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.
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