> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job

Haha, at what company? I've met few people who've been able to work at a company long enough (and for the company to be successful enough) to double their salary. Apparently, it's much faster to just get two lower paying, easy jobs.

I don't know what world you live in, but I have yet to see a company which let's anyone reach 2x of their starting salary in less than a decade.

Might be because I'm european, but the idea sounds crazy to me.

I've doubled my compensation every time I switched jobs, plus doubled once through internal promotions, and another 50% increase through stock appreciation since most recent rehire. It's been about 5 doublings over a 20-year career. Most recent employer is in my username, and income history is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10760918

(Plus $630K in 2020 and about $900K in 2021.)

God I wish I could make anywhere close to that. I'm 3 years in and my highest TC offer was about $300k at Square. I ended up taking slightly less for a more interesting startup but even that's still just $275k.

Life at the bottom rung is not pretty in the slightest!

I don’t know if this is satirical or not but 275k for 3yoe is near the top of that band (assuming the startup equity is liquid). I think the parent has very generous stock appreciation going on, as $GOOG roughly tripled in the past 3 years

It's not liquid, and probably won't be.

I used to be at Amazon and my TC was only $200k.

I believe you. But, the point isn't "is there someone out there who can do it?" The point is "is this typical, and can I do it." And, the answer to the latter is clearly "no."

Depends when in your career, and what the company is doing. I went from my first starting salary of $72k at age 23 (in 2003) as engineer #2 to $150k as chief architect about 5 years later. After another 5 years we sold the company, and I was making better than $300k salary plus bonus in 2013. So that’s two doublings in 10 years. But it’s also probably the exception that proves the rule.

I’ve more than doubled my salary every 4 years in Silicon Valley. I’m 11 years in and 16x my starting salary my first year out of college. Yes this includes equity comp, but this is not dominated by appreciation. My current employer stock performance hasn’t been great or even mediocre. But my career growth has ensured that doesn’t matter.

2^(11/4) = 6.7x you might want to check the math there :)

I guess you could have meant by "more than doubled" as 2.75x, that would work out. Pretty impressive.

Silicon Valley is insane, but that's nothing new, when I look at the money offered elsewhere, I really regret not trying harder to move there in my 20s.

At the same company though?

Within a single company? If so, thats pretty neat.

Fellow European here. Indeed possible but unlikely.

Started working for 43k (Euro) directly out of university. Joined SV startup 2y later with 50% higher salary (60k). Now four four years and one promotion in, almost doubled my salary at 110k.

This is also before considering equity.

Every salary increase I had so far has been 2x. Once I hit a ceiling, I got 2 gigs in paralel, so I 2xed again, I guess. Even so, I did not reach SV income level. I cash in about 100k a year. I am comfortable though.

I'm sure it's harder to get when you're more senior, but I started working as a graduate in London for £30k 3 years ago and am now on £60k. I think this is pretty typical in London.

Okay if you start THAT low I can see it, but most start at 40-60 here, getting up to 80-120 is used to be at least a decade away.

I know for a fact that at Meta (Facebook), even if you literally are a genius and were promoted twice in 2 years you wouldn't be doubling your total comp.

I’ve seen people promoted once in FANG including Meta more than double their salary.

That almost never happens, at least at Google, unless you are running a very important project and you also bring offers from another FAANG. Otherwise, good luck.

People aren't really looking for "I've seen it" here. They're looking for "this is typical, and you can do it."

When was this? It also isn't the norm. I've also heard of people double their TC during COVID, but it was mainly due to the stock increase. It's not sustainable, nor is it the norm.

Within the last 4 years for sure, and before that as well. Not the norm, but for high performing engineers it’s definitely possibly without equity appreciation. But I do think it speaks to the parents comment — if you put in the extra work the payoffs at the right company definitely have higher ROI than two jobs where you’re lying / hiding / stressing about being mediocre. Just my two cents.

Note, it’s not just the initial promotion. It’s the wider compensation band it opens up.

which company? I've had friends get promoted at then Facebook and Amazon and not receive a 50% increase with EE/S let alone double. I doubt it happens very often even for top people unless they were underpaid.

I edited my comment but will reply here to for clarity.

It’s not the initial promo that necessarily gives you doubling. It’s the wider compensation bands the promotion opens up. Sustained performance can have high upside in a 2-4 year time horizon for high performers.

"If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job."

Between the two extremes (mediocre and rockstar/10x), there are many 'competent' people who can't get promoted to their 2x salary jobs. And these people are competent in a particular niche, not like those who aced programming olympiads, compiler gurus, kernel hackers, etc.

You don’t get 2x your salary quickly via promotion for doing the same job unless you are starting at the very bottom.

In Silicon Valley this is simply not true.

It simply is until you cite statistics.

Sorry for the apparent snark, but, I'm saying I don't believe you, and "nuh uh," "ya huh" isn't where I'd like to go with this.

> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.

I don't know the numbers but in my limited experience, in western Europe, this is just not possible (or very very rare among C level people if any, not mere engineers). A good senior salary (gross) is like 80K Euro/year. As a senior engineer working in Europe, you cannot expect reach 100K Euro easily. Now, thinking that you can go from 80K to 160K just by being an engineer that is "competent enough" is just plain naive. Not even the CTOs are making that around here.

Where are these mythical promos with 2x salary? I have never met someone who got one. Heck, where are the companies that even keep up with market rate for devs? Every company has short tenures now.

> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.

I've found the opposite is true. If you are extremely competent at your job your manager is motivated to keep you in place because that's what you're good at. It's easier to promote lower-accomplishing people-pleasers because it won't affect _their_ software throughput as much (higher level engineers write less code).

> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.

One of the benefits of this is that you don't have to be competent enough to sustain two jobs. There are people who do this and just swap their jobs every year or less. Another side benefit of that is that people have lower expectations for the new hire, and if you're perpetually a new hire...

> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.

Nope

> they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job

[Citation Needed]

> they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary

That's only the case if they were underpaid to begin with. It will plateau very quickly.