faang_employee

There's mistake in their slides. Staff Engineer should be L6 https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

You can't be more far away from the truth.

Thinking outside of the box is very much encouraged and more senior engineers are expected to come up or shape, lead and deliver projects.

FB is company where individual engineers could go and do any project they want - they can even invent it - if they believe that it will deliver big enough impact. After 1 year at FB you can switch team any time you like and your manager does not even need to know what you are working on (it's probably better if they know, as they could many times help you, but no one is micro managing you).

You are assessed every 6 months based on impact you deliver. Your manager supports you, but you need to drive it and deliver it.

Tooling/languages are standardised, but FB does not care whether you do know Hack, or JS. You can do interview in any language (if you are going for generic engineering role). So far at FB I have coded in 4 different languages and picked up all of them as I joined teams.

Even though FB is enterprise company, it feels like startup with great salary, benefits and more manageable work-life balance. Before FB I was 7 years in startups and I have worked longer hours, got paid much less and wasted more time.

Figures for my company are spot on, so I assume that they are correct for other ones as well. Usually base salary for a given level is set (you can see that majority of entries have very similar base salary if you remove outliers). Bonus is usually preset as % of base salary and therefore will be same/similar for most people. What could make difference are RSUs. If you are coming from another FAANG or startup and leaving behind lot of unvested stock, you might get that matched. Or if you have other offers they will prefer to increase RSUs rather than base salary. Every year you then get refresher RSUs which are quite significant (as big as your base salary but spread over 4 years).

London salaries:

L5 (senior engineer) Facebook [1] Google [2]

Facebook L6 (lead engineer) [3]

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

[2] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

[3] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

There's a difference, because you are given a number of RSUs at hire with some monetary value, so on this example you would be given RSUs worth of 800k at the time of hire, which would be 200k per year (they vest over 4 years). If we run this example just for 2 years you will start to see the difference:

Year 1: At Netflix you get 400k in cash, you buy 200k of FB stock, so you have 200k cash, 200k worth of FB stock At FB you get 200k of cash and 200K worth of stock

Year 2 - FB stock goes up by 10% so 200k of FB stock from last year is now worth 220k: At Netflix you got another 400k in cash and you will buy another 200k worth of FB stock. So now you have 400k of cash and 420k worth of FB stock At FB you get 200k of cash and 220k of FB stock, so now you have 400k of cash and 440k of FB stock.

Also RSUs vests quarterly so you can (and should) sell it and invest in other things to diversify.

At FAANG you typically get RSU new hire grant and then annual RSU refreshers. And you are right that companies do not renew initial hire RSUs grant. However you will only hit salary cliff if your initial grant was bigger than what would be your annual refresher at the end of year 4 at company (both initial RSUs and annual refreshers vest over 4 years). If your annual refresher is same as your initial grant your salary will not increase that year (which you might still consider not great, because until now your salary was increasing every year due to RSU refreshers).

> Even if they did, that would be less than what that employee is paid when the initial grant expired, or what they could make by moving jobs (since they’re now 4-5 years more senior). If employee became more senior that would mean they got promotions (base salary increase in double digits, bonus increases) and their annual refreshers are much bigger now (they almost double between levels [1]). If they did not get promotion over past 4-5 years (that's only possible for senior roles, grad and junior levels need to get promotion in certain time frame otherwise they are out) there's quite low probability they would get hired to more senior role at other FAANG (though they might be offered big initial RSU offer)

> More cynically, it might be political. If only a few cherry picked employees stay, and all the other organizational memory walks out the door every 4-5 years, then all the organizational power eventually accumulates in middle management. Same salary rules apply to management, so they could also walk out if they hit salary cliff. However if you are manager/director/VP you will be higher level and your annual refresher might be high enough to keep you there.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-range-of-the-RSU-stock-ref...