The people talking about working long hours at Apple are getting paid commensurately. There's a reason why people work at FAANG companies despite the constant complaints.
Not really. Most divisions in SWE do stack ranking (unofficially). The top quintile (decile in some groups) gets a majority of compensation at review time. The bottom half is lucky to get a cost of living adjustment to their base pay. They likely will get no RSUs and little if any cash bonus.
Despite the disparity in compensation everyone on a team is expected to put in overtime. Anyone that doesn't is guilted over not being a "team player", put on a PIP, outright threatened with firing. If you get put on a PIP there is zero guidance to get off.
To be clear: It’s because they’re still being paid very, very well.
The top paying tech companies are kind of a weird bubble because they pay so well on average but they also have a huge upward range beyond that for top performers. It leads to situations where someone can be making $200-300K per year but end up feeling underpaid because someone they know is getting $600K for being a top performer at a top company.
It’s also important to put it in perspective. Relatively few engineers work at these companies in total. The vast majority of engineers work at more mainstream companies where the pay is still good (though maybe not retire early good) and the hours are reasonable. People at the big companies are working long hours to compete for those few coveted top positions and top salaries. But you definitely don’t have to work at those companies.
FAANG and a few fintech operations pay the big USD. The lower bound on FAANG senior software engineers is apparently above or barely overlaps the upper bound for other massively profitable companies like Intel. So you can't even achieve FAANG comp most places unless you a department director.
Also a lot of their income was stock and share bonuses, great if the stock price is constantly going up and they're growing hand over fist, but when things slow down that non-guaranteed income is the first thing to be looked at - if it's not on the contract it's not guaranteed. Sure you might be lucky, but in my experience the "Buy your house in cash of FAANG" for a mid-level engineer gravy train seems to be over if you're not already sitting on the options.
Plenty of people want to earn that extra renumeration even if it means doing grunt work or giving up on their work-life balance.
There's also no clarity into how to be considered the top of the rankings. The only guidance from managers is to "innovate" and work more.
It's a really demoralizing system unless you're at the top of the stack. It's further demoralizing that the managers are told in no uncertain terms to make the system as opaque as possible.
If you're in the fancy new hotness that has VP political support, great.
If you're in a team with a manager who has your back and pushed back on extra work and raises and bonuses for the whole team, great.
But you're one of the lucky ones.
on more than a handful of occasions i was able to bill 20 hours over overtime at 2x rate for simply being 'available' meaning my phone was on mute in a deployment support conference call.
they happily paid and i happily pretended to care about their product.
> work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple.
I am always floored by statements like this. I work as a principal data analyst and everything above 40 hours/week is overtime. While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows. On average I do something like 41 hours a week over the last few years. Including high profile client engagement or pitch situations.
I find myself having enough time to also work on my side business and do work for animal protection charities. While still being able to work in the garden and shop to relax.