When a recruiter reached out to me earlier this year, I knew two things: I would never work for Facebook, and I wanted to know how much they would pay. When the recruiter gave me the salary range, it made me seriously question the first thing. It was more than double my already-plentiful income as a senior dev.

I took a day to think about it and then went with my original plan, but that's the answer about why people would work for them. I could have retired years earlier! Even two years working for them would have put quite a lot into my retirement fund.

I told myself I wouldn't make it through the interview process, just to make myself feel better about giving up that cheddar.

> When the recruiter gave me the salary range, it made me seriously question the first thing. It was more than double my already-plentiful income as a senior dev.

> I took a day to think about it...

Give us numbers!

That is useful for current salaries, but new hires are likely to start much higher than the median because labor supply is constrained.

I'm not very smart and have 3 years of experience, but I got an offer for $265k recurring/$315k first year a few months ago for a full-remote position. I'm fairly confident I could have negotiated it up, but I ended up going with a pre-IPO company (because I didn't want to deal with their bootcamp process).

These are surreal numbers. I need to quit teaching.

What was the technology stack?

Anything? Remote boot camp is mostly Menlo Park teams is what I heard.

those #s just the cash portion or total comp (rsu's included)?

It’s all liquid. Base was around 165 with a target bonus percentage.

just filter the data then: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...

I like to use the deathbed test for decisions like this. On my deathbed, whenever that day comes, will I be happy with the decision I'm about to make?

It sounds like you will be happy with this decision.

I'd say this is a very poor approach to deciding something because (in my somewhat uninformed opinion) it's very unlikely you'll have the same view of the world and what's important to you on your deathbed, though that obviously depends on what happens between now and then.

See https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1229294

Yep, I had a lot of 'I would never' kind of deathbed decisions which i would be happy with 10-20-30 years later.

I rather look at current longterm goals: these might(do) change over time but that is the closest to deathbed goals as I can get.

It’s a huge misconception that Meta is outpaying everyone.

If you’re willing to work in the Bay there are at least ten companies that will consistently beat them. Check levels.fyi

For remote, I’m not sure, maybe Meta is best but unclear exactly what their remote situation is. I’ve read you’re second class citizen to MPK.

Meta obviously pays super well but that’s reflective of SV paying well, they don’t stand out. They are just a better known brand. In fact despite their “toxic” brand I think they still have quite a strong overall engineering brand and many engineers interview there precisely because it “looks good on the resume.” This is especially true for the international crowd. Often times people only interview at famous companies and don’t realize the better options.

Somehow FAANG has gotten reputation for being the king of compensation when none of those companies stand out, strong consumer brands and huge market caps putting them on finance radars is why they get talked about. FAANG as a term was coined by a stock analyst.

Of course any individual case can vary a ton and Meta has deep pockets if they desperately want you, I’m just talking about standard IC senior E5 and staff E6 engineers.

I’m not saying anyone has to move to the Bay or optimize their life for money, I’m just noting that if you do want the “cheddar” but don’t like Meta, you’re in luck. Many other companies will outpay them, I speak from experience as an IC engineer in the Bay whose spoken with many others who get offers.

FAANG has many other benefits (standardised hiring, promotion, performance expectations and compensation increases, profitable business with more stable stock price). Meta is the only one of the FAANG trying to break into a new area that is perceived as complex. Ie Google is trying to grow Cloud but the strategy is mostly “copy AWS and sell it well”, likewise with Microsoft. So they know they don’t need to pay top of market for these roles.

I think this is a relatively recent shift - anecdotally I've heard that meta is getting a lot more aggressive comp-wise, especially at the more senior levels (E7+/L7+). I'm not saying there might not be other companies paying at that level, but it definitely feels like there's a shift happening there, partially because of their toxic reputation.

There's some external signals as well:

https://www.recruitingnewsnetwork.com/posts/facebook-changes...

I bring all this up because 1) levels.fyi is great, but it's lacking at the more senior PM and eng levels at most companies, and 2) it's a lagging indicator if things have shifted recently.

> It’s a huge misconception that Meta is outpaying everyone.

Offers can be pretty specific. I might be worth 300k to one company but 600k to another down the street. The ranges can get pretty ridiculous at a certain point. levels.fyi can't really cope with ranges like that, especially if you're being grabbed for a more niche role/ background that they're particularly eager to fill.

What this means is that, no, you're not in luck. One company might legitimately pay you twice what the others will.

Do they even do that? My feeling is all recruiters just mass email candidates and neither understand nor consider backgrounds or requirements. All Meta recruiters I heard from certainly where like that.

I was told I'd be looking at an offer in the $350k+ range working remotely, based on my location in Texas.

If that's not outpaying everyone, I'm very interested in hearing of companies that aren't so repugnant willing to come close to that.

To save some people the trouble, here are some top-paying companies: https://www.levels.fyi/2020/

This was compiled in 2020 and Meta might move up the list in 2021.

It’s worth noting that Netflix does not have RSUs, and Stripe keeps appreciation of RSU value for itself. So if you expect Meta stock price to go up over the next few years (a big if), compensation at Meta could be higher in the long run.

If you were that confident in Meta stock going up, then you could work for Stripe and split the difference in compensation with long term OTM call options in Meta.

Equally importantly, HW / silicon jobs pay less well. People on the HWE side of the house frequently ponder switching to SW for the $$$

What if a startup working in that space couldn't compete on comp (yet), but offered 4 or 3 day work weeks. Would you be compelled by that?

Are you expected to work roughly the same amount in 3 or 4 days in this scenario? If so, it's not a draw for me (lots of employers let you just put in the hours when you want outside of meetings anyway)

If by 3 day work week you mean you're expected to work roughly 60% as much for 60% the pay, then yes, I'd be interested (but I'm not the person you replied to)

I'm going to guess that work 60% as much for 25% of the pay is what's actually being offered, and then working 120% as much for 25% of the pay will be the eventual result.

Startups can always compete on equity if they so choose.

yes

I mean, it's certainly worth trying out for a bit. Even if you don't hang around for long enough to vest much of the RSU, their base salaries are pretty good too. It shouldn't take over a year or so to make up for any RSU you forfeit when leaving your previous job. And you get good leverage if you decide to boomerang later. And who knows, you may find that your preconceptions were wrong, and end up liking the job.

TC or GTFO

Word on the street is that Meta is paying big time to overcome the toxic brand. So if you aren't personally too bothered by it all (and some people aren't), then you can rake in the cash.

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire...

They’re also hiring very aggressively from what I can tell. They have recruiters all over and the path to interviewing is remarkably short.

I didn’t bother because I like my job and I suspect their salaries in Canada will be very… Canadian.

No their salaries are quite Californian

Cool, thanks for that. I’ve been hesitating recommending looking into meta in Canada because so many companies see Canada as a cheap source of talent.

I mean it's still lower than peak bay area salaries but the Toronto scale is completely different from even like 2 years ago

Same with the Victoria scale. It wasn’t uncommon to see companies kind of capping out around $90k. I had to negotiate way too hard before I started working remotely instead. Since then I see rates around 120-150k in senior roles, which isn’t that much better with general COL inflation around here, but it’s an improvement. I think you’d generally do better by working remotely, still.

They pay a bit better than other FAANGs but it's not hugely out of line. Chances are if you can get a gig at Meta, you can get one at any of the others. Apple, for what it's worth pays a bit less than the FAANG median.

The sweet spot at this stage in the capitalist narrative arc is like a Series C/D startup that's found product-market fit and is rapidly growing. You'll get the same cash, and while there's a bit more risk, the equity could be dramatically more rewarding. Right on the knee of the curve.

Not sure about that. Startup/fast growth tech space is in a bit of a bubble, so your equity very likely could be worth less by the time it vests.

Lots of share price growth over the past two years has been valuation expansion, and marginally due to organic growth. Even the big guys... like NVDA has doubled their profit, but their share price is up 10x. Obviously not a sustainable trajectory

FB on the other hand has like a 20 forward PE, despite high growth. Unlikely to fall much, except if new regulation/legislation passed that effects them.

If I had to pick any spot, it would be as a founder/cofounder seeking capital for seed stage right now. Personally wouldn't join the majority of companies for equity and expect it to retain value.

> The sweet spot at this stage in the capitalist narrative arc is like a Series C/D startup that's found product-market fit and is rapidly growing. You'll get the same cash, and while there's a bit more risk, the equity could be dramatically more rewarding. Right on the knee of the curve.

Don't they use that spiel to get you to take less salary and a smaller cut of equity?

> Don't they use that spiel to get you to take less salary and a smaller cut of equity?

They sure used to, but these days at a funded and successful C/D you'll get very similar cash. The market for engineers is insane right now. I've seen Meta starting salary levels offered by even earlier stage companies.

[edit] As for the equity angle, it really depends - but generally speaking if you're being offered options I'd divide by 3 when comparing to an RSU offer (i.e. expect 3X as many options as RSUs) which triples your leverage even if they're intrinsically not worth anything on receipt. And depending on the stage, that equity could easily be dramatically more valuable even if you get less to start. This is more of a question of how much leverage you have in your negotiation.

I highly recommend becoming friends with a recruiter wherever you work :) being able to find out what you should be making next time is a super-power, and they're generally super fun and friendly people!

The missing element from the RSU/options conversion is the (very important) liquidity premium. For a Series C company, I would expect to not see material liquidity from options for 4+ years, so I would discount the options by at least 70% off the top to account for lack of liquidity and possibility of future funding rounds reducing the value of my options.

Engineers who had options during the .com crash and the GFC can share more about why near-term liquidity matters.

Yeah, you're right, liquidity commands a strong premium IMO. Depends on your risk tolerance.

Not sure if this is still true, as most of these sorts of companies have gone public, but there was a period between 2015 and 2019 where these sorts of late stage startups were paying comparable base salaries but were giving what was essential double the amount of equity. For people who got this deal and held onto their stock until today they're better off by a lot than had they worked at FANG.

What consumer-facing or B2B startups currently fit this description?

All I could think of was Stripe off the top of my head, but maybe a good place to start would be https://duckduckgo.com/?q="completes+series+d" ? It's an interesting approach to filtering the job noise.

Stripe is way more than Series C/D at this point. Their last fundraising was a Series H that valued them at $95B. That's more than Ford or GM, and more than the big-4 U.S. airlines put together.

I think they still have pretty significant room to grow - Mastercard is worth almost $400B, Visa is $475B. I heard their stock grants are now a fixed dollar amount which converts to a number of shares upon vest rather than grant, though [1], which removes a lot of the upside. If you negotiate $300K/year at Google (as a senior+; I heard junior hires have a new stock plan) and the stock price doubles, you get $600K/year in stock for the remainder of your 4 years. If you negotiate $300K/year at Stripe and they go public at 5x the valuation, your existing shares are now worth 5x as much, but you're still getting $300K/year.

[1] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Stripes-New-Offer-policy-on-R...

Ah that's a really good point, and I didn't realize it at all. I think the other half of my comment stands though.

That will be quite the filter on who works there.

It's a lot more toxic to HN users than to the general public. They pay well, they're making a lot of money, and they have lots of interesting problems to solve. It doesn't seem like much of a mystery to me why so many would want to work for them.

I also wonder how much goodwill is still left from Facebook not being part of the salary collusion stuff over a decade ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Probably not much. That's ancient history from the perspective of the modern tech industry.

When so much of your compensation is tied directly to the stock price, you also need to make a guess where the stock price will be in 2-4 years compared to your other options.

FB is not cool, TikTok is eating Instagram’s lunch causing IG to pivot more to video, so it comes down to the Metaverse.

You just sell the stock every year and switch it to S&P 500 if you're that worried...

If the stock price for the company goes down, the value of your unvested stock goes with it.

This is a common misconception.

If the value of your invested RSUs go up: fantastic now you make more.

I’d the value of the invested RSUs go down: no problem, you evaluate if you want to wait to see if they go up, or if you want to go into the market and take a new job.

It’s nearly all upside for the employee (in a hot market).

It's not a "misconception." I may not want to go find a new job in 6 months because the stock tanked. There's opportunity cost if nothing else. While that company's stock is tanking, I could instead be at one that's growing at even a modest rate.

While true, frequently cash-rich companies account for this. There are a lot of levers CFOs of profitable companies have to prevent people from leaving when the stock drops: issuing more shares, cash bonuses, etc. Facebook and Apple have more than enough cash to retain their talent in the event their stocks get cheap.

Still, they’re likely to readjust your comp back up to baseline.

You face the opportunity cost of not working for a company whose stock will rise fast, making it worth much more in years 2-3+ than it was initially priced at.

None of us have a crystal ball though, so it’s all speculation.

Are you saying senior engineers who don’t use HN have different values from those that do?

> Are you saying senior engineers who don’t use HN have different values from those that do?

Absolutely yes.

HN posters are by far the noisy minority.

Even on HN the vast majority of readers don’t post. HN posters are a sliver of a sliver.

> Are you saying senior engineers who don’t use HN have different values from those that do?

non-california, non-big city senior engineers have wildly different values from HN users. i'm not sure about non-HN big city or california engineers. i suspect that HN accurately reflects the values of folks working in SF/LA.

if i tried to explain the shit HN freaks out about every day to my coworkers, they'd think i was making everything up.

They don't even necessarily have different values. A lot of online people are virtue signaling to get virtual points.

In particular, the viewpoints that are downvoted differs from those that aren't. There's probably a lot of engineers that, like me, have learnt that HN isn't very fond of posts arguing for other perspectives in relation to big tech, and therefore will refrain from presenting them. Even if they don't, their posts will be hidden from view quickly enough to prevent them from affecting the overall tone.

Yep, that is what I'm saying. Most of my real life SWE friends have attitudes that seem different from folks on this site. Perhaps they are secretly harboring the same views, but I'd guess that there is a selection effect that biases the sort of folks who comment here.

Not everyone has the same thresholds wrt to morality. There are software engineers making peanuts while writing some of the most unethical crap you'd imagine. I too would require a ton of money to suppress my feelings against facebook in order to work for them. Others are just looking to get into FAANG... And it's hard to believe (it took me a while to reach out of my bubble and realize this), but there are people who legit think Facebook has a positive effect on society. So.. yeah

Depends.

In some areas its doing some very exciting work, if you believe in yourself enough you might think that you can shape the future of AR or VR. (if you're a software engineer, then you'll be one of 4k other who are doing that)

For a hardware engineer, you are going to be given much more free reign, and don't have to worry about the cloak and dagger cult shit that apple insist on.

also, a stonking wage.

Money. Lots and lots of fuckin money.

I morally stand against writing closed source software, and centralizing control over software. Yet I work for these megacorps. You know why? Lots of fuckin money.

For me it's not even that. It sounds like they're full speed ahead on what seems to be some kind of boring VR video game. Unless they really surprise us, I think they're jumping the shark in a big way.

React, pytorch, quest, etc. Meta is not just Facebook.

Nah.. all roads lead to Rome. This is all fake technical diversity. You just need to look at Meta's revenue model, consider it's not a non-profit and then realize that pretty much any piece of work ends up one way or another to Facebook.

This hate of Facebook is massively overblown from both the right and left wing. The right hates the fact that the online population is younger and more inherently liberal and the left needed a convenient excuse for their electoral failures. I don't see them as a particularly evil corporation. Their engineering talent is exceptional and they have ambitious goals. Seems like a great place to work ( fyi I don't work there )

Probably. I'm not a political analyst to have valid opinions about which wing hates what corporation and why. Quite frankly I couldn't give a shit. I just have a fundamental issue with their core product and ambitious 'goals'

Reach and PyTorch are I believe developed within the Facebook arm. I assume by Quest you mean Oculus, so that's off to the side but... like, not really.

But it's all Zuckerberg.

It's not just Facebook that I despise.

Everyone has a price....at least I believe that is what Zuck is thinking of. Meta is his goldmine. He needs miners for his Meta goldmine at whatever the price is. If he offer a pay....say worth twice what one can get at Apple, it is worthwhile for some to try their luck in Meta. 10 years wasted in Meta will only be 5 years missing in Apple for example. It still will look good in one resume having been "land developer" or "founding fathers and mothers" in Metaverse.

When you get a call offering mid to high six figures you’ll consider it.

Frankly, I view apple as equally poor, and wouldn’t consider working there.

To put it into perspective, an accountant might make $60k a year. A senior dev at meta can make (total comp) $600-700k a year.

They are paying a shitload more, maybe not the metric shitload for your price but it is for plenty of people I know. Annecdotally I have seen offers of TC > 550k for L5 engineers in my network.

I think it makes sense to be a moral contrarian in these regards. All big companies are more or less the same, and public perception is fickle. Take advantage of the disparity.

no other company has bet their future on VR/AR , at least not publically. If you want to do VR or AR there aren't really many other choices.

I've heard they are in fact giving offers in the "metric shitload" range.