Sometimes I wonder if the people saying this stuff really even work there. It's not impossible, but the kind of person who would be promoted that fast wouldn't be working two crappy jobs to begin with.

Not to mention even if you were promoted you wouldn't go from $300K to $500K. You think getting promoted at FAANG gives you an over 50% increase in total comp as the norm? (edit: If you've seen this, it's almost due to the fact that FAANG stock increased drastically during COVID. If you look at 2012-2017 data for promotions a 50% increase is almost unheard of).

You should join one if you're not already there and read about how people are complaining about less than 6.7% (last inflation report) raises during company meetings and less than 10% even when promoted.

Finally, background checks work on what you give them, they're not exhaustive (unless you're trying to work for the government). So many inaccuracies in this post I wonder if it's satire. If so, I apologize.

lol

If you only count take home pay in cash, it's nowhere near $500k! Closer to 200k for a senior engineer imho. Vesting of shares takes a few years, so the extra $200k that you "get" is because 2 years ago, you were paid $150k in equity, and it grew to $200k (or more).

For context: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

In my experience, people often stumble into these situations by simply not quitting their old job when they get a new job.

The idea is to continue to collect paychecks from the old job until they lay you off with severance.

This usually catches up with people later on when someone puts two and two together or hears from a friend of a friend that the person is working at a certain company. Imagine being recruited to a new company and seeing your former company coworker in Slack and he's been there for months. Word gets around.

This absolutely destroys reference checks. Another reason to always do reference checks and always confirm someone's end dates with the other company.

It's like $30-50K base each level (~18-25%), but the stock grants can make a huge difference. As a junior engineer you might make ~$35K/year in stock grants; at staff it's like $200K+; and at principal it's $600K+. In total comp you can easily go from ~$350K/year at senior to $500K at staff to $750K at senior staff to $1M at principal, which is close to 50% each time.

Note that the biggest benefit is that getting promoted opens you up to having more negotiating leverage. If the company doesn't want to keep you or if they're sure they'll keep you anyway, then sure, you'll be getting < 10% raises. Same if you came in at a very high baseline because of savvy negotiating or lots of competing offers. But if you're managing a critical team with a sustained record of high performance and then you get an offer elsewhere, that's what opens you up to those $M+ stock counteroffers. Junior engineers are not going to get that regardless of performance, because they just aren't that important to the business.

I'm saying that I know a lot of people who've been promoted.

1. Getting promoted in 2 years, especially once you're midlevel is very rare.

2. People at the lowest level (E3/L3/59 etc etc) are not receiving a 50% increase in total comp by being promoted usually.

People are getting confused because FAAANG stock has increased so much, and many bullish employees have not sold their stock and so their compensation (including appreciation) went up 50% during COVID. It's a trend that will likely not continue.

Edit: It's too bad "decency bias" isn't actually a thing. I wish it was.

So many compensation discussions are hard to get into because of the reliance on adding (sold or unsold) stock as part of total compensation. It's very reasonable for a junior engineer to get a $125-$150k base salary offer these days, but whether their total comp after 1 year pushes that to $300k, let alone if they can get a promotion that adds significantly more stock to push total to $500k the next (noting their first stock is still vesting and contributing), depends so much on the particulars of the company's stock price set by the market and stock grant plans that unless you name names and package specifics people won't believe you. Like it's possible as you say that you get promoted but with no new stock and a paltry raise, yet nevertheless your total comp over the next year goes up to $500k, this can be entirely due to the stock raising. Not very useful in a discussion trying to get at actual salary trajectories that don't depend on market luck.

The job I quit last year (Salesforce, fortune 137) I reached the "Lead" position (roughly equivalent to L5/senior at a place like google, but "Staff" at other places, titles are dumb) but I only ever had two stock grants in the years I was there: one at the beginning, one after reaching "Lead", and the second one was almost insultingly tiny (much smaller than the initial one) and I wasn't phased at all to give up ~70% of it in leaving. So for all my years there my comp was basically dominated by the base salary + the annual % bonus nearly everyone always gets and peaked at a "mere" $200k, stock didn't impact it much. A random mid-stage startup in Utah of all places trying to recruit me was throwing out $200k base as comparison. This sort of experience, especially the lack of significant stock refreshes ever, is pretty common, but there are companies (like Facebook) that give significant annual refreshes not even tied to promotions and can make stories like the GP's not too crazy.

A final factor in making these discussions difficult is that there are a lot of senior+ folks who've stayed with a place for 4+ years and are essentially getting shafted in terms of their earning potential and they don't want to admit that they need to change jobs (or even just leave and come back later) to get a lot more than they currently do, which leads them to dismiss very real likelihoods of newly hired junior or "standard" roles (what do we even call just a plain "software engineer" when so many are either junior or senior) getting as much as they do after stocks are added in.

I was an SMTS at Salesforce (also not HQ) back in the day on $150k~ total comp, which people in this thread regard as junior pay; and that was on my initial stock grant, never got to find out what my refresher would have been.

HireRight and Sterling both only verified what I sent.

In another comment, you’ve mentioned that you don’t care about levels.fyi, which is basically saying you don’t care about accurate data. levels.fyi actually underestimates total comp, because they use base + (grant / vesting period) to calculate comp. For high growth tech companies, stock usually grows so comp gets higher naturally over time.

also, I don't believe in using appreciation of stock as part of comp. were you paid less if you held on to vested RSUs and the stock dropped? no. you just decided not to sell and faced the consequences.

same way I wouldn't count someone taking their entire salary and dumping it into options successfully as "apprecation"

This friend that I'm giving an example of is real, and I feel like he has the potential to get into FANGMULA with my mentorship and then get promoted within that time frame. It's definitely all real and the post was kind of my own internal speech to get him to come over.

Go look at https://levels.fyi , and look at the jumps in comp between bands. Yes some companies may pay +/- %10 more, but it is what it is. Also the market has gone up, yet again, so even levels is a bit behind.

People thinking what I'm saying is BS is just a bunch of cope. You don't have to be a super genius with the grit of god to get into these companies.

Perhaps, for example, an E3 at Meta can go to E4 in 2 years, but an E3 isn't making 300K total comp at Meta in California to begin with, nor would they go to 500K after promotion.

If you're a hiring manager then I don't need to explain to you that a 50% increase even with the highest ratings isn't some normal thing that happens.

Maybe you've seen it happen, I believe you. My point is that it's not the norm and you should stop saying it like it is.

Google L4 > L5 (270 -> 360)

Meta E4 > E5 (275 -> 390)

Microsoft SDE II -> Principal SDE (182 -> 308K; I intentionally skipped a level just to show the ridiculousness).

Amazon SDE II -> SDE III (240K -> 330K)

Apple ICT3 -> ITC4 (222K -> 333K)

And these are midlevel to senior and these are from the site you linked. If you do junior to midlevel your numbers, on average, make even less sense.

I get that this is HN and a very SF-centric board, but sometimes users here are so incredibly out of touch with the real world, it's not even funny anymore. I'm not attacking you directly, but it's something you see here all the time ("why not just join google and become a principal engineer")

>>Well I do know someone who pulls that as a junior but he also has a PhD in inverse kinematics simulation and that job was really needed.

This is the problem with using words like nobody, always, etc. Someone will usually (see what I did there?) come along with one single piece of anecdata and think the original statement is invalid.

0 - https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook&track=Softwa...

Explore this site, it'll open up a whole new world of SDE pay at unicorns / startups / FANGMULA. I'd look at the entry level positions for maybe ... Dropbox or something, or Stripe. Those two off the top of my head get pretty close to 300k for "junior" engineer - SWE I.

The rest tier-1, tier-2 are on avg below 200k. Some get closer to 200k but majority are not. Facebook would be the "gold standard" for now.

They make 200k base but have 0.5M bonuses (or more depending on the HF perf).

That FB eng that got return offer for 300k? Most likely just the only one. Probably not because of elite but because of niche skill (SME/PhD in a specific field that happened to be relevant). Probably skipped I3 to I4. Majority (95%) of FB I3 won't get close to 300k.

Fully vested and liquid and have taken the tax hit one often gets in IPO situations (if applicable).

However, it's not that difficult to spot if you're paying attention. Two job workers tend to:

1. Have elaborate excuses for why they can't update their LinkedIn profile to show the new job. Obviously they can't tip the old company off that they have a new job.

2. Have mysteriously complicated and ever-changing schedule conflicts throughout the day. We support (and encourage) flexible work, but when someone is disappearing throughout the day and can't reliably jump on a phone call (despite supposedly being online and active) without ample notice, they're probably doing something else.

3. Are extreme people-pleasers in superficial ways (want to keep up appearances) but only actually deliver good work when it's high profile and they know they're in the spotlight.

4. Are loathed by their teammates after a while, because everyone they work with slowly catches on that the person is absent-mindedly doing the bare minimum to not get fired. Inevitably, the teammates have to pick up the slack and do extra work to compensate. Few people are better positioned to recognize this than the people who are in the trenches with the person all day.

5. Have a different jobs on their resume with start and end dates that don't match what you confirm with the company. That's because they need to massage the start/end dates to appear as though they weren't overlapping the two jobs.

6. Are religious about "If I get my work done, why does it matter when I work?" Sounds great, but then they play every game in the book to shrink "their work" to be as small as possible and move the "done" part as far in the future as possible. End result is that team mates suffer (see #4).

Why is this being stated as if a person is required to update LinkedIn with their current employer? What employer is pressuring new hires for an explanation on why they haven’t publicly claimed their new relationship status?

I don’t often update LI, but your phrasing of someone having “elaborate excuses” means there’s pressure from an employer (or coworkers?) for an LI update before anyone could even receive such “elaborate excuses” … and that’s just plain weird.

I honestly don't care for in-person employees, but it's something I ask remote employees to do for this exact reason.

If a remote employee makes vague excuses for why they must keep their old employer on their LinkedIn, it's worth investigating further.

Fortunately it's usually easy to call up the old company and confirm the person's start and end dates. Companies love to learn that one of their employees has started a new job but hasn't actually quit yet.

It sounds like you're just nosy, then. The content of my LinkedIn profile is no more your business than the content of my Tinder profile, and just as relevant to my work.

What? LinkedIn profiles are literally about your work.

It's not about being nosy. It's about noticing inconsistencies. If someone is going through the trouble of maintaining a LinkedIn profile but they're also listing a different company as their current employer, it's time to start investigating.

LinkedIn isn't the final say, obviously. However, it can act as a canary in the coalmine for further investigation.

Empathetic managers trust their employees when they say a task is difficult and will take longer than expected.

Double job workers (and slackers in general) thrive on taking advantage of this empathy by lying and manipulating their way into perceptions that they are doing more work than they really are. Not fair to the manager, company, or team mates.

It's basic due diligence of any manager to check these things.

Tell me honestly for a second: if you weren't happy with someone's work, would anything on (or not on) their LinkedIn profile make any difference to that situation whatsoever?

The LinkedIn point was about looking for clues that you might need to investigate further. I think you're trying to twist my statement into something else entirely.

"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

And some of these cases have been egregious:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29668822

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29668427

Those kinds of comment are bannable offences on HN. I don't want to ban you, but this has been a problem many times before, and we need it to stop. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future?

I ask contractors if they’re vaccinated before entering my home and they can refuse the job if it bothers them.

LinkedIn has proven a fucking pain indeed, and that is why I am not active on it anymore.

Yep. There's another person in this thread trying to argue it away, but I've found LinkedIn to be a huge canary in the coalmine in these situations.

Someone who insists on maintaining an active LinkedIn profile but also isn't updating it with a new job isn't a red flag by itself (people just forget, obviously). It is, however, another piece of the puzzle.

If someone updates their LinkedIn and broadcasts their new job to all of their peers then I'm much less concerned.

But if someone has clearly gone through the trouble of setting up a LinkedIn, listing all of their jobs and details on it, and collecting a lot of connections, but for some reason they must continue listing their previous employer as their current employer, it's worth further investigation.

The "why" is in the linked article: It's in the playbook of people trying to manipulate you into letting them work half as much as their coworkers (thereby screwing over coworkers, who are forced to pick up the slack).

If you care about your team, you don't sit idle while one of the employees is slacking off, putting in half the effort as their peers, or manipulating their way into doing less than others.

There we go! "Slacking off" is not relevant. What's relevant is that you, as my manager at a company I already work for, are happy with my work, or not. It shouldn't matter whether it takes 100%, 80%, 50%, or 20% of my capacity to make you happy. This would be completely non-controversial in the vast majority of jobs.

Truth is, double job workers are usually caught because they're underperforming. But smart managers give employees the benefit of the doubt and don't go firing people at first signs of underperformance. If someone has a legitimate reason for falling behind for a while (maybe overleveled during hiring, maybe struggling with real life issues, etc.) then we work with them. If they have a manipulative/deceptive reason (working two jobs, avoiding work) then it's better off that we replace them with someone who cares.

If you think that a job is a simple matter of "do fixed pile of work every week", that's not how 95% of software jobs work. We rely on a 2-way communication with employees to establish what's reasonable, and if someone is manipulating us into lowering expectations (literally the title of this article) then they must go and be replaced with someone who cares.

If, as an employee, your philosophy is to grift what you can, expect companies to do the same. And good employers actually don't.

Well said.

If the entire relationship is built on lies and deception, it begins to show over time. Employees who build their relationship based on manipulating their employer (setting low expectations, as the article suggests) aren't the same employees helping their teammates, working together to get things done, and shipping good work. They're the ones that need constant manager attention and slowly siphon the energy out of their peers and managers. Removing them from the team is a win for everyone.

But pretending that working two full-time salaried jobs are OK because no one has actually caught you? Wow.

And you're basically providing a template for manager who don't believe in more flexible working arrangements to deny them. I'd love for people for that to be kicked hard to the curb.

And, yes, most companies are. That's been my experience, and that's how they have to be if they want to compete in the market.

And you've still misunderstand the 2-way feedback loop about effort estimation.

You have this misconception that a job is an isolated 1:1 relationship with an employer where units of work are passed in isolation back and forth. In the real world, something like this does huge damage to the team by forcing everyone else to compensate for the deliberate underperformance.

I didn't say a job. I said the job I'm hiring for.

If you're going to come in and deliberately do as little work as possible to extract as much as possible from the team, why should I give the job to you instead of someone who is actually honest and cares?

You're not entitled to any job you want, obviously. I usually have 10-100 applicants who would honestly do the job and not sandbag their work onto peers. Obviously we would all rather have the honest employees working on the team.

In what moral system do you deserve the job more than literally any other honest employee if you're dead set on doing less than them and lying your way through the job?

If nothing else, having two jobs becomes a conflict of interest with a huge monetary incentive to continue lying. There's also the matter of trade secrets as people often come from related companies.

You've already implied you'd do whatever you could get away with:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29668597

Oh, and let's not pretend companies won't do "whatever they can get away with," either. Read the news if you need examples.

Employees get W2s, contractors get 1099s.

And, no, I've never signed anything stating I'd work "40 hours" for a tech company. I edited this into a previous comment, but this is literally the applicable phrase from my last offer letter:

> As an exempt salaried employee, you will be expected to work the hours, including evenings and weekends, required to perform your job duties.

It goes both way, you see. I accomplish my duties in less than 40 hours, I get to be done. If my manager is happy with my work, quite frankly, why does it matter how long it takes?

BTW, it does appear that, despite you being technically an employee, you're doing piecework like a contractor would. Piecework work is, indeed, paid for the piece, not the hours. If that is the agreement with your employer, then there is nothing dishonorable about it, and I withdraw my criticism.

I don't know if you want to call it "piecework" per se or not, but, every tech job I've ever had has required me to make an estimate of what I think I can accomplish during a given period (generally a 2 week sprint). As long as there's no push back on whether that's sufficient or not from my manager, if I accomplish those things, it doesn't matter how long it takes. I can take 50 hours, or I can take 20, and I still get paid the same. I don't get paid additional money if I finish my original commitment in 20 hours, then take on more work, which, as you may understand, doesn't give me a great incentive to do so.

Salaried jobs I've had all expected me to work 40 hrs. I'd moonlight on my own business, but was always careful to get a signed agreement in advance from my employer allowing me to do so. Some people moonlight and then live in terror of their employer finding out and claiming ownership over the moonlight business, but getting the agreement in advance forestalls that problem.

Why is it their coworkers responsibility to make sure enough total labor is present? According to you, anyone not giving 100% is slacking and doing something wrong, so I assume their coworkers are already giving 100%. Why should they have to work harder than 100% because management is bad at getting workers?

I'd be curious to see stats on this. My experience at large corporations (multiple of FAANG) has been the opposite. For instance, at Google my L4-5 salary bump was 10-15%, my bonus target percentage is identical, and to be honest the stock grants from L4 Strongly Exceeds were better than L5 Consistently Meets Expectations. There's theoretically a higher ceiling over the long term (and the L6 bump seems to be better) but it was nowhere near 50% for me.

What are you supposed to do when you have a conflict, if you're keeping things secret? "that time doesn't work for me" "uh, why? I just hired you. You have another meeting?"

Or the even bigger architecture convos involving several team leads and all their subordinates chilling in the Zoom. Have had too many fellow devs joke about how half our value is as a visual entourage.

Could someone be in two visual entourages at once? Probably.

You are a very old hat at two years everywhere I have worked.

I am in Canada, and we don’t really get equity like Americans do, and even if we do, not a lot of it so many people have 1 year stints everywhere.

This is not true in most of the world I believe.

Do companies actually teach anyone, ever?

"If they joined as a jr engineer at a FANGMULA or equivalent, they would be making $300k,"

This assumes they could spend the time to pass the interview and then deal with the performance expectations. Losers like me could probably work two $80k jobs if they are simple enough. But I'll never get into FAANG, nor would they pay me $300k for a remote role.

"They think that promos (like this article), are at most only %10, while promos are more like a x1.5 to x2 of your income."

Where the hell do you work!? My company gives a 7% raise with a promotion. I want one of these $300k jobs with a 2x promotion. Even the $150k job would be a 50% raise for me. I have been looking for a while and see almost nothing over $120k.

I’m not interested in working two jobs, but can you provide some sort of reference around this?

My last two background checks included no employment info and I was fairly certain private sector jobs have no reporting outside the IRS, hence ridiculous interviews.

My employers have so far been very happy with my work, although I am aware I could have performed much better and have done very stupid mistakes because I was moving too fast.

"FANGMULA" is a dumb acronym that a cringey YouTuber made up because he couldn't get into FAANG, so he had to make up a new acronym that would include the company he did get into.

Comment on the note:

  FANGMULA is from blind
  FANGULTAD is from youtube

hah. yes you can. No one cares if you have multiple concurrent jobs on a resume. And no one cares about what the background check is going to show.

This is all easily explained away.

Most people are never good enough to break into FANGMULA.

---

[0]: http://recursion.org/2012/1/10/interviewing-anti-loop

Didn't get in. Total cost to him was about 30K between courses and foregone income.

This is false on average, even at FAANG, getting promoted to the next level doesn't boost your TC that much, the company assumes that the promotion on itself is good enough prize. You usually get a better deal applying to the next level at another FAANG.

> 1. They tend to work double jobs at frankly lo..... This is also false, plenty of people that work for small companies, even being a 10X , "rockstar" , ... developer, would never get "promoted" to the next level, because , there is no next level, and the C-level positions are reserved for friends and family, and in some occasion to outside experienced executives.

30 years ago, climbing the corporate ladder was "the way" to get ahead, nowadays, people with small mildly successful SAAS businesses, consultant companies, podcasters, indie hackers etc... make way more than any Director at FAANG.

This is a very "boomer" take in general, and is also pretty cringe.

Dir at FAANG makes $1-2M with probably less stress that comes from running-your-own-business.

How many podcasters at the level of $1-2M that works less than Dir at FAANG?

I rarely seen IndieHackers at that level (a select few who struck gold, not as "common" as Dir at FAANG).

Depends on how hard you run your own business. You can't go to $1M without driving hard. The ones that got lucky (struct on once-in-a-lifetime idea) typically don't stay up at $1M that long if they continue to run it like a side-hustle doing 20 hours per week.

> Directors at FAANG have wayyyy more pressure

That pressure is pushed down to the army of EMs and SWEs (-_-"). FAANG is a body shop because they have their hiring pipeline with potential candidates; they can afford to burn bodies (hi Netflix and Amazon :D :D).

> because you can always spin another SaaS

Not to $1M level that easily within 1-2 years...

> but is very hard to get another Director position at another company once you get fired from one

I don't know... I rarely seen Dir got fired and tailspin in the career. Can always go as Senior EM and climb up again.

> Also, your kids/family can inherit your business, but not your job.

This is the only thing that might be a WIN for entrepreneurship but now you have 2 worries: 1 running the company, 2 finding your successors.

That's bull, man, sorry. Most of the devs out there, I'd wager at least 95%, don't go through background checks ever, as a start.

Second, I work as a dev for 20 years now and I have never known anyone who got promoted by more than 20%. I have only known one guy through another guy who got promoted with 35% once and that was actually a strategy to make him accept more responsibility. He burned out and quit in less than 6 months after. Anecdotal evidence, sure, but then again, what you cite seems statistically insignificant to me so I don't know if I even believe it because I've not seen it and I haven't even heard of it.

Thirdly, "lower tier companies", really? Sure, use that connotation if you like it -- but I've been all over the spectrum and different combinations of work/life balance vs. income are literally endless. There are companies paying top dollar but there's always some gotcha, and more often than not that gotcha is not worth the extra money. I'll concede here that I have been unlucky -- or not that skilled to begin with, why not, I don't claim I am the greatest -- but it's what I've (not) seen.

2. Because of double working, they are pretty much guaranteed to not get promoted beyond the standard terminal level.

Working your arse off in one primary job is seldom if ever rewarded well. I love your positive bubble but you seriously have to think about for how many people out there it applies to.

3. They think that promos (like this article), are at most only %10, while promos are more like a x1.5 to x2 of your income.

Nope, doesn't happen almost ever. Maybe in startups but let's be honest -- will you be in this startup 5 years from now? Also you can't eternally job-hop to more and more money.

4. You cannot work at proper startups and learn a ton, because the workload would be way too high for this strategy.

At least that's true, I'll give you that.

---

I realize that I've been at shitty employers most of my career (took me a while to get a good baseline data from other people and understand my position) but still, most devs out there are at shitty employers. What you're talking about no more than 5% of the total programming workforce, I'd wager it's more like 0.5% even.