Needless to say, if I was offered these compensations (or higher), I'll gladly take even 10 years of incompetence around me to then be able to do fuck all for the rest of my life (or, well, things I actually enjoy doing, not for a megacorporation). Being an elevated engineer doesn't pay the bills.
It doesn't get you that far.
Consider tax and cost of life in NYC/SF/London where you won't be able to buy a house anyway, and you're left with 50k to save a year. In other places, you're less likely to get such a TC.
Sure, it's a lot of money, but not enough to change your social status. It adds up if you manage to stay long enough there, but considering ageism and burning out, you're not in the same leagues as let say doctors, or people who inherited 1 million after selling their parents house.
For comparaison, there are extremely few SWEs in FAANG over 50 years old.
You're mistaking the exponential growth of the SWE "profession" with Ageism.
The time to acquire a fellowship seems to be a couple years.
During that the time it takes for a doctor to go through med school, residency and specialist training (after which they would have the income numbers you cited), the FAANG careerist would probably have risen through the ranks and have comparable income numbers anyway.
If you want to make an argument that the overall career arc of a software engineer is better off than that of a physician, then that's a very different statement than GP made. (My personal view - strictly from a monetary standpoint, medicine in the US is more lucrative than big tech over the course of a ~40 year career, when you take into account lifestyle and personal flexibility, tech comes out looking better).
To me this is an important difference between these two careers. Ageism is a thing in tech and in corporations in general. Of course, a few winners can climb the ladder and have a lucrative corporate career or earn enough money to retire early. But lots of SWEs get pushed out in their 50s or don't manage to work in fast pace / high pay environments for decades.
I don't see which row. Levels.fyi says L5 Google SWE is 350k. The left column in your link has a header saying specialty. "Family medicine" is 270k in your data set. Nothing in the 350k range vaguely resembles general practice.
> If you want to make an argument that
I'm not trying to make any argument, except to counter yours.
> not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism
Heh. I can't speak of the industry as a whole, but I don't think I'm coping in any way. I'd say in medicine you know the demand for your skills is going to be stable, worldwide. In tech, there's no way to project 20 years into the future.
Alright, let's consider this: my current gross salary is at 47k €. With what my boss pays, let's say it would be the equivalent of 100k in the US (unemployment, social security, etc). And I'm from France, which is a pretty wealthy first world country. My salary puts me in about the top 20% in terms of salary.
If you think I wouldn't be able to commute for 2 hours every day for 2.5x salary so i could save up MY ENTIRE CURRENT SALARY IN A YEAR, you have massive blinders preventing you from realising how privileged of a status it'll be. The amount of people that can put 50k aside in a year is ridiculously small. And 50k is actually being awful at saving, you can easily reach 100k if you're not a dumbass.
Now consider this for an indian H1B, who can pretty much make an entire family live like kings off of that.
No, you don't realise just how much of a life changing amount 250k is.
My lifestyle hasn't changed to the slightest, except I work more. I won't be able to sustain that lifestyle for many years, because ageism + stressful job. For comparison, in France, 10% of people inherit more than 500K without doing nothing. I'll probably never reach that level of savings, won't ever be able to live in a house and so on...
I'm not complaining as I'm in a privileged situation. But in countries like France, inequalities come primarily from inheritance. It's hard to lift yourself from middle class with salary alone.
So you're at least E6 and less than 30 or/and you join the companies when stocks were low. Don't think your particular case is the same as everyone else. Some people go to FAANG at E5 in their late 30s in Europe/Asia. 200K is more the norm for them, and it's not sure they'll be cruising until 50 in an IC position.
Spot on! It's a race for them to keep moving up the TC ladder and then show off within their social circles. Their all now on to the new fad i.e working at HFT firms. I work at one and the questions I see on Blind, regarding HFT's, is a source of constant laughter for those of us in the industry.
Some great examples: "I have never written a line of production C++. If I do leetcode in C++ will that get me a job working on ultra low-latency systems?".
There's so much more to work than compensation and this post proves it. Being on a good team is 100x more important than what you're paid. Good teams elevate engineers and give you a better career path in your future. I make SL level compensation and non-SL level companies because my value is high, not because my employer can overpay for mediocrity.
There's too many engineers who think the secret to success is to get hired at the right company and then they just sail on to a dream career. I've worked with enough people from those big companies who left, some after long careers, to know that it's simply not true.
A lot of people see the impactful work that happens at these big companies and assume that's the impact they'll make as well. What they don't get is those big companies literally poach PhDs or buy smaller companies to get that kind of talent.