If you think dramatically increasing compensation is going to continue in the next decade like it has in the last one, I think you might be disappointed.
Now that companies are comfortable with remote, HR departments are eventually going to realize that services like Deel exist, and that its not actually that hard to hire employees overseas.
Once job ads start removing the "US only" part from the requirements, comp is going to come crashing back to earth.
A remote worker in the US being paid 4-5X as much as a remote worker in Europe is a massive market inefficiency just waiting to be arbitraged by companies.
As the tech giants growth inevitably slows over the coming years, they're going to have to start looking more closely at their cost structure to meet investor expectations.
What works better is outsourcing entire business functions so all of that routine coordination can happen in the same team/time zone, and you have an easier time measuring performance.
For example, we've hired several engineers through a very big name, silicon valley backed, foreign contractor firm. They perform at the level of a junior engineer at best.
China in particular have large tech companies (e.g. tiktok) that offer pays that almost matches the US, which skimmed the best engineers away from these contracting jobs.
I'm talking about tech companies directly hiring employees from other countries.
You don't even need to leave the English speaking world to find massive arbitrage opportunities.
If you think there's no React developers in the UK/Australia/Etc who can do leetcode problems...I've got news for you.
The only fly in the soup there is that I see loads of remote roles that can only be performed in the USA because of PII. It's not so much that the workforce is getting globalized, but that the country-specific workforce is going remote in whatever boundaries they're legally allowed to work (in this case, within US borders).
So yes, if you start as a junior engineer and end your career as a CEO of one of the most successful companies on the planet then you can see this growth. But those aren't regular raises for doing good work. Those are completely different pay strata for completely different jobs.
Good luck with those odds!
That’s just last showing years W-2. Someone that made that much but retired in 2019 doesn’t count. It also excludes anyone that will cross the threshold at some point in the future. It even excludes people that got stock options worth that much but can avoid calling them taxable income right now.
Lifetime odds for a random American might be ~1:10,000. But not everyone tries to make that much money from a W-2 either. Becoming a school teacher is hardly putting your hat in the ring for that kind of compensation. Which arguably drops lifetime odds closer to 1 in 1,000 if not better for people that make a real attempt. I am trying to avoid any kind of truss Scotsman argument, but IMO there is a meaningful difference between random chance and stuff people work for.
Personally, I and most developers don’t think it’s worth it which is one of the reasons why it’s not actually difficult to get started.
Gonna be the [citation needed] guy here again; "quite a few" is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. According to the most recent wage statistics from 2020, there are less than 100,000 people reporting incomes of $1M or over; that alone doesn't just put you in the top 1%, it puts you in the top 0.1%. "Low 8 figures" is in the low thousands.
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2020
I'm not the first person to point out that Silicon Valley (and SV-style) software engineering incomes seem to have skewed HN's idea of what "average" salaries are and I won't be the last, but I think it's really true. If you make a six figure income, you're pretty much in the top 10% of that wage statistics chart; the median income is around $30K.
> Personally, I and most developers don’t think it’s worth it
The number of people who started as developers and increased their salaries to that $1M+ level have got to be very, very low, and I don't think you can really imply that most developers have the opportunity to do so and simply choose not to. That kind of "engineering founder" success requires skills beyond engineering (and, as much as we sometimes like to pretend otherwise, a certain amount of good fortune).
Beyond that the relevant question is not what percentage of people currently make that much money out of all people or even all workers. The relevant question is what percentage of people that aim for it eventually make that money. If hypothetically people make 1+M for on average 7 years of their life then your looking at something like ~10 x 184,989 people or roughly 1 out of every 180 people in the population. But again not everyone is in the running, a Teacher is hardly aiming to climb the corporate ladder to millions. Depending who you cut out the actual odds might be as high as 1-5%.
And of course ignoring actors etc who might make that much money but aren’t getting it on a W-2.
PS: To see just how biased official income statistics are try and calculate Bill Gates official lifetime taxable income some time vs how much his current net worth + total donations + 2.4B divorce added up to even ignoring all actual spending.
Can’t be that hard if an engineer can just walk out and get that. What do you think the replacement will cost? And with none of the knowledge.
Uh, they seem to find that money just fine for execs, who are not even the ones keeping servers up, so to speak...
It doesn't mean they did 10x the work, but they definitely brought the value.
People literally jump around chasing pay increases. If you got a decent raise comparable to a job change would you jump around every couple years?
Just how many 20 year experience engineers do you think the average company has?
I have a feeling you will find that the (very small number of) folks who have been at the same FAANG continuously for the past 20 years are indeed making compensation in that ballpark (we're talking Google's Senior Staff Engineer or Amazon's Distinguished Engineer level) - particularly if you take into account the massive stock price increases over that period.