seems more likely to be accurate.

> even with 20 years of experience and I can't even get a FAANG interview (let alone pass it)

If you want one, I've never had the impression that getting an interview was the hard part. I participated in Google Code Jam maybe 9 years ago, passed either 0 or 1 rounds (there's a "qualification round" which I definitely passed, and later a "round 1" which I have a feeling I probably didn't pass), and every so often they offer me an interview unprompted because of that.

Landing a FAANG interview is easy (I graduated from a low-tier state school and have only done startup & government jobs). Just don’t say anything crazy during the recruiter phone screen and they’ll let you in.

I did mediocre on the interviews, they were undecided on whether to hire me or not. They sent in a take home problem. I only spent a few hours on it, but easily could’ve spent weeks perfecting the solution.

Anyways, if I had 1) prepared for the interviews and 2) spent the entire weekend on the take home project, I probably would’ve passed.

And even though I didn’t get the offer, they still ping me about every six months to see if I want to apply again.

Just try applying and see what happens!

I have been told I have an excellent resume by Google recruiters and gotten a recommendation from a manager I worked with in the past there and still not gotten an interview.

With that said, I think it is because at the time the Boston office was mostly specialists and I'm a generalist. I'm also not from a top 10 school in a city filled with top-10 schools which didn't help, I'm sure.

But that was years ago. Maybe I'd have better luck these days.

I applied about 6 years ago to work at HQ. I went to community college and a bottom-tier state school and got an interview. Sounds like you just may not have been a match with the available jobs.

> Sounds like you just may not have been a match with the available jobs.

People say this a lot, but Google is pretty explicit that they decide whether to hire you first, and only then consider where they might put you.

Yes & no. Maybe as a generalist SWE this is true. But if you’re applying for a more specialized position you might encounter limits in terms of how many of that role is needed.

This topic certainly does bring out the shittiest commentary on this site, both in tone and content.

Congrats on making an income I could have only dreamed of as a college kid.

I've made very little money and FAANG-like money in my career. It has nothing to do with the difficulty of the work, the impact, or the hiring process. It's purely how badly the company wants "top" talent and the extent to which they want to / have to use money as a magnet.

The money is out there and $175K/yr is nowhere near the top of the market for your experience in the Boston area. That’s not to say you’re doing something wrong if you’re optimizing for the many things other than money that are worthwhile.

Not near the top, no, but according to the numbers it is median. I'm sure there are larger salaries out there but this article makes it sound like it is normal. Which in a roundabout way was my point.

Median is not a useful measure in these matters. Deciles, or even quintiles, would actually be useful.

Boston has a lot of robotics which seems to pay less for some reason (less profitable? Can't scale as cheaply?) and biotech which pays less. That could be one cause.

It's harder to transfer on robotics and biotech as ramping up a projects takes a long time and there's a lot of bespoke tooling. In my experience the jobs that pay the most are where engineers can switch and quickly be productive, as the main force actually driving salaries up are people quitting for a higher pay. The company hiring you for more than average needs you to be productive quickly.

Would you work on increasing ad click rate by 0.01% or on playing with cool tech toys and solving hard robotics problem? This is the same as SpaceX being able to pay under market - what you do matter and people are ready to take paycut to work on intersting problems.

it’s easier to offshore

why? i don’t know, it’s definitely not any easier work. but it’s reflected in the comp

In order to negotiate high compensation, you must be selling something in high demand and selling to someone with lots of cash (or cash equivalent like FAANG RSU). I suspect robotics companies’ cash flow does not look like the FAANG company’s.

You were happy a little bit ago and now you're not. You think you're doing something wrong.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Do your job.

I earn about 60% of yours with 0 YoE with no leetcode process in a state without income tax. I think you can easily do better.

How many CTOs that wrote two books are there around Boston?

Go to any little league practice in MetroWest, look over at the dads. Not the guy in the fleece vest - he works for a consulting firm or something. The two guys next to him, though? Both of them are ex CTOs. Only one of them wrote two books though.

[removed to protect identity of the author]

I mostly just like to be able to comment as a nobody and not in any of my official capacities. I'm not a troll account, nothing in my comments here would hurt my career, so really... go ahead. Not sure why anyone would want to, though. shrug

With that said I am in those search results (I checked) :-P if anyone wants to go through 63,000 people, be my guest. Everyone needs a hobby :)

There are tons of results so what's your point?

You are in the wrong place. The top salaries are exclusvively in the Bay Area and New York.

Lots of highly educated grads in Boston relative to jobs. (Compared to Denver)

>every time I see an article like this, I think I am doing something "very wrong"

there's a comment like this in every single thread like this. and the recommendation is always the same: grind LC for however long you need in order to be comfortable solving hard problems cleanly in 35-45 minutes and then collect your pay bump. the fact that the

1. data

2. complaint

3. recommendation

crop up with 100% perfect regularity means that it's the solution that simply isn't palatable to all of the people that express the complaint. to which i say: what exactly are you expecting to give among these three things?

It was data. The "I must be doing something wrong" was tongue in cheek. The specific data point was that I am not seeing any salaries anywhere near that. And Salary.com actually backs me up.

Just the fact "grind Leet Code" is a recommendation to someone who's most recent job title was CTO and has written two books may be a sign these interviews are broken.

But point taken, I'm sure if I studied specifically for interviews I could get those jobs. But the fact remains, a vast majority of people don't work for FAANG and even the "person unwilling to work for FAANG" example is higher salary than I have ever seen.

My point was actually that the article and ones like this seem well research but don't match the reality. For example, I recently interviewed at a fortune 100 company for a Director position and it was what this article says is "non-FAANG staff engineer" salary.

Fortune 100 companies don't necessarily pay well for software engineers. The bigger a company is, the more that resources concentrate to the top of the company. Besides, a non-tech company will consider their tech departments cost center, which means the pay will not be good. Tech companies pay much better, both in cash and in equity. Note a company does not have to be technical in your eyes, but needs to be technical in its management's perspective.

> My point was actually that the article and ones like this seem well research but don't match the reality

Isn't it more that they match the reality, but the reality only for a relatively small section of a bimodal (or more) distribution?

I have no data to back that up but I think you may be right. We always show salary as a normal distribution but maybe it is bimodal.

> We always show salary as a normal distribution but maybe it is bimodal.

Who are we? Which salaries?

Starting salaries for lawyers are one of the most famous examples of a bimodal distribution you can find. Salaries across the country generally are less bimodal than that. But salaries shouldn't be modeled as a normal distribution in any event. They skew high very easily, and they can never skew low.

Sites like Salary.com mostly.

https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/ discusses this somewhat (2015 numbers).

This seems to be my experience with these sort of topics.

> Just the fact "grind Leet Code" is a recommendation to someone who's most recent job title was CTO and has written two books may be a sign these interviews are broken.

Well, I'm sorry you have to go through the same ropes that we peasants do, you highness.

Exactly.

If I was hiring for a tech position and had to choose between an engineer with a few years of experience and strong analytical skills proven through coding & system design interviews, and a person who prides themselves on 10 years as a CTO at a company I've never heard of and two book authorships, I'd strongly lean towards the former.

I mean “tech position” is extremely vague here if you’re going to make them code because what you actually need is an engineer then yeah I would prefer the leetcoder too but if you’re going to build a team and put processes in place then I’d go for the CTO. I think it all depends on the position specifics. Generally speaking tho the CTO interview is VERY different than a typical engineer or senior engineer.

The leet code thing is overstated. I’ve rarely seen “hard” questions asked and when they are asked, often the maximally efficient solution is not required to do well in the interview.

I'm a bit confused about what you're saying. levels.fyi is accurate and there are plenty of remote jobs available. So the 300k+ salaries are certainly available from Boston. If you're not willing to prove that you can pass system design, coding, and leadership interviews then that's a different matter. FWIW I recently interviewed for staff at a bay area big tech company and there was no leetcode-style coding interview: system design, leadership, presenting previous work, and a simple non-algorithmic coding discussion.

The comment I'm replying to specifically mentions Leet Code (I am assuming that is what LC stood for) which is the only reason I brought it up. Your point is exactly my point, leet code is not relevant to the type of position I'd be looking for.

So assuming Levels.fyi is accurate (their numbers are $20k more than salary.com which is more accurate in my opinion): my point was that I am average, right in the middle. But this article is telling me (and by extension, since I am at the mean, 50% of software engineers) are extremely underpaid.

And maybe on a nation wide scale that includes non-Boston metros, I am. But for Boston... I'm not over or under. I'm right in the middle.

Basically based on my research I think this article is for a very niche group at the top 25% of pay ranges and is not accurate or relevant to 75%+ of software developers (numbers are ballpark).

> leet code is not relevant to the type of position I'd be looking for

Leetcode is relevant to getting the money though. It may be the case that inexperienced new hires with Leetcode proficiency make significantly more money than CTOs in the positions you're considering.

> Your point is exactly my point, leet code is not relevant to the type of position I'd be looking for.

But the jobs you'd get with leetcode would pay twice your current expected liquid compensation at least (assuming 0 stock growth) for your experience level. If you don't want those then fine, but then you can't complain about threads like this either.

Google has jobs in Boston, I bet there are many other tech companies paying similar as well. Pay at these varies by location, but not more than around 10% within USA, so it isn't like it is your locations fault, if you worked at these companies you'd be earning very close to the same you'd earn in silicon valley.

I'm not complaining, if you read my posts am saying the article is not representative of a majority of software engineers' experience. Using my career as an example. I even explicitly say that in the very comment you are replying to.

Not everyone works for FAANG.

Also, leet code is not relevant because the questions asked at that level are typically not algorithms. I passed the leet code stage in my career 10 years ago. Questions I get asked are typically around architecture, distributed systems, scaling, etc.

So what you are saying is someone who can answer the leet code questions easily (and has been able to for a decade) AND is an expert architect, should get paid less than someone who can only do leet code?

> leet code is not relevant because the questions asked at that level are typically not algorithms

Top companies still ask algorithms at these levels and fail people at these levels if they don't perform at least as well as juniors. If you are L6 at Google you are looking at liquid compensation around $500k a year, and they still require mostly leetcode questions. Of course you wont get considered for those positions without a ton of experience, but to get them you have to do your algorithm homework.

> should get paid less

Not should, will. I didn't make any claims to what things should look like, I am talking about what the market looks like now. Your ability to do algorithms is more important for your compensation than your ability as an architect or as a leader except for extreme cases where you start to get into higher management positions at big companies.

Edit: And if you are great at algorithms as you say, but doesn't leverage that skill to get higher pay then that has the same effect on your compensation as not knowing algorithms. It is simple. So your insistence on only looking for jobs that doesn't test algorithms is probably the reason your salary didn't balloon as you'd expect.

I've never gone through a FAANG interview but I have gone through some fortune 100s and never once been asked an algorithm questions. But I have no reason not to believe you about FAANG.

Saying questions asked at that level are not about algorithms was based on my non-FAANG experience. I shouldn't have been so absolute.

But with that said, to back up and restate where I was trying to get. What I was trying to say is that algorithms are table stakes, you should absolutely know them at a senior level but the actually questions you should be being asked should be more advanced than that.

Big difference between FAANG and other fortune companies is that FAANG expect their managers up to very senior level to be technical and be able to code even if they do not code day to day. Other Fortune 100 companies are happy to have non-technical managers to manage engineers with mixed results.

In all SV companies coding interviews are strictly required at interviews at M1/M2 level (up to 60-80 reports) and required at some companies at D1 level (150 reports). CTO at start up with 20-30 reports is M1 and will have to do coding 100% and failing coding interview is automatic no hire.

I am not the GP and I mean no disrespect to you. Your below phrasing seems presumptuous to me -

>>..someone who can answer the leet code questions easily (and has been able to for a decade)...

If you are a CTO chances are you have not been practicing LC. Even if you were able to do LC style questions a decade ago, without practice you are very likely to struggle with them. So don't assume just because you are CTO / architect you can do LC style questions. The questions have been becoming progressively harder each year. It is a sad reality, our industry does not decide compensation based on experience, knowledge and actual skill used on the job. If you want to maximize your compensation you have to do LC style questions. Even non FAANG companies ask LC style questions these days.

I actually agree with you. You have a point. I would probably practice Leet Code or similar before I went back into the interview world just to freshen up.

Though, with that said, I have been on the interviewer side a lot and need to know some of them well enough to know if the candidate knows their stuff. So I'm not completely rusty. And as CTO I would often read through what other companies are asking in interviews to make sure what I'm asking is in line.

My objection was the implication that not crunching Leet Code problems was the sole reason for the low compensation.

But you are right. I should not assume because at one point I knew all those algorithms that I can still explain them under pressure of an interview.

Maybe you didn't mean to use that word but it's not about "explaining" them: you have to be able to write the code to solve a given problem, on the spot. The problem might require a familiar technique such as breadth-first search but it will need to be adapted; the problem is likely to be slightly different from anything you've seen before.

It's true that at the staff interviews i just did, LC was not required but at the staff interviews i'm about to do they will be.

I meant explain. I see explain as a superset of implement. I have met lots of people who can implement but not explain. I didn't mean a simple explanation, I mean actually going into depth about things like algorithmic complexity, memory usage, etc.

As an interviewer (granted not at FAANG) I see no value in you just proving you did an algorithm on Leet Code. You could just be passing it through rote learning. I want to make sure you understand it. Otherwise I'm just wasting your time. But that's just my interview style, I know bigger companies may be different.

> I mean actually going into depth about things like algorithmic complexity, memory usage

OK, I agree that's definitely something the candidate should be able to do. I'm just trying to point out to anyone reading that it won't be sufficient to explain an algorithm. You have to actually write code to solve a given problem. That's not the same as regurgitating code you remember from leetcode, so please don't think that. You have to apply techniques that you've learned. It's not easy, and it's not intellectually shallow.

>Just the fact "grind Leet Code" is a recommendation to someone who's most recent job title was CTO and has written two books may be a sign these interviews are broken.

This comment and those further down (particularly doubting the data) suggest that you're experiencing strong cognitive dissonance. There are, I'm sure, hundreds of engineers on HN that can testify to exactly how much FAANG pays and in which metro and how little experience they had (not including LC) before they started.

The claim that hiring is broken has been constantly repeated since ~2010 and yet all of these companies somehow, despite hiring all of the wrong non-CTO people, are still alive and are in fact thriving. Like I said: given how consistently these mantras are chanted I'm just curious what you're expecting to have changed since the last time a post like this was made (you did say "every time I see..." so you've certainly seen many). It's a little like that episode of parks and rec with the reasonabilists where they keep predicting and amending the date of the end of the world.

Don't take this the wrong way, but, having helped several people through the interview loop at FAANG, my experience is that it is frequently the ones that see themselves as above grinding LC, that have the hardest time making it all the way through. And I don't mean wrt wrestling with how tricky some LC problems are (most everyone struggles with eg DP) but with marshalling the discipline and patience to actually do enough to do well during the interview.

It has been said before but my personal experience reflects this: it is of absolutely no surprise to absolutely anyone that those that can grind LC fare much better once on the inside and facing the sheer abyss of complexity of FAANG systems.

Read what I said again. My point was not that algorithms are irrelevant but they are table stakes. I have known all the algorithms on Leet Code for years.

My comment was not that I don't need to know algorithms it was that at a senior level the questions should be far more advanced than what leet code has.

I'm a little amazed that so many people in these comments assume I don't know algorithms.

>My comment was not that I don't need to know algorithms it was that at a senior level the questions should be far more advanced than what leet code has.

Seniors (>=L5) go through a "pirate" round that's system design/arch in addition to the "ninja" round. But you're a CTO so you should be able to ace that (after handily passing ninja since you know all the algorithms). So what exactly are you waiting for? I mean like do you want a referral? I'd be glad to make a quick 5k for referring you since you're so confident that you're good enough.

Mostly because I stayed at my last job way too long and when I was finally ready to leave I started my own company vs job hunting.

I probably will start applying if my new company doesn't make it.

Though a lot of me wonders why I am working for no pay at my own company when it sounds like I can make enough to retire being an individual contributor. I do believe in my idea though and want to see it through.

I have friends at just about every one of the FAANG companies so a refferal's not the issue.

Edit: When I say way too long... I mean 10+ years.

Edit 2 because I just realized how it could have sounded: I didn't start a company then give myself the CTO title. I was CTO at my previous job (the one I was at 10+ years).

It sounds like you should leave your company and go make a guaranteed monster salary.

If you are great at algorithms, have 20 years of experience with a great track record and live near a great tech university so plenty of tech companies, then you are doing something really wrong if you just earn $175k a year. Or you intentionally choose to have a low salary and prioritize other things, but if you did that then you'd know about it instead of asking this question.

You're being downvoted (not by me) but you have a point. I did two things wrong that I know of:

- I graduated college right before the great recession and that effected my career starting rates

- I stayed at a company I knew was under paying me for far too long (because I had a lot of stock options and I valued them too highly)

If either of those two things were different I'd probably be making a lot more. But my point was, regardless, I am making the mean salary for my region and that mean is not what is represented in this article.

I feel like those 2 points are just excuses(no offense but plenty of people would kill for a chance to even go to college)...if you were to go back would you hold off graduating college until after the recession? It sounds like you are extremely proficient in the technical space, are you good at negotiating and/or identifying where the value is? There is really no reason for someone to stay on a linear pay progression when moving from one job to the next, or even one title to the next.

A lot of research has been done on how the recession stunted career growth for anyone who graduated into it. Effectively anyone who graduated during it got passed over for the people who did graduated right after it. Leaving the people who graduated during it in underemployment and unable to move on because companies were more willing to hire people who were fresh graduates than people who were underemployed.

So yes, actually... in hind sight I should have gotten my Masters degree instead of entering the workforce.

Edit: That job I stayed at too long... only reason I took it in the first place was because the recession left me almost no choices. No one was hiring in Boston. The job boards were empty for someone right out of college.

Yes, I mean hindsight is 20/20 and no one could have really predicted the fallout from and during the great recession. It generally sounds like you are doing fairly well now, and that is a fantastic accomplishment. Realistically speaking there are few times in our lives where we have 'almost no choice'. The truth is that you didn't see a choice that was appealing to you, but that's just my 2c, and with inflation nowadays the 2c is worth even less hahaha.

>I am making the mean salary for my region and that mean is not what is represented in this article.

the article didn't say it was representing the mean salary though, probably the salary they are representing is the average - so there are a few high earning outliers pulling that number way up.

Or maybe, the more you are experienced and able to solve problems. Any problems. And produce quality software that performs. Then maybe the more unique that makes you. Which is not what FAANGs are looking for. They want a smart enough human, that is replaceable enough. And they will pay a lot for people that accept to play by the rules.

Hey just a theory. I am probably wrong.

> My point was not that algorithms are irrelevant but they are table stakes

You're wrong. A previous team built a simple data processing pipeline for a big customer. The throughput is single digit per second. The customer was furious as they would have wait for days to get their data in. The reason is the team was not aware that their graph building and traversal algorithms are O(n^2), and they didn't understand how to distribute their processing logic. My team came in, fixed the algorithms with merely dozens of lines, and improved the throughput by more than 200 times in a matter of days. If you build large backend for data intensive systems, which pretty much every tech company needs, you will need algorithms and data structures. Probabilistic data structures? Check. Manually optimizing popular machine learning algorithms? Check. Rolling out our own implementation of graphs, trees, vector similarity search algorithms and indices, parallelization algorithms, cache oblivious data structures? Check, check, and check. You don't have to use those techniques, but your value to your projects will increase exponentially if you push the boundary.

What part of my statement is wrong?

I said algorithms are table stakes (a poker term for something you need to know just to play at the table). To continue the analogy, sounds like whoever designed that system didn't have enough to buy into the table.

> If you build large backend for data intensive systems

I have. Many.

ouch, my bad. Somehow I read “algorithm is irrelevant”, and you’re right, I didn’t get your analogy.

200x single digit/second still seems lowish? I’m not sure if I’d call that a large backend for a data intensive system.

Depends on how extensive your processing is of course.

> This comment and those further down (particularly doubting the data) suggest that you're experiencing strong cognitive dissonance. There are, I'm sure, hundreds of engineers on HN that can testify to exactly how much FAANG pays and in which metro and how little experience they had (not including LC) before they started.

Another thing about these threads is that the hundreds of people making the big bucks are always the ones happy to confirm these numbers, and the (hundreds? thousands? who knows?) making small bucks just silently lurk and think to themselves, "I'm doing something wrong." So you get selection bias. Then one person actually has the gall to post "I'm making less, clearly doing something wrong" and he gets tons of responses like "You're underpaid, brah, go get another job!" It's just not a helpful response.

I say this as one of the lurkers who is tired of pointing out that many of us don't make these so-called average salaries, because the response is always the same: "Dude, it's data--can't argue with that. Leetcode and/or try a different company" (as if we haven't done that already).

At the risk of being trite, the response to FAANG employees being underpaid is also more or less 'you're underpaid, brah, go get another job!'. The bar for hiring and compensation is much higher, but management still wants to minimizing costs. This means systematically limiting internal salary growth, and hiring external rockstars at higher salaries to replace the internal rockstars that leave. Overall, it seems to be more effective to spend a couple months preparing/interviewing for the role you want than navigating the internal bureaucracy for an indefinite amount of time on the order of years.

>I'd love to hear a practical, actionable response to "I'm a senior FAANG who makes 75% of the "average" on levels.fyi. All other job offers I've seen are ± 2% of that. What next?"

I have literally zero idea what are you're trying to express. There's no selection bias if everyone is FAANG is very well payed and everyone outside is not.

But if you really want to see something vaguely like that then go on blind and look for posts like "I'm making 650 as an E6 where should I go from here", the idea of which I'm sure just further confounds you but I'm sorry the data is very accurate (eg inside FB/Google/AMZN there's a group that openly discusses return offers for interns and it's always within a few percent of what is on the public side).

Yea, I removed the example scenario because it's kind of pointless, in order to zero in on bias.

I don't see how there couldn't be sampling bias. Salary is a sensitive topic, and people who are making on the high range (within FAANG or outside of it) are going to be more likely to want to post about it and answer surveys about it than people in the low range. HN and Blind are obviously not random sampling. levels.fyi claims to use self-reported offer letters AND reach out directly to compensation folks at companies, which is better. But are these individual companies sharing unbiased data?

When one encounters average numbers that are a little higher than their reality, it's disappointing but believable. When one encounters average numbers that just look just crazy, one begins to ask "am I really this much of an outlier or should I suspect methodology/bias?"

> The claim that hiring is broken has been constantly repeated since ~2010 and yet all of these companies somehow, despite hiring all of the wrong non-CTO people, are still alive and are in fact thriving.

There is little correlation between the quality of your tech stack and profitability.

You could say that means hiring isn’t broken, but only from the perspective of the company.

> I'm just curious what you're expecting to have changed since the last time a post like this was made (you did say "every time I see..." so you've certainly seen many).

Hire me inflated ego without any tests, of course. God forbids I have to do anything to get a job that will put me in a bracket of earning more than 99.99% people in this world.

> grind LC for however long you need in order to be comfortable solving hard problems cleanly in 35-45 minutes

Which is more difficult to do for people who have a lot of non-work commitments, like say raising a family. So this method of hiring introduces some biases. Not that I have a solution.

•Boston area •7 yoe •Staff level •Full remote •Co is SF-based •$250 total comp

I expect a promotion and ~20% increase next cycle. Interview was no leet code (I’m terrible at it!) - my strategy was to interview at public companies with levels on levels.fyi but not FAANG

7 yoe at FAANG is double that and they're all permanent remote now (except Apple). Diminishing returns n all regarding TC but you didn't hack the system or anything with that strategy.

By no means did I imply I did. I offered an alternative to “grind lc” to somebody who is underpaid. I did not say this was how to get the maximum TC

But how is an alternative? It's half the money. Reminds of a Russian joke: daughter asks mom for milk. Mom says sure there's a pale of water underneath the bed

The person you’re replying to has nearly 3x the yoe and significantly lower TC, pretty simple. And like you say, there are always people in these threads saying “good TC doesn’t exist where I am.” Finally, you’re assuming everyone wants to work for FAANG.

I was interviewing at Amazon and they're certainly not permanent remote going forward.

I've heard the same about Google and Netflix

I think they're permanently WFH flexible but that's very different from remote (I don't have to move to take a job that's remote)

What's "grind LC"?

Do practice exercises on LeetCode.

You should have negotiated for equity. That's where all the real money is. RSUs/ISOs/NSOs whatever. If you were CTO of a revenue generating project and didn't get a % of the business, that is what you did wrong.