It was probably a typo, with extra zero. they probably meant $500-$1000 per day. That would be $125k-$250k which seems much more reasonable
Examples:
"while other people who just picked a better company to work at 20 years ago and never left have been growing their wealth by a couple million dollars per year every year for almost their entire career"
"What is it like to join a company where all the co-workers your same age have made $10+ million over the past 4 years while you are joining with nothing?"
You'd have to be very high in the org chart at a FAANG style company to make that kind of income.
Google pays basically the same salary as a series A startup would (ie: $150 - $180k / yr). Yes, you'll get your salary again in stock but you aren't necessarily getting left behind by choosing to punch lottery tickets because you enjoy it.
People need to, and I need to say this to myself too, smell the roses occasionally. You are paid an absurdly comfortable salary to basically solve puzzles all day. The meetings and people can suck occasionally but I can't imagine a much better life if I have to work for a living.
If you work for 10-15 years at a tech giant, bank your $150k in RSUs per year and then sell them all at retirement then maybe the numbers add up, if you're extraordinarily lucky.
He even links to it from his resume.
His problem is that he thinks L10 is the benchmark to compare against, when the vast, vast majority of engineers (including many with decades of experience) would never make it to L10.
Because like L3 is 200k so I'm not sure if you're seeing people post 600k as a reference point or 200k.
Metropolitan areas with the highest employment level in Software Developers
Metropolitan area Employment Employment Location Hourly Annual
per 1000 jobs quotient mean wage mean wage
New York-Newark-Jersey City,... 119,010 12.53 1.15 $ 73.12 $ 152,100
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 96,590 84.60 7.75 $ 96.06 $ 199,800
San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA 83,920 34.65 3.18 $ 87.13 $ 181,220
The vast majority of engineers will never make it to L10.
The technical/individual contributor track also has L8 and L9 Director/Senior Director levels. Sometimes it's referred to as a "Principal" level in Product Areas like Cloud, but there are far fewer L8+ people on individual contributor career ladders (i.e. tracks) than on management ladders.
L8 is considered the start of Google's "executive levels," where individuals at this level and above are privy to executive-level training, perks, etc.
Google Fellows are generally L10 (i.e. Vice President equivalent level), if I recall correctly. Jeff Dean would be a canonical example of a Vice President equivalent level, however Jeff Dean also ended up being a manager/organizational head of the Research Product Area for several years as a Fellow. Vint Cerf may be another useful example of a Fellow / Vice President equivalent.
(My statements here are from having personally done statistical analysis of career ladders and levels at Google and Alphabet as a whole)
L8 is director level. So L10 might be both fellow and VP, given that Senior Director exists so is probably L9
> You are paid an absurdly comfortable salary to basically solve puzzles all day No, you are paid commensurate to the value you can deliver. This "be grateful" attitude is becoming more prevalent in tech and is leading to companies getting away with lower pay and worse working conditions.
Companies are waking far more $$ from you than they pay you. Especially profitable tech companies.
Well of course they are. But then asking to pay more will not help. What's the leverage of people who should be paid lot more ? Because IMO if any of those engineers have leverage they are not taken for chump and get paid appropriately when they negotiate.
Entry level. But with ~5 years experience and two promos you’ll be pushing $400k.
If you joined Google 5 years ago then you had at least one annual stock grant double in value.
If you work at FANG for 10 years you should be able to hit retirement money. If nothing else you’ll have invested 600k into your 401k which should be enough for CoastFire. IE it’s all the money you’ll need at retirement age.
Is that incorrect? I know I've just heard that promo boards are really difficult to get to Senior and anything above that basically requires a miracle / someone far above gunning you.
EDIT: See above. I already addressed the fact TC is much higher. I am only talking about cash comp.
> Yes, you'll get your salary again in stock but you aren't necessarily getting left behind by choosing to punch lottery tickets because you enjoy it.
The base salary and bonus component will be in the ballpark of $200k/yr USD (base salary * 15% of base salary). Annual RSUs will often be $100k/yr.
But you are. $100k in liquid stock is worth about $100k. Startup options are expensive lottery tickets. One is worth substantially more than the other. Therefore one amounts to substantially greater compensation than the other.
You almost always get your full bonus (or more) and (depending on the size of our RSU grants) you vest either quarterly or monthly and can usually sell immediately (barring an imminent earnings release).
So for all practical purposes (at FAANG at least) the total comp is cash equivalent (even though it's a combo of base + bonus + RSU).
L5 at Google is $372k which is enough to get to CoastFIRE after a decade.
You're talking about it wrong. RSUs are functionally equivalent to cash, and taxed as such. You can't talk about only cash comp. If one person is making startup $200k cash + lottery ticket and another person is making $200k cash + $200k RSU then yes the startup person will get left behind if their lottery tickets never hit.
> heard that promo boards are really difficult to get to Senior and anything above that basically requires a miracle / someone far above gunning you.
Nah. I don't know Google's exact ratios. But I would estimate that ~10% of their SWEs are L6 and 3-5% are L7+. I think pretty much anyone can hit L6 if that's a goal. The percentage of SWEs that have 15+ years experience and are L6+ should be relatively high. The bulk of the workforce is quite young. Varies by company and I haven't worked at Google but I have worked at FAANG. They're all pretty similar afaict.
It's similar at Facebook. Something like 10% are L6+ (mostly L6 and very few L7+).
10 * ~20k (individual max contribution, rough avg.) * 1.5 (1:0.5 match) = ~300k?
The pre-tax 401k limit is ~$23,000. But you can put in another ~$46,000 post-tax. (Limits go up a little each year). High end 401k plans allow this post-tax contribution to be instantly auto-converted into a Roth IRA that grows tax free.
It's maybe a little hard to max out at L3. But every L4+ SWE should be maxing it out. Do this for 10 years and you'll actually have tucked away $700,000 plus growth. Assuming you're a couple of decades away from retirement this will compound and grow into millions of dollars for retirement.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/mega-backdoor-r...
In 1950 a house cost $7300. Average salary was $3000. So you could make 41% of a house in a year. You would be taxed at 17%.
In 2024 the median house price is $420k. So someone making $150k only makes 36% of a house in a year. You will be taxed at 19%.
Inflation-adjusted, 3k in 1950 is ~40k today, so 150k leaves you much better off in general.
Also, 150 is definitely high (though not crazy or anything). It's more than twice the average US wage.
I specifically mention housing because it is one of the main things (aside from education and healthcare) that our neoliberal economic system has not been able to import, and which have skyrocketed in cost since the 70s. And everyone needs housing.
Adjusted, people have more purchasing power today, even if they are spending relatively more on housing.
High house prices suck, and definitely are a big problem, arguably self-bflicted in most places by increasingly onerous regulations (zoning, building quality, minimum sizes, and so on). Certainly there are some benefits to that, but all comes at the cost of increased house prices.
The other thing is labour has become relatively very expensive compared to most goods today, and houses embed a huge labour cost component - so their price (along with other labour-intensive sectors like, well, education and healthcare), have gone up much more than eg. Food, which can be produced largely with capital investment (tractors and so on)
Most people here are in tech and have no idea how heavily incentivized industrial sales is. Selling a fleet of D10 dozers to an excavation operation and selling a maintenance agreement is going to net caterpillar $1.7mm a dozer multiplied by number of dozers. They aren't paying someone 60k a year and free kombucha for managing those sorts of accounts.
These are the TOP folks though. I don't think most entry level college grads are going to making that any time size.
I can say from personal experience that, at least in Australia, tech workers for mining companies that work in city offices are paid fairly similarly to other non-FAANG tech workers (e.g. banks etc). I also just checked levels.fyi for a few big mining companies and verified that this is the case.
Engineers (mining, geo, tech, whatever) that work out in the field do make quite a bit more. MAYBE around what FAANG would pay, but FAANG still pays more after a few years of refreshers and/if one manages to climb the ladder.
I think the author is quite off with their estimates of what people make in "heavy industries". At least as far as my experience goes for AU. FAANG/HFT still beats everything, and by a vast margin.
His resume even confirms this[0], because he seemingly thinks the appropriate level at FAANG would be L10 which is extremely rare. There is a 0% chance that his experience would level him that high.
The entire article can be chocked up to a massively inflated sense of entitlement.
His resume starts with a quote of himself stating that he has “seen things you people wouldn't believe.”
It goes on to highlight that he purchased a domain name in 1997.
He claims to have developed “the highest performing in-memory database in the world” but complains that “nobody really wants to buy it when free worse performing choies [sic] exist.”
The part about nobody wanting to buy his product is in his resume.
His current status is “Waiting for AI apocalypse.”
This is either mega-cringe, or the best satire I’ve read in a while. Unfortunately, I think it’s the former.
The "Experience" section looks like a big complain about the world not recognizing his genius.
I really don't think a lot people would call him for an interview just by looking at this resume.
The rest sounds like high flying BS to my ears, isolating yourself has consequences.
Curious, did you seriously not recognize that this is a famous quote from the final scene in Blader Runner?
I read that more as quirky call out to a famous film, not that he was claiming this was his own view of the world.
The quote is attributed to “Matt,” and it’s at the top of Matt’s resume. The speaker in Blade Runner was Roy Batty. If Matt was trying to include a famous quote on his resume, why did he attribute the quote to himself?
Regardless of the answer, I don’t think a technical resume is the right place for quirky call-outs to films. Particularly if you are substituting your own name as the speaker of the quote. Maybe I’m being too harsh, but in the context of this resume, IMO, it’s just another red flag.
Or any industry, really.
I’m less sure about his resume, though:
That or he truly did work at a "nepo company", as he phrases it. Not many people can just travel the world for 5 years, let alone boast about it on their resume.
(I grew up around a bipolar II individual. I am not an expert.)
If you had a preconceived topic you care about: this blog post gives you every imaginable opening. Free of any substance which might define a direction for discussion.
And despite the fact that this article is filled with absolutely wild claims and martyr-laden tangents, the response here on HN proves that passion is worth more than substance in the tech world. Which explains a lot.
> Under the modern tech landscape, stable “hyperscale ultra-growth” companies are paying experienced employees the equivalent of $10,000 to $50,000 per day if we include the value of their exponentially growing yearly stock grants.
Assuming a $250k salary, that's only about $1000/day. But if you're able to bank $50,000,000 in stock grants over a 40 years career (invest early and often in a high-growth company), that averages out to $5,000 per day.
Kinda dodgy math, should been better clarified, and that's still somewhat ambitious; but I think that's the idea behind it based on a couple allusions throughout the article.
The entire article is just the whimsical fantasies of someone with no understanding of market reality.
For anyone that came to the comments before the article, it claims that number is per day
I do think your overall point stands
He talks about making millions per year, so it’s not a typo.
It's decent enough resource that packs all the issues (except S178) into one convinient package to point to next time someone asks "why does the market suck". You can argue the hyperbole takes away, but it adds some engagement (the nightmare stories are probably not even that far from the truth, given my experiences).
If nothing else I was intrigued (but maybe am not 100% onboard) with the "hire the safe middle" process for modern interviewing. "Overqualified" is mostly a weasel term, but I can see it coming up from interviewers who truly do not understand top talent (note: I am very much not top talent).
Given how many comments this thread has, I suspect he achieved his goal
Seems a bit strange to call the tractor manufacturers non-tech companies. The modern tractor you can see is essentially just a case around what is a rather advanced computer. Hell, the Right to Repair topic that has garnered attention in semi-recent times centres specifically around tractors having become computers. What is tech if not that?
Sure, the typical worker – even when constraining to software engineers – isn't making anywhere near that much (nor are they at any company, not even FAANG), but it is likely that certain key players are.
Even assuming that’s including taxes so divide by two, and constraining to just software employees for that claim. There is no way the average pay is nearly a million a year. The average software engineer in the US is making around 135-150k a year and that average is including all the faang engineers with the top end salary