- why pay more (US level) when you can pay just slightly more than the rest.
- a culture of viewing makers/engineering as something lower level, to make it you got to be a 'Manager' or 'Director' of something, doesn't matter what. director of mopping, regional director of moving crates, international director in charge of that small sub-section of the website no one know exists or uses...
- more money motivated people not constrained by personal circumstances just move out to where the money is.
You are absolutely correct about engineers being looked down upon.
I know the UK still refers to digital- this and digital- that, like we’re still in some magical Tomorrow’s World where computers go beep beep boop and watches and calculators have glowing red numbers on them but only when you hold down a button.
It’s getting better, but the tech scene also used to be hobbled by the usual class antics of Annabels-membership-esque popularity contests. You made it on the London tech scene not when you hit $100M ARR or a $1bn exit, but when your holiday party got featured in Tatler.
There is thankfully lots of serious tech outside of London’s second-fiddle-to finance bubble. You can make Google SWE salaries in Europe if you work at Goldman Sachs in London, but you can also command a decent salary if you work for many of the series Bs anywhere but London.
This is a California-centric view, but if I'm going to hire someone then I very much want them in a similar timezone so that I can actually talk to them during work hours.
Someone outside of say, +/- 4 hours, is just harder to work with.
It seems very strange that these companies are spending so much on engineering resources.
How many 750k engineers are actually producing 7x a 100k engineer? I look at companies like Google and aside from the core cash cow (ads) it seems like very little of value is actually happening. They have the cash flow so I guess why not burn it on staff, but e.g. how many 500k or even 250k engineers did Google assign to reinvent messaging for the nth time? How many shitty attempts at a Google watch? How many Meta/Facebook/Instagram clones of some other social network’s feature?
I get that there are occasionally known-by-name engineers who it would make sense to pay for, but I don’t think that constitutes a general “market for SWEs”.
Maybe it is just the market for FAANG SWEs, but they do lots of weird things to constrain their hiring (e.g. only hiring from certain schools or doing bizarre algorithm tests) so really they’re playing themselves at shareholder expense.
Maybe a bigger question is: why are these big companies letting fungible labor take such a big piece of the pie? Facebook likes having the fanciest engineers, but I seriously doubt that they _need_ them.
If they have more of a constrained supply, they win. Right. There aren't enough SWEs, so if you have them, your competition can't. Get enough SWEs together and you get some cool shit like K8s.
That and probably keeping the good ones who are 2x in some areas, but make fewer mistakes than two 1x would.
I would maybe consider it the other way; these companies are wildly profitable with huge margins, why don't the employees capture _more_ of the value they create?
I think you would be surprised how many 100k engineers at Fortune 500 companies can't do things FAANG engineers would consider very basic. It's not that there's a 7x and a 1x engineer but that there's a 0.1x and a 1x engineer.
For example I did a stint at a F500 company where 1) a data engineer did not know how to use multiprocessing to parallelize a multi-terabyte S3 upload 2) an internal tool that fired off hundreds of network requests did not use concurrency and hence had 30+ second latency 3) a certain other team was dumping hundreds of terabytes of logs that nobody even knew the schema of into S3 automatically, and none of it was ever touched. Also seen: "data scientists" who did not know Python and executives that spent more time talking about Scrum than any concrete execution.
To be fair, you'd also be shocked to learn how many top developers will rarely need any of those tricks. Even more shocking, to learn that FAANG developers are just as guilty of many of these "sins."
Take the uploading to s3 point. If you are saturating your network... going multithreaded will do nothing. If you are not, find out why.
The other examples are also lacking a lot of details. 30 seconds of latency can be bad, of course. But so can adding concurrency to a team that doesn't understand it well. (Really, this one sounds like it just needs more context. I'd normally push to remove extra calls moreso than jumping to concurrency. But, each has its place.)
Edit: And the logs... this is just a result of not putting cost as a tracked item for teams. Too many folks fall afoul of a hoarder mentality when it comes to logs.
FAANGs are full of terrible programmers. It's obvious. What they do have though is a higher number of good programmers, and they try to leverage them as best they can to make use of the bad ones.
I hesitate to call them terrible. Developing is a hilariously multi paradigmed skill that is tough to train. Such that a good programmer may make a terrible developer, without the appropriate supporting team.
Similarly, an otherwise great developer can be horrible in a team that doesn't know how to use them.
>The other examples are also lacking a lot of details. 30 seconds of latency can be bad, of course. But so can adding concurrency to a team that doesn't understand it well.
It might also be that it's not worth spending effort on speeding up some script like this. How often does it run?
Do these 30 seconds matter? Maybe they do now but they didn't in the beginning, but then that's ok, too, and you refactor.
I’ve worked in demanding startups where I question my own competence and lethargic enterprises where I’ve never felt more under challenged. It’s hard to find a good job that strikes a nice balance.
Fraud is a complete overreaction. A fraud might be someone posing as a doctor with no doctoral degree, or an electrician with no such training. Software is so broad and has no real, agreed upon training that it simply a gap between what an employer thinks someone can do and what they can actually do.
Fraud is a bit strong, but there are many people that have mastered the art of beating that particular system. I've met engineers that have become exceptionally good at pattern matching to the FAANG hazing ritual but which otherwise have unremarkable engineering skill.
Way more. Most of these <$300k engineers I’d pay to fire. They can’t identify the problem and fix it. I’ve got to hand hold them and then treat them like a robotic arm (I do all the hard work and then just use them as a glorified autocomplete).
The only engineers who produce value are a small set. Everyone else you try not to have because they’ll slow everyone down.
What amazing problems are you solving? Most of what is coming out of these companies is toxic and barely moving the needle — many times actually making software development worse with ever more bloated “pet project” platforms that get released to the dev world allowing for lesser skilled devs to churn out copycat glitchy web-based products.
HFT. Pet projects don’t happen here because we’re a prop trading shop. We can backtest, we can trial, we have immediate financial feedback. If your change doesn’t lead to improved PNL it’s not going to hold.
And, in any case, you’re not going to want it to hold. We all have failing hypotheses. The trick is to have lots of succeeding ones and for the failing ones to fail early.
Whether amazing or not isn’t the deal. The only question is whether it yields more money tomorrow. If it doesn’t, it’s not good.
In my limited experience of HFT, the galaxy brain mathematicians write terrible code. And there isn't much time for heavy anything at HFT speeds. So there's a lot of clever software and hardware engineering that is implementing what are often quite simple strategies. Those simple strategies are backed up by lots of clever analysis of course.
Right, the analysis is the heavy part. and yes the math guys themselves don't write the code, the coders do that part.
even if the impl can be quite involved, it seems rather strange that someone could make money from very simple strategies? seems to contradict common sense.
You can make money on average with simple strategies because you react faster to signals than the competition. Your order goes in first. You just have to be very fast.
I worked at a hedge fund that did a bit of HFT. They mostly took pride though in the fact that they made money using intelligence rather than just being really fast.
I was of similar mindset until I worked with some. Not to say a 200k dev couldn’t do it, but especially at big tech or rapidly growing large scale startups, the price difference is worth it from experience alone.
Not only are the technical challenges different at large scale, the product and human challenges are different. The 750 principle is basically leading a 500+ engineer org’s technical vision and steering the ship. Not only is it crazy difficult to get 500 people align on a vision, but the mechanics of organizing and leading that large number of people are unique too.
Plus product wise a 750k engineer can save the company multiples of that just by advocating on what not to do, and avoid expensive mistakes.
I’ve learned more in 2 years at big tech than I have in 7 in local companies or smaller startups.
This. A principle engineer probably wouldn’t be expected to write that much code in most cases. They’d be leading other senior/staff engineers. They’re spending a lot of time doing research, reviewing design docs, mentoring, and contributing their technical knowledge to high level planning meetings with directors and VPs.
I’d also agree with others that something like a “10x engineer” does exist, it just doesn’t look like the legend might have you believe. They’re not fast typing antisocial weirdos. They just understand the technical and business problems more deeply and have the breadth and depth of knowledge to come up with really good solutions. So in that regard, the value of their output is at least 10x that of their more junior peers.
This comment if I understood it correctly is basically saying that Google is probably over-paying Senior Engineers; Based on the OP's observation that "seems like very little of actual value is actually happening".
A Googler is likely best to answer here but my thesis is that since Google is just founded on the PageRank ideas of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, doesn't that already prove the value of highly skilled and highly intelligent people?
One highly intelligent person that can create a breakthrough like PageRank already creates immense value in the world so likely that is the reason that Google are willing to pay such high salaries for the best of the best.
I’m not sure if you’ve worked with a 100k engineer in the US but I’d almost always rather have one really good 300k engineer than 3 100k engineers. I mean 100k is pretty much entry level and not the cream of the crop for entry level either (which is closer to $150-250k).
When you get to 500+k you’re either talking about stock appreciation, or people in more of a leadership position/having specific technical expertise.
I’ll add that software is not necessarily a quantity thing. If you want things to have tons of features and have highly parallelizable tasks, it is. But if you want localized technical choices to be high quality you’d rather have one good person than three people who don’t know what they’re doing.
One our our engineers in a few of his sprints rewrote major pieces of Apache Tomcat, which is used in our very high TPS APIs. He fixed a bunch of the way the memory loading works, and drastically improved latency and stability of over 100 teams APIs. This guy had deep understanding of dependency injection, how java works under the hood, etc. This kind of thing might not be a huge win for a startup, but at a large corporation, you need people that can push the bounds on already well tested and well known open source software
So, say you have 500 machines serving something. This rewrite allows you to bring it down to 100.
This code change saves you 400 instances x 24 hrs x 365 x aws cost per hour. And the next year, and the year after that, and maybe the one after that too.
Throwing more metal at the problem is the favored solution when the issue is transient, the company doesn’t scale, or the company is shitty.
There have been a lot of companies that tried the strategy you're suggesting; Friendster and Yahoo, for example. It turns out that "letting ... labor take such a big piece of the pie" is a much more profitable strategy.
This results from the underlying factor structure of the industry over the past quarter century. Classically, the factors of production are land, labor, and capital. Capital provides the means of production such as factories, bribed politicians, and lathes; land provides natural resources such as rainfall, sunlight, coal, and zinc ore; and labor applies one to the other to produce something which can be sold for revenue. This revenue is then divided up among the owners of land, labor, and capital.
The division doesn't reflect any kind of moral or objective valuation of the importance of the three factors; rather, it results from market processes in which the owners negotiate with one another.
Power in these negotiations results from owning a scarce resource. We're having this conversation with 100,000 other people on a web site hosted on a single server running on probably 200 watts. So the server costs maybe US$1000, the "land" costs probably US$1000/year, and it required labor that would have cost maybe US$100,000 to get it running in the first place, plus on the order of another US$100,000 a year to pay dang for moderation. The land and capital in this case are pretty fungible, and very little of them is needed. The labor is not.
A rank-and-file steelworker negotiating with the owner of a blast furnace is in a poor negotiating position because there aren't many blast furnaces around, he doesn't have one in his backyard, and there are lots of potential steelworkers with enough impulse control to avoid tripping and falling into the melt. The foreman who knows how to prevent breakouts from damaging the blast furnace and killing his coworkers is scarcer, but he's still probably limited to quitting to work for the other steel mill across town; he can't set up his own steel mill either.
By contrast, all the capital I need for my work is a US$300 laptop and a US$10/month VPS.
So the bizarre algorithm tests are not the cause of these salaries. The underlying factor structure is.
This also explains why hardware engineers are paid so much less than software engineers: an Intel chip designer can't quit and go into competition with Intel, the way the Intel founders and Chuck Peddle did, because even though you can buy foundry services on the open market, Intel's designs are festooned with patent barbed wire, and it commonly takes a million dollars and a year to get an ASIC fabbed, so you need significant startup capital. Modern patents are correctly analyzed as a way to improve the bargaining position of the owners of capital with respect to labor so that the revenues flow to investors instead of employees.
So why is it different in Europe and India? My guess is that you can't run a profitable business there without the right connections (not necessarily outright bribery), so people with the pull have the negotiating power, so they can take home the profits. And Europeans and Indians can't work in the US without visas, which are controlled by (capital-intensive) immigration lawyers and, of course, pull.
> Maybe a bigger question is: why are these big companies letting fungible labor take such a big piece of the pie?
there's a lot to dig into in this comment, but I think this is the biggest thing you are missing. the leadership of big tech companies generally does not look at revenue as a fixed-size pie to be divvied up between themselves and their subordinates. instead, they try to grow the pie as fast as possible so they can justify their own salaries and bonuses to the board. if this means paying way over market for labor, so be it. they'll keep doing it as long as they grow revenue by more than they spend on SDE salaries (modulo some organization dysfunction, of course).
the point of the $300k salaries is not to hire engineers that are 3x better; it's to hire armies of engineers very quickly. this is where the absurd algo interviews come in. a large company hiring at this pace does not have the time or the manager incentive alignment to make holistic hiring decisions. some terrible engineers that test well do slip through the cracks, but they can be PIPed out before they cost too much money.
“ the leadership of big tech companies generally does not look at revenue as a fixed-size pie to be divvied up between themselves and their subordinates. instead, they try to grow the pie as fast as possible so they can justify their own salaries and bonuses to the board.”
> How many 750k engineers are actually producing 7x a 100k engineer?
A huge part of the market is hilarious bad. It's insane. People graduate from school and can barely program, and even after years they don't get a whole lot better.
Yes, people often think of the baseline as good. This may be true in fields where people only do it for love, like programming back in the day.
The absolute dominance of computing has created such a draw that the average is in the gutter. Something as simple as pointers is beyond the skill of untold thousands.
We don’t have the gatekeepers that medicine and law do, so what to do? Pay more, make more interesting work, etc to filter out the cream, or rather, the previously decent.
Typically, a $750k engineer designs and builds the software that makes the $100k engineers productive, or can solve Hard Problems that a $100k engineer is unlikely to solve and may not even recognize. They are paid as much as they are not just because of the impact on productivity, but also because the $100k engineers do not have the skills to produce what the $750k engineer produces. One cannot be replaced with the other. Even if you do not have an immediate use for these very expensive engineers, it can be extraordinarily valuable to have them around for when you do need them.
Having engineers that are very good at solving Hard Problems is a major asset. They have the potential to save you countless millions of dollars when Hard Problems occur. They may be doing low-value things part of the time, but if they can deliver on the Hard Problems when they occur then they are worth it.
Generally speaking, $750k class engineers, and I know many, are extremely capable and have skills far beyond the average engineer. That's why they are paid what they are paid. They have achieved a degree of mastery that few engineers achieve.
It is not only a function of value being produced, but of supply and demand. If Google wants to hire a certain level of engineer in a certain location, they have to pay $750K, just because those engineers have other options that pay as much. Yes, at some point Google may think it’s not economically feasible to hire SWEs at that cost anymore, but given the huge profits of the tech industry it doesn’t seem like we are close to it yet.
Facebook definitely needs the "fanciest" engineers. Simple problems become much more complex at scale and Facebook also solves plenty of really hard problems. Also when your whole business relies on tech the costs of bad engineering and the benefits of great engineering are both enormous. I think I'd always have an incredible engineer for 700k or however many k rather than a 5 mediocre engineers. More people rarely solve problems, better people do
I'm not sure about other companies, but in Amazon a $1M engineer tells you how to build a VM called firecracker, another $1M engineer single-handedly implemented a distributed log service and made it the backbone of multiple AWS services. Another $1M engineer convinced the company to build EC2 and SQS. In Snowflake, a $1M engineer spearheaded the Apache BEAM initiative and wrote the best book on stream processing when he was in Google. In FB, a $1M engineer lead the RxJava and Hystrix projects for years until functional reactive programing turned from a niche into something mainstream. The list can go on.
It is in India as well. The salaries have doubled in the last couple of years. Hiring has become extremely difficult. Good SWEs typically have 2-3 offers at 2x to 3x salaries
Can you give some ballpark absolute salary numbers here? It's a different story if we're talking about doubling from US$10k/year to US$20k/year or if we're talking about doubling from US$250k/year to US$500k/year.
I know, but when India exports rice it doesn't sell it at a tenth of the global rice price because "that's a massive sum of money in India tbh". Why should people exporting software engineering services settle for ten cents on the dollar? Because their neighbors are poor? Their neighbors will stay poor longer if they leave 90% of their potential export revenue on the table.
They shouldn't I'm fully pro people in India getting paid the same as the us. We are in fact seeing some equalization of salaries around the globe. Top talent is getting paid top dollar everywhere
I am making 18LPA INR(23.5K USD), and just got an offer for 2x the amount(48K USD approx). I have an offer being negotiated with another one, and am expecting 1-2 more offers. I still have interviews lined up, and probably need to be more selective now to avoid interview burnout. I have <2 yoe.
This puts me in top 2% in India and top 5% in the world by income. While I am aware that I can get 4-5x this offer in US, I can't demand that offer here because 1. It's not trivial to immigrate to US, unless I am willing to spend 2 years on (another) Masters degree or spend many more on a PhD. 2. It's a supply demand issue, where at some point, they will be willing to hire someone else than pay me 4x more.
For now, I am hoping that after a few years, I'd be able to immigrate without having to first study in west, or having to take the huge financial risk of immigrating first and then looking for a job. If (political) shit hits the fan though, I might get desperate enough to try one of that option.
With such high salaries I'm not sure if there's any place on earth other than SF that can come close to the standard of living you will live with $48k in Indian metro city.
If you're spending your money on healthcare, a cook, chauffeur, maid, and housing, then sure; you can probably get better healthcare than in the US if you pay for it. But as I said elsewhere, if what you're interested in is retiring in Costa Rica, buying a fleet of DJI drones, or buying a berth on Starship to Mars, US$48k is just US$48k. Or even clothes.
As far as I know, apartments in biggest cities are also very expensive. So if you don't inherit anything, and you are on your own, I'm not sure it's 48k is really that much?
Are we really interested in fairness and equitable compensation or is it that these wide ranges are just more visible now that everyone’s salaries are pretty much accessible and widely known
Question is can we (the collective we) get the same piece of that pie when everyone is global and remote based on merit alone- various forms of protectionism will conspire against this..
I know some excellent software engineers making 15$ per hour because they are stuck in India and I know folks with same talent making 200$ per hour for some US consulting firms because that’s what they can get out of them..
Fair? No - understandable yes- free market? Not quite - yes cost of living makes one persons 15$ Per hour worth more than another’s but it is unfair -
I’m US based engineer applying for FAANG companies now that I can work remotely from the south and hoping for a compensation bump - it’s not in my interest for those jobs to go “offshore” to top talent in Poland or India (just what does Offshore mean anyway in todays world?)
I would say that Europe is on fire right now, however due to a combination of Brexit, IR35 and COVID, companies are a lot more willing to hire remotely across Europe.
At the end of last year I had an initial call with a certain London based food delivery company, and the recruiter said they had to place 100 engineers over the next year. He said that it was now much harder to find people in the UK, and most of the people they'd already placed (over the last few months) were outside the UK.
This was a role advertising rates of £650/day. In the UK you can live pretty comfortably like that, in Spain or Poland you can live like a king.
This doesn't really increase the top end salaries, but it does mean they become more balanced across Europe.
I live in the Baltics, and have seen local roles advertised paying up to €90k (I'm guessing 'up to' is the key part, but still). That's at similar levels (or slightly higher) than non-London UK salaries. To get a salary like that 5 years ago you'd have to go to the UK (or maybe Berlin), and people here did, but now you can get the same at home.
US market is on fire for a small group of experience senior devs. In the corp world, small startups, majority of grads not so much. I'm not at a FANG company and just did our annual review where most the team got 0 or 2% raise.
I know many startups who are now paying _interns_ more than other companies are paying senior devs. It is conceivable to get paid $70+/h at Series A startups as an intern and $140-150k + 20-40k in options as a new grad.
Speaking frankly as someone who has worked at bog standard F500 companies that pay "not so much" to HFT, experience is not nearly as important as raw skill. A 20+ year experience engineer who has mediocre skills will never be able to write a compiler, work on complex distributed systems, or bring new verticals to market (think AR, VR, ML applications) very quickly. A skilled new grad might be able to contribute meaningfully if their hand is held on architecture and design.
For example, it's a reasonable expectation for those skilled new grads to be able to grok and start doing easy tasks in a complex codebase (e.g. on PyTorch or Spark itself or business logic in a distributed system) within a week or less, and for them to require at most 1-2 hours of help from an existing engineer to get started. I posit that a 20+ year mediocre engineer is never going to get the skills to contribute to something like PyTorch if they haven't developed those skills in the 20 years they've worked.
>It is conceivable to get paid $70+/h at Series A startups as an intern and $140-150k + 20-40k in options as a new grad.
conceivable? Sure. But what use is "conceivable"? I'd rather know what is "normal" i.e. common.
I think it's more pertinent to represent the median, than say the 80th-90th+ percentile.
For example, I almost interviewed with Vercel recently (accepted an offer from different company, instead of continuing to interview)-- Series D currently [1].
And sure-- this is only one datapoint-- but I think it still illumniates that $70+/h as an intern may be "conceivable" but I doubt it's "common"...
0-1 years of experience there at Vercel pays about $70k-$100k -- And that's in Boston / San Francisco. I would have expected more, given those locations.
Meanwhile, my first programming job was also about $100k, in San Jose, CA (4 months exp. before getting laid off). And then later, $80k on contract, fully remote (2 months on contract. Then got hired on salary by a different company at $105k, still 100% remote.).
Now I have about 3 years of SWE experience and making about $170k TC fully remote ($140k base plus some equity).
I think using comparative benchmarks instead of absolute benchmarks is where we differ. The absolute bar - being able to grok large codebases, work on complex systems, etc. with some help from a senior engineer - is not high. It's the equivalent of a proper undergrad education in CS. So when you set the bar at a, in my opinion, very achievable level, the benchmark is $70/hr for interns. We're not talking Jeff Dean or Linus levels of skill here. You can't just look at the percentiles and say it's unachievable. You have to look at it objectively. We're in a talent shortage precisely because there aren't enough people that meet the low bar.
The question should be, if I work my ass off and get good at what I do, how much could I potentially make as a random new grad / 2-3 yoe SWE? And the answer to that is if you meet the already very low bar, you can make a lot. I never compare myself to the average and you shouldn't either.
I know when my friends at startups look to hire they don't target percentiles, they target an absolute level of skill or intelligence.
> 0-1 years of experience there at Vercel pays about $70k-$100k
That would be getting underpaid if you had the skills I mentioned above.
> Now I have about 3 years of SWE experience
My whole point is that years of experience don't necessarily make you a better engineer. It correlates, but in general having more skill is a step function change compared to another year of experience. A senior engineer at mediocre level will be less productive than a new grad engineer at high skill that needs their hand held on design, because the high skill engineer is capable of doing things the mediocre one can't even complete with infinite time.
Can you give some ballpark absolute numbers here? It's a very different story if we're talking about a 2% raise at US$40k/year or a 2% raise at US$400k/year.
My understanding is that engineers in India are earning 10x what they were earning 10 years ago. Maybe someone more familiar with the Indian software market can elaborate.
A better way of thinking about this is what % are people paid of the revenue per employee the company makes. Google is about 1.5M per employee. They have a lot of money to give.
Because Europe is and always has been a terrible place to be for SWEs. If you want to earn 75% less than your American counterparts and pay 25%+ more in taxes, stay in Europe. If not, get a visa and get out.
You are giving up literally millions of dollars by living in Europe. No amount of free healthcare makes up for the gap. By the way, healthcare is low cost / essentially free at most tech companies in the US.
In my experience, healthcare is poor at most tech companies in the US. Every now and then you get a "we cover 100%" claim - which again is usually 100% of the premium for their selected plans for you...the same as any other company. It's tailored for the typical college grad and not much more. I've declined company insurance 100% of the time over the last 25 years, since I prefer Kaiser. Ofc it's not unusual for companies to only pay into the cheapest providers, when providing employees benefits.
If you have any serious medical issues, you carry your own insurance. Luckily, the salary generally makes this feasible.
> If you have any serious medical issues, you carry your own insurance
I've never seen this at any tech company in the SFBA. They cover 100% of the premium for yourself and it's only <$200/mo to cover a whole family of dependents. Their plans are always among the best. Copays are the lowest by far of anything I've ever seen, including ACA marketplace plans, my parents' plans, school offered plans, and non-"tech" company plans.
$200/mo is way, way less than I pay in taxes to CA state alone.
> since I prefer Kaiser
Obviously if you want Kaiser and they don't offer it you have to buy it yourself. Personally I don't feel like the difference is too huge that it justifies buying insurance myself. I used to have Kaiser and you get slightly smaller delays (3 days instead of say a week) to see specialists and that's it.
Healthcare is only the thing that people most quip about.
Don't get me wrong, there are many good things about the US (e.g. networking opportunities, better availability of new tech, VC for startups, freedom to do things that just aren't possible in Europe), but OTOH, it's much harder to find safe walkable neighborhoods, excellent public transport, solidly built houses, and in San Francisco apparently human feces are a problem because of a homelessness crisis.
The US healthcare system has very poor outcome measures across the board; even rich areas in the US have poorer health outcomes than many other parts of the world. If you're young this probably doesn't matter unless you have a chronic disease. Old people might prefer to be middle-class in a country with reasonable healthcare than superrich in a country where decent healthcare is unavailable at any price.
I'm fairly convinced that a larger part of recruiting by the big companies is to evaporate the hiring market for every other company out there.
Yes, developers are doing amazing things at a lot of these companies. However, the most amazing thing they are doing is not working at another shop. This is particularly true for the companies that have a habit of "moon shot" projects that are not likely to see customers.
I wonder if that's true. Most FAANG companies didn't even humor to interview me as a graduate, while I have a bachelor in information science and master in CS. My average grade as an A during my master (8 out 10 in The Netherlands [1]). 3 years later, Facebook humored me. I didn't pass it (poor sleep), but I did pass one coding interview.
So in this case, Facebook would've picked me up while other companies wouldn't even think I'd be worthwhile to even give an interview to. I have a hunch this happens quite often.
If anyone would have a chat with me (email in profile) and see if I'm referral worthy, I'd be grateful :) I'm happy where I am now, but I think I'd like to switch in a year or two. And unfortunately, I don't think I'll get there without referrals.
FAANG companies don't care about your educational background. While I agree that their standards for who is worth hiring are inconsistent and incoherent, the hazing ritual isn't entirely random.
In Europe specifically, I think there is some cultural impedance mismatch. US tech companies default to the culture of the US West Coast, which has norms that are quite different than Europe. The Europeans that I know that seemed to seamlessly integrate into the FAANG outposts are notable for being, as individuals, pretty far outside the median European culture in a way that is compatible with US West Coast culture. (Tech, even in the US, has a strongly West Coast cultural flavor, which globally is a relatively unique culture generally.)
I wouldn’t even get an invite (other than Facebook 3 years after graduation). I am incredibly curious when it comes to American culture as I am on the English web all the time. It’s not that.
The issue is that FAANG has a narrative that FAANG hires graduate students if those students have done reasonably well at a good university. What they fail to say is that this only seems to he true for US students. And it is painful. I don’t get any feedback as to why I don’t get invited, all I can do is guess.
Master computer science
Bachelor information science
Being a TA in programming courses
Being an iOS developer
Being a coding bootcamp instructor
Side projects
I did all this while I while I was studying.
And I still I didn’t get invited.
I mean what more can I do? Tell me, I will do it. I like computing, I love tech. I’d love to see a FAANG and get the chance to experience it.
I didn’t even get a chance for an invite to a graduate position. Instead I got 3 years worth of struggle, a mild depression even. Because I believed the meritocracy narrative. But if it was about pure merit, then I would at least get an invite, judging by all the blog posts I read from people that did.
But I didn’t from any of them. And I hold them accountable. They don’t owe me anything but they lied at scale with their meritocratic narrative. I don’t think it’s intentional but it’s also a problem they are not seemingly fixing. And it then hurts to see that computer science is all about “problem solving” because they are not solving this problem, while they (especially Google) claim to be unbiased and meritocratic.
9 years of studies (6 years in computer science related degrees), 2 years of work experience, good grades. All done in the timespan of 8 years.
No invite.
More importantly, no feedback. Just me guessing in the dark why I don’t get a chance and others do.
It feels unfair and painful. It’s not the end of the world by any means, but it is a stark contrast to university, where I got every chance in the world and I aced it. I owned my education! You just need to show up and have the right qualifications. With FAANG I can say that’s not the case.
I am sorry for the rant. It’s the flip side of ambition. I am one of the examples that you don’t normally see due to survivorship bias, and I didn’t get there. I wanted to work for Google [1] and Facebook [2] in 2018 and they were the highest companies on my list and I didn’t want to settle because I wanted to work passionately.
[1] I liked that Google held empirical thinking in high regard
[2] Like Zuckerberg, I studied psychology and computer science. So I felt academically related to him (or anyone that has done that combination for that matter).
Hate to hear you are having a hard time breathing in to FAANG, if that is what you want. Stick with it, is the only real advice I have. :(
I think there many things that could help. I doubt there are many things that will help. That is, there is likely not a single set of advice that will make a difference. However, sampling all advice is likely to do so.
My sample: stay social. Find ways to make interviews somewhat interactive. Not just question answer, but probe and explore. Definitive answers exist for some things, absolutely. However, most of those are already in books. Interesting question is how you, specifically you, have engaged in things. And what is an interview, but you engaging with a company?
Other than that, you do need to be somewhat quick coding interview style. I don't think there is any getting around that, at the moment.
Did you apply cold, or get referrals? I think having an acquaintance at FANG to refer you is an important foot in the door if you have no prior FANG work experience.
I apologize if my point is taken as "sole" goal. I don't think there is truly a single goal involved. And, at large, this makes sense. Companies with extra money can afford extra risk on projects that have an obvious tendency to fail.
For the interviewing, I don't really have a good answer. Would be easy to say that the interviewing process is broken. But that drastically undersells how difficult interviewing is.
Even the Indian hiring market is on fire. Very hard to recruit right now, we have had open positions for months. We have been taking endless interviews, those who are good have multiple offers and shop around. We have seen lots of attrition also since if you jump ship you will get a bump of at least 30%.
No Idea, but the the range is huge, on the one side you may have small consultancies which may be paying like 8k to 10k INR a month, which translates to 1.2k USD in annual compensation. At the other extreme, you have these unicorns and FAANGs where people are getting 100K USD in annual compensation.
But ... it is on fire. We offered senior SWEs in Ukraine about 4kUSD around september, in February they were asking for 6kUSD, and we would have gotten them, if it werent for the war which made senior management back out.
Perhaps the fire is cushioned/spread out by the different rates in different countries, but some markets are definitely on fire, we heard the same thing but worse (alt. better) in Poland.
Do you mean US$6000 per year, US$6000 per month, or US$6000 per two-week paycheck? (Presumably not per hour.)
Even US$6000 per two-week paycheck is only US$150k/year, which sounds like it's about 20% of what the same people will get if they can immigrate to the US.
US$72000/year sounds insanely low though. Like, it's literally an order of magnitude lower than the numbers Dan Luu is talking about. And it's pretty common for US companies to pay every two weeks, and I suspect aliswe's company may be in the US if it's paying in USD.
I suspect it's per month and using $ because you wouldn't intuitively know how much the Ukrainian currency is worth if you're not Ukrainian.
$72k/year is low for the US but for Ukrainian standard it isn't - apparently median wage (in general, not for programmers) in Ukraine is $6936.84/year while in the US it's $35,977/year, so a factor of ~5.2x.
Does $372k/year still sound ridiculously low in the US?
US$372k/year sounds reasonable in the US (even, to my eyes, surprisingly high, but apparently normal now). But in either place saving 20% of US$72k/year gets you about the same amount toward whatever goal you have, whether that's retiring in Costa Rica, buying a fleet of DJI drones, or buying a berth on Starship to Mars. There's no reason you should be expected to leave 80% of your potential earnings on the table if you move from San Francisco to Ukraine.
What people in your neighborhood earn only matters if you're hiring them or competing with them for some limited commodity such as housing.
The point is what other options they have unless they are willing to immigrate. I don’t think these $72k developers are American expats but Ukrainians that for whatever reason don’t want or can’t leave their home country.
And there are much more flagrant instances of borders determining your salary than that - when I was studying in Vienna I had a friend who studied with me and after school went back to his hometown in Poland. We both started our first jobs at the same time, with the same education and same title/job, and I was earning 3x his salary simply because I stayed in Vienna (Poland isn’t that far from Germany and Austria).
Layoffs might indeed happen , but a lot of those salaries are based on stock value. So the more likely scenario is that those salaries just become lower with stock prices.
One of the reasons CEO pay exploded over the last few decades is that every company wants to pay “above market average,” which of course is impossible by definition. But they find out what the market average is, then beat it, thus raise the new market average, which the next company then has to go and beat.
I’m sure something similar is going on for software engineers. To some degree, of course it is.
I'm from Valencia, Spain, and something very interesting to note is that most software developers I've spoken with in here don't believe these numbers. Like, if you tell them that a software engineer in SF can make $500k/year, they'd think that you are either joking (most common), naive for believing that yourself, you are trying to con them, or that okay it might happen to one that was very lucky but as a total anomaly[1] and you misunderstood, like on a lucky exit.
Luckily in recent years (thank God) they've started to learn that they are underpaid, and that SWE is an occupation that ought to be paid more (for scalability reasons) than many other professions, so salaries are rising. Specially thanks to international companies in Barcelona. But in my hometown Valencia, I'm pretty sure I'd still sound like crazy, or like I'm trying to con someone, if I was talking about those "crazy American salaries".
Note: things in Barcelona are prob better, this is just my experience in more "rural" Valencia
[1] I do know it's not common, but also it's not "an statistical fluke" so to speak
I don’t believe it either. I mean I know it’s a thing but it seems so isolated to a few engineers at very few companies in a very small area. I’m in Europe, have 15 years experience and an “architect” type role since 10. I make around $80k/yr (Europe caveats apply - I’d want at least 50% more in the US) I still think these FAANG salaries are just people from certain universities having bidding wars for alumni from the same schools while measuring quality with whiteboard coding.
I’d be very happy to work remotely as a $150k emgineer, but I doubt that’s possible. I can see around zero job ads e.g on StackOverflow careers that approach FAANG figures.
It's not hard to work remotely at €250k a year. I live in Amsterdam and did it last year via https://a.team for a Canadian company. It only took a few weeks to find a gig and I probably could have asked for me.
If you look at the last "Who's hiring" thread, there was even a company in Amsterdam offering €200k salaries. I know Uber offers more than that too.
And a friend of a friend just got an offer from Facebook in Germany for €400k.
Dunno. I spent a year at a unicorn at ~100k€, and I hated the lack of meaningful work so much that I went for a contractor job in a public institution. It pays more, and I get to serve the citizens instead of serving mad corporate overlords.
I do not live in one of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the US. The closest top 20 metro area is 250 miles away (I suppose this meant more before Covid and WFH).
I do not have a college degree.
In terms of programming work, I have some part-time experience at very low pay at very small, pre-seed startups for a few years, and then two years of programming at a big company where I work full-time. At the time I was at these places I was also taking college courses and working another non-tech job.
My W2 last year was over $165k, all pay from my company. I have to check the numbers, but with 401k matching and stock discount, I think my real TC was actually more like $175k.
If I cared more about getting money in the near-term, and spent more time doing Leetcode I am sure I could make tens of thousands more in TC. Over $200k easily (easily be able to make it, spending weeks doing Leetcode is not easy for me to make time for currently).
At my company I know people just out of college for a year or two who are very good but who made <$100k. One left and is making more than me now, the other joined last year.
Levels.fyi used offer letters, W2s etc. The numbers look real to me, and everyone I talk to seems to agree. I do not work at a FAANG, I work at a traditional Fortune 500 company.
>I’m in Europe, have 15 years experience and an “architect” type role since 10. I make around $80k/yr
I am sure you can find something that pays quite a bit more if you look around. I am earning 75k eur (82k usd) a year with 4 years of experience, although as a somewhat niche-specialized engineer. This is in Germany.
I also didn't believe it until I met someone making that money and then I got hired for a similar amount, so now my whole perspective has changed from "$100-$200k jobs are a myth" to "oh now I make that so it's real, so now $500K+ jobs are a myth"!
But ofc I know better and I know that's a personal bias (specially when I see this same bias stronger in my friends with who I grew up with) so now my question is "if this is real how can I be one of those people making $500k+?", even if it's just a mental exercise -because I'm not willing to move to the US-.
Be careful how much of the compensation is Stocks/Shares as that is likely to collapse. For anybody based in Europe most tax laws are right down hostile to any granted stock options.
In the US in 2020: "Software Developers made a median salary of $110,140 in 2020. The best-paid 25 percent made $140,470 that year, while the lowest-paid 25 percent made $84,020."
Keep in mind the completely different situation of medical insurance in the US.
Remote is an option but then companies claim to pay according to where you are based.
Bay Area/San Francisco based 250k compensation does not impress, after you apply taxes, and you realize you will have to share a flat with four other colleagues...
> SWE is an occupation that ought to be paid more (for scalability reasons)
Scalability isn't a reason for salaries to be higher.
It doesn't matter if an employee generates $1M/year or $100M/year for the company; if somebody else would accept to do it for $100k/year that's what he's getting.
It is, maybe as a second order force but if Google, Facebook etc can pay Engineers those salaries, it's only because of their already well oiled scalability that those Engineers built; if they were selling anything with tiny margins, they could not have a large percentage of their employees have a huge salary. And this is what generates demand, which generates scarcity of talent, which makes both what you say and what I said true.
To understand that scalability (/margin per employee) is true, a good counter example would be: if there was a constrain of McDonnalds employees for some reason and that persisted, the company could not afford to pay them $100k salaries because it just doesn't make that much profit per employee (does not scale).
I’ve often wondered if the reason Bay Area engineers are paid so much more than in other places is not because of anything they’re doing, but because of their cross functional counterparts. A team is often composed of not just engineers, but product managers, designers, people managers, data analysts, program managers, quality assurance, etc. Having them all in one place, or at least in a similar time zone makes a difference.
If you can’t build out a *full* team in one region, you have to go where you can. So while you might be able to find plenty of engineers in Poland (for example), if you can’t also get a product manager, a designer, and an eng manager, you may not be able to hire any of those engineers, and you’re just going to have to look for where you can hire everyone. That may mean going to the Bay Area and paying engineers there their market rate.
Seems to me over in Europe or India they don't have a place where there was a gold rush in the last 170 years, and with a century of capital appreciation built on that, spawned an outfit like HP 70 years ago with its incredible growth potential which attracted engineers from all over for decades. Then with proximity to more easy-come risk-capital like after Hollywood money shot through the roof.
And the foundation was all very well in place before the 21st century came around.
Silicon Valley primarily (not exclusively) derived from East Coast industrial money in terms of backing it initially and building it up. Over time it spawned its own large scale capital structure as the successes rolled in, and that snowball has been rolling down the hill ever since. The California gold rush and supposed related capital appreciation had very little to do with the Silicon Valley outcome.
As a generalization, Europe still has a tendency to focus on quantity over quality. There is still a strong tendency to view engineering skill and culture as undifferentiated. Factory workers.
Few people working in West Coast tech believes that, and hires accordingly. In the traditional West Coast tech market, engineers are modeled more as elite athletes who are members of a sports team. You can't replace Lionel Messi with a bunch of scrubs from the local pub. Having elite talent in key roles can make or break your company/project. Anecdotally, this tends to be true in practice too. Ambitious companies will pay almost anything to have elite engineers in every position of their team if they can make it happen. Being cheap doesn't matter if you never win.
Funny that you say that Europe hires based on quantity and then you put an example (Lionel Messi) of a European football player*.
I don't believe that's true. We also have our "rockstars" in Europe that we know are nigh unreplaceable, from Santiago Calatrava (architect), soccer players as you said, etc. in modern times to all of the classic artists and architects which are known by name.
I think one big difference is that technology came a decade or more later to e.g. Spain, so there's still a strong generational difference where older hiring people do not see a big difference from a "kid" fixing their computer/phone or making a website, and don't see the value so much. Add all of the other related things, like even if they saw it valuable there's little related infra, specific knowledge, etc.
*weeell technically Argentinian but the high of his career was in Spain
I would say the factory worker mentality is actually an "everywhere but west coast US tech firms". I worked for a while for a few New Yorkers and they had exactly the same mentality, but they came from finance.
"Ambitious companies will pay almost anything to have elite engineers in every position of their team ... Being cheap doesn't matter if you never win"
This mentality and most of the wage inflation is down to extremely loose VC markets that are almost entirely focused on software, not something actually inherent to the USA or the job market. There are huge numbers of firms and industries which are not winner takes all, and in which price does matter. Being cheap can in fact matter if the market you're in simply doesn't have a single winner and lots of losers.
VCs generally aren't interested in such businesses however, because they only care about businesses that could potentially have absurd levels of return, which in practice means they select firms that make promises of entirely dominating their chosen area. But that's really hard to do through skill alone, hence the proliferation of companies that simply attempt to buy the entire market using nothing but VC money (see: Uber).
1) The contracting scene in the UK is massive, that's where a lot of the higher paying UK tech jobs are. I suspect this skews the salary averages.
2) I'm in South Africa, I've recently been approached on linked-in to (quote) "Earn a US based salary working remotely from South Africa". So it seems some US recruiters are starting to look further afield.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadin a sarcastic tone, most answers boil down to:
- why pay more (US level) when you can pay just slightly more than the rest.
- a culture of viewing makers/engineering as something lower level, to make it you got to be a 'Manager' or 'Director' of something, doesn't matter what. director of mopping, regional director of moving crates, international director in charge of that small sub-section of the website no one know exists or uses...
- more money motivated people not constrained by personal circumstances just move out to where the money is.
I know the UK still refers to digital- this and digital- that, like we’re still in some magical Tomorrow’s World where computers go beep beep boop and watches and calculators have glowing red numbers on them but only when you hold down a button.
It’s getting better, but the tech scene also used to be hobbled by the usual class antics of Annabels-membership-esque popularity contests. You made it on the London tech scene not when you hit $100M ARR or a $1bn exit, but when your holiday party got featured in Tatler.
There is thankfully lots of serious tech outside of London’s second-fiddle-to finance bubble. You can make Google SWE salaries in Europe if you work at Goldman Sachs in London, but you can also command a decent salary if you work for many of the series Bs anywhere but London.
Someone outside of say, +/- 4 hours, is just harder to work with.
How many 750k engineers are actually producing 7x a 100k engineer? I look at companies like Google and aside from the core cash cow (ads) it seems like very little of value is actually happening. They have the cash flow so I guess why not burn it on staff, but e.g. how many 500k or even 250k engineers did Google assign to reinvent messaging for the nth time? How many shitty attempts at a Google watch? How many Meta/Facebook/Instagram clones of some other social network’s feature?
I get that there are occasionally known-by-name engineers who it would make sense to pay for, but I don’t think that constitutes a general “market for SWEs”.
Maybe it is just the market for FAANG SWEs, but they do lots of weird things to constrain their hiring (e.g. only hiring from certain schools or doing bizarre algorithm tests) so really they’re playing themselves at shareholder expense.
Maybe a bigger question is: why are these big companies letting fungible labor take such a big piece of the pie? Facebook likes having the fanciest engineers, but I seriously doubt that they _need_ them.
Anyway, off to the job boards, I guess.
This is why others are running the ship. Your exact example, which you don’t understand, is a perfect example of why you SHOULD give k8s away.
For example I did a stint at a F500 company where 1) a data engineer did not know how to use multiprocessing to parallelize a multi-terabyte S3 upload 2) an internal tool that fired off hundreds of network requests did not use concurrency and hence had 30+ second latency 3) a certain other team was dumping hundreds of terabytes of logs that nobody even knew the schema of into S3 automatically, and none of it was ever touched. Also seen: "data scientists" who did not know Python and executives that spent more time talking about Scrum than any concrete execution.
Take the uploading to s3 point. If you are saturating your network... going multithreaded will do nothing. If you are not, find out why.
The other examples are also lacking a lot of details. 30 seconds of latency can be bad, of course. But so can adding concurrency to a team that doesn't understand it well. (Really, this one sounds like it just needs more context. I'd normally push to remove extra calls moreso than jumping to concurrency. But, each has its place.)
Edit: And the logs... this is just a result of not putting cost as a tracked item for teams. Too many folks fall afoul of a hoarder mentality when it comes to logs.
Similarly, an otherwise great developer can be horrible in a team that doesn't know how to use them.
It might also be that it's not worth spending effort on speeding up some script like this. How often does it run?
Do these 30 seconds matter? Maybe they do now but they didn't in the beginning, but then that's ok, too, and you refactor.
The only engineers who produce value are a small set. Everyone else you try not to have because they’ll slow everyone down.
And, in any case, you’re not going to want it to hold. We all have failing hypotheses. The trick is to have lots of succeeding ones and for the failing ones to fail early.
Whether amazing or not isn’t the deal. The only question is whether it yields more money tomorrow. If it doesn’t, it’s not good.
seems like a very different skill than big tech coders.
even if the impl can be quite involved, it seems rather strange that someone could make money from very simple strategies? seems to contradict common sense.
I worked at a hedge fund that did a bit of HFT. They mostly took pride though in the fact that they made money using intelligence rather than just being really fast.
Not only are the technical challenges different at large scale, the product and human challenges are different. The 750 principle is basically leading a 500+ engineer org’s technical vision and steering the ship. Not only is it crazy difficult to get 500 people align on a vision, but the mechanics of organizing and leading that large number of people are unique too.
Plus product wise a 750k engineer can save the company multiples of that just by advocating on what not to do, and avoid expensive mistakes.
I’ve learned more in 2 years at big tech than I have in 7 in local companies or smaller startups.
I’d also agree with others that something like a “10x engineer” does exist, it just doesn’t look like the legend might have you believe. They’re not fast typing antisocial weirdos. They just understand the technical and business problems more deeply and have the breadth and depth of knowledge to come up with really good solutions. So in that regard, the value of their output is at least 10x that of their more junior peers.
So not that different from senior management pay grades in other industries.
A Googler is likely best to answer here but my thesis is that since Google is just founded on the PageRank ideas of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, doesn't that already prove the value of highly skilled and highly intelligent people?
One highly intelligent person that can create a breakthrough like PageRank already creates immense value in the world so likely that is the reason that Google are willing to pay such high salaries for the best of the best.
When you get to 500+k you’re either talking about stock appreciation, or people in more of a leadership position/having specific technical expertise.
I’ll add that software is not necessarily a quantity thing. If you want things to have tons of features and have highly parallelizable tasks, it is. But if you want localized technical choices to be high quality you’d rather have one good person than three people who don’t know what they’re doing.
Finance, Management Consulting, Law, Medicine.
This code change saves you 400 instances x 24 hrs x 365 x aws cost per hour. And the next year, and the year after that, and maybe the one after that too.
Throwing more metal at the problem is the favored solution when the issue is transient, the company doesn’t scale, or the company is shitty.
This results from the underlying factor structure of the industry over the past quarter century. Classically, the factors of production are land, labor, and capital. Capital provides the means of production such as factories, bribed politicians, and lathes; land provides natural resources such as rainfall, sunlight, coal, and zinc ore; and labor applies one to the other to produce something which can be sold for revenue. This revenue is then divided up among the owners of land, labor, and capital.
The division doesn't reflect any kind of moral or objective valuation of the importance of the three factors; rather, it results from market processes in which the owners negotiate with one another.
Power in these negotiations results from owning a scarce resource. We're having this conversation with 100,000 other people on a web site hosted on a single server running on probably 200 watts. So the server costs maybe US$1000, the "land" costs probably US$1000/year, and it required labor that would have cost maybe US$100,000 to get it running in the first place, plus on the order of another US$100,000 a year to pay dang for moderation. The land and capital in this case are pretty fungible, and very little of them is needed. The labor is not.
A rank-and-file steelworker negotiating with the owner of a blast furnace is in a poor negotiating position because there aren't many blast furnaces around, he doesn't have one in his backyard, and there are lots of potential steelworkers with enough impulse control to avoid tripping and falling into the melt. The foreman who knows how to prevent breakouts from damaging the blast furnace and killing his coworkers is scarcer, but he's still probably limited to quitting to work for the other steel mill across town; he can't set up his own steel mill either.
By contrast, all the capital I need for my work is a US$300 laptop and a US$10/month VPS.
So the bizarre algorithm tests are not the cause of these salaries. The underlying factor structure is.
This also explains why hardware engineers are paid so much less than software engineers: an Intel chip designer can't quit and go into competition with Intel, the way the Intel founders and Chuck Peddle did, because even though you can buy foundry services on the open market, Intel's designs are festooned with patent barbed wire, and it commonly takes a million dollars and a year to get an ASIC fabbed, so you need significant startup capital. Modern patents are correctly analyzed as a way to improve the bargaining position of the owners of capital with respect to labor so that the revenues flow to investors instead of employees.
So why is it different in Europe and India? My guess is that you can't run a profitable business there without the right connections (not necessarily outright bribery), so people with the pull have the negotiating power, so they can take home the profits. And Europeans and Indians can't work in the US without visas, which are controlled by (capital-intensive) immigration lawyers and, of course, pull.
there's a lot to dig into in this comment, but I think this is the biggest thing you are missing. the leadership of big tech companies generally does not look at revenue as a fixed-size pie to be divvied up between themselves and their subordinates. instead, they try to grow the pie as fast as possible so they can justify their own salaries and bonuses to the board. if this means paying way over market for labor, so be it. they'll keep doing it as long as they grow revenue by more than they spend on SDE salaries (modulo some organization dysfunction, of course).
the point of the $300k salaries is not to hire engineers that are 3x better; it's to hire armies of engineers very quickly. this is where the absurd algo interviews come in. a large company hiring at this pace does not have the time or the manager incentive alignment to make holistic hiring decisions. some terrible engineers that test well do slip through the cracks, but they can be PIPed out before they cost too much money.
Right. And yet they collude to keep salaries low.
A huge part of the market is hilarious bad. It's insane. People graduate from school and can barely program, and even after years they don't get a whole lot better.
So yeah, absolutely there are people 7x better.
The absolute dominance of computing has created such a draw that the average is in the gutter. Something as simple as pointers is beyond the skill of untold thousands.
We don’t have the gatekeepers that medicine and law do, so what to do? Pay more, make more interesting work, etc to filter out the cream, or rather, the previously decent.
Having engineers that are very good at solving Hard Problems is a major asset. They have the potential to save you countless millions of dollars when Hard Problems occur. They may be doing low-value things part of the time, but if they can deliver on the Hard Problems when they occur then they are worth it.
Generally speaking, $750k class engineers, and I know many, are extremely capable and have skills far beyond the average engineer. That's why they are paid what they are paid. They have achieved a degree of mastery that few engineers achieve.
The Twitter thread https://birdsite.xanny.family/Tennistetris/status/1473033790... suggests that maybe we're talking about US$80k-US$130k per year for senior developers in India. Presumably that's post-doubling.
This puts me in top 2% in India and top 5% in the world by income. While I am aware that I can get 4-5x this offer in US, I can't demand that offer here because 1. It's not trivial to immigrate to US, unless I am willing to spend 2 years on (another) Masters degree or spend many more on a PhD. 2. It's a supply demand issue, where at some point, they will be willing to hire someone else than pay me 4x more.
For now, I am hoping that after a few years, I'd be able to immigrate without having to first study in west, or having to take the huge financial risk of immigrating first and then looking for a job. If (political) shit hits the fan though, I might get desperate enough to try one of that option.
If you're spending your money on healthcare, a cook, chauffeur, maid, and housing, then sure; you can probably get better healthcare than in the US if you pay for it. But as I said elsewhere, if what you're interested in is retiring in Costa Rica, buying a fleet of DJI drones, or buying a berth on Starship to Mars, US$48k is just US$48k. Or even clothes.
Salary levels at companies != US & Europe & India’s hiring market.
Are we really interested in fairness and equitable compensation or is it that these wide ranges are just more visible now that everyone’s salaries are pretty much accessible and widely known
Question is can we (the collective we) get the same piece of that pie when everyone is global and remote based on merit alone- various forms of protectionism will conspire against this..
I know some excellent software engineers making 15$ per hour because they are stuck in India and I know folks with same talent making 200$ per hour for some US consulting firms because that’s what they can get out of them..
Fair? No - understandable yes- free market? Not quite - yes cost of living makes one persons 15$ Per hour worth more than another’s but it is unfair -
I’m US based engineer applying for FAANG companies now that I can work remotely from the south and hoping for a compensation bump - it’s not in my interest for those jobs to go “offshore” to top talent in Poland or India (just what does Offshore mean anyway in todays world?)
But this is one reason so many come to where wages are high: to send money home where is goes a lot further.
At the end of last year I had an initial call with a certain London based food delivery company, and the recruiter said they had to place 100 engineers over the next year. He said that it was now much harder to find people in the UK, and most of the people they'd already placed (over the last few months) were outside the UK.
This was a role advertising rates of £650/day. In the UK you can live pretty comfortably like that, in Spain or Poland you can live like a king.
This doesn't really increase the top end salaries, but it does mean they become more balanced across Europe.
I live in the Baltics, and have seen local roles advertised paying up to €90k (I'm guessing 'up to' is the key part, but still). That's at similar levels (or slightly higher) than non-London UK salaries. To get a salary like that 5 years ago you'd have to go to the UK (or maybe Berlin), and people here did, but now you can get the same at home.
Speaking frankly as someone who has worked at bog standard F500 companies that pay "not so much" to HFT, experience is not nearly as important as raw skill. A 20+ year experience engineer who has mediocre skills will never be able to write a compiler, work on complex distributed systems, or bring new verticals to market (think AR, VR, ML applications) very quickly. A skilled new grad might be able to contribute meaningfully if their hand is held on architecture and design.
For example, it's a reasonable expectation for those skilled new grads to be able to grok and start doing easy tasks in a complex codebase (e.g. on PyTorch or Spark itself or business logic in a distributed system) within a week or less, and for them to require at most 1-2 hours of help from an existing engineer to get started. I posit that a 20+ year mediocre engineer is never going to get the skills to contribute to something like PyTorch if they haven't developed those skills in the 20 years they've worked.
conceivable? Sure. But what use is "conceivable"? I'd rather know what is "normal" i.e. common.
I think it's more pertinent to represent the median, than say the 80th-90th+ percentile.
For example, I almost interviewed with Vercel recently (accepted an offer from different company, instead of continuing to interview)-- Series D currently [1].
And sure-- this is only one datapoint-- but I think it still illumniates that $70+/h as an intern may be "conceivable" but I doubt it's "common"...
0-1 years of experience there at Vercel pays about $70k-$100k -- And that's in Boston / San Francisco. I would have expected more, given those locations.
Meanwhile, my first programming job was also about $100k, in San Jose, CA (4 months exp. before getting laid off). And then later, $80k on contract, fully remote (2 months on contract. Then got hired on salary by a different company at $105k, still 100% remote.).
Now I have about 3 years of SWE experience and making about $170k TC fully remote ($140k base plus some equity).
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Vercel/salaries/Software-Engi...
[1] https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-funding-series-d-and-valuatio...
[2]https://www.levels.fyi/company/Vercel/salaries/Software-Engi...
I think using comparative benchmarks instead of absolute benchmarks is where we differ. The absolute bar - being able to grok large codebases, work on complex systems, etc. with some help from a senior engineer - is not high. It's the equivalent of a proper undergrad education in CS. So when you set the bar at a, in my opinion, very achievable level, the benchmark is $70/hr for interns. We're not talking Jeff Dean or Linus levels of skill here. You can't just look at the percentiles and say it's unachievable. You have to look at it objectively. We're in a talent shortage precisely because there aren't enough people that meet the low bar.
The question should be, if I work my ass off and get good at what I do, how much could I potentially make as a random new grad / 2-3 yoe SWE? And the answer to that is if you meet the already very low bar, you can make a lot. I never compare myself to the average and you shouldn't either.
I know when my friends at startups look to hire they don't target percentiles, they target an absolute level of skill or intelligence.
> 0-1 years of experience there at Vercel pays about $70k-$100k
That would be getting underpaid if you had the skills I mentioned above.
> Now I have about 3 years of SWE experience
My whole point is that years of experience don't necessarily make you a better engineer. It correlates, but in general having more skill is a step function change compared to another year of experience. A senior engineer at mediocre level will be less productive than a new grad engineer at high skill that needs their hand held on design, because the high skill engineer is capable of doing things the mediocre one can't even complete with infinite time.
You are giving up literally millions of dollars by living in Europe. No amount of free healthcare makes up for the gap. By the way, healthcare is low cost / essentially free at most tech companies in the US.
If you have any serious medical issues, you carry your own insurance. Luckily, the salary generally makes this feasible.
I've never seen this at any tech company in the SFBA. They cover 100% of the premium for yourself and it's only <$200/mo to cover a whole family of dependents. Their plans are always among the best. Copays are the lowest by far of anything I've ever seen, including ACA marketplace plans, my parents' plans, school offered plans, and non-"tech" company plans.
$200/mo is way, way less than I pay in taxes to CA state alone.
> since I prefer Kaiser
Obviously if you want Kaiser and they don't offer it you have to buy it yourself. Personally I don't feel like the difference is too huge that it justifies buying insurance myself. I used to have Kaiser and you get slightly smaller delays (3 days instead of say a week) to see specialists and that's it.
Don't get me wrong, there are many good things about the US (e.g. networking opportunities, better availability of new tech, VC for startups, freedom to do things that just aren't possible in Europe), but OTOH, it's much harder to find safe walkable neighborhoods, excellent public transport, solidly built houses, and in San Francisco apparently human feces are a problem because of a homelessness crisis.
Yes, developers are doing amazing things at a lot of these companies. However, the most amazing thing they are doing is not working at another shop. This is particularly true for the companies that have a habit of "moon shot" projects that are not likely to see customers.
So in this case, Facebook would've picked me up while other companies wouldn't even think I'd be worthwhile to even give an interview to. I have a hunch this happens quite often.
If anyone would have a chat with me (email in profile) and see if I'm referral worthy, I'd be grateful :) I'm happy where I am now, but I think I'd like to switch in a year or two. And unfortunately, I don't think I'll get there without referrals.
[1] Conversion guide: https://students.uu.nl/sites/default/files/geo-grading-syste...
In Europe specifically, I think there is some cultural impedance mismatch. US tech companies default to the culture of the US West Coast, which has norms that are quite different than Europe. The Europeans that I know that seemed to seamlessly integrate into the FAANG outposts are notable for being, as individuals, pretty far outside the median European culture in a way that is compatible with US West Coast culture. (Tech, even in the US, has a strongly West Coast cultural flavor, which globally is a relatively unique culture generally.)
The issue is that FAANG has a narrative that FAANG hires graduate students if those students have done reasonably well at a good university. What they fail to say is that this only seems to he true for US students. And it is painful. I don’t get any feedback as to why I don’t get invited, all I can do is guess.
Master computer science
Bachelor information science
Being a TA in programming courses
Being an iOS developer
Being a coding bootcamp instructor
Side projects
I did all this while I while I was studying.
And I still I didn’t get invited.
I mean what more can I do? Tell me, I will do it. I like computing, I love tech. I’d love to see a FAANG and get the chance to experience it.
I didn’t even get a chance for an invite to a graduate position. Instead I got 3 years worth of struggle, a mild depression even. Because I believed the meritocracy narrative. But if it was about pure merit, then I would at least get an invite, judging by all the blog posts I read from people that did.
But I didn’t from any of them. And I hold them accountable. They don’t owe me anything but they lied at scale with their meritocratic narrative. I don’t think it’s intentional but it’s also a problem they are not seemingly fixing. And it then hurts to see that computer science is all about “problem solving” because they are not solving this problem, while they (especially Google) claim to be unbiased and meritocratic.
9 years of studies (6 years in computer science related degrees), 2 years of work experience, good grades. All done in the timespan of 8 years.
No invite.
More importantly, no feedback. Just me guessing in the dark why I don’t get a chance and others do.
It feels unfair and painful. It’s not the end of the world by any means, but it is a stark contrast to university, where I got every chance in the world and I aced it. I owned my education! You just need to show up and have the right qualifications. With FAANG I can say that’s not the case.
I am sorry for the rant. It’s the flip side of ambition. I am one of the examples that you don’t normally see due to survivorship bias, and I didn’t get there. I wanted to work for Google [1] and Facebook [2] in 2018 and they were the highest companies on my list and I didn’t want to settle because I wanted to work passionately.
[1] I liked that Google held empirical thinking in high regard
[2] Like Zuckerberg, I studied psychology and computer science. So I felt academically related to him (or anyone that has done that combination for that matter).
I think there many things that could help. I doubt there are many things that will help. That is, there is likely not a single set of advice that will make a difference. However, sampling all advice is likely to do so.
My sample: stay social. Find ways to make interviews somewhat interactive. Not just question answer, but probe and explore. Definitive answers exist for some things, absolutely. However, most of those are already in books. Interesting question is how you, specifically you, have engaged in things. And what is an interview, but you engaging with a company?
Other than that, you do need to be somewhat quick coding interview style. I don't think there is any getting around that, at the moment.
Good luck!
For the interviewing, I don't really have a good answer. Would be easy to say that the interviewing process is broken. But that drastically undersells how difficult interviewing is.
Perhaps the fire is cushioned/spread out by the different rates in different countries, but some markets are definitely on fire, we heard the same thing but worse (alt. better) in Poland.
Even US$6000 per two-week paycheck is only US$150k/year, which sounds like it's about 20% of what the same people will get if they can immigrate to the US.
$72k/year is low for the US but for Ukrainian standard it isn't - apparently median wage (in general, not for programmers) in Ukraine is $6936.84/year while in the US it's $35,977/year, so a factor of ~5.2x.
Does $372k/year still sound ridiculously low in the US?
What people in your neighborhood earn only matters if you're hiring them or competing with them for some limited commodity such as housing.
And there are much more flagrant instances of borders determining your salary than that - when I was studying in Vienna I had a friend who studied with me and after school went back to his hometown in Poland. We both started our first jobs at the same time, with the same education and same title/job, and I was earning 3x his salary simply because I stayed in Vienna (Poland isn’t that far from Germany and Austria).
I’m sure something similar is going on for software engineers. To some degree, of course it is.
Luckily in recent years (thank God) they've started to learn that they are underpaid, and that SWE is an occupation that ought to be paid more (for scalability reasons) than many other professions, so salaries are rising. Specially thanks to international companies in Barcelona. But in my hometown Valencia, I'm pretty sure I'd still sound like crazy, or like I'm trying to con someone, if I was talking about those "crazy American salaries".
Note: things in Barcelona are prob better, this is just my experience in more "rural" Valencia
[1] I do know it's not common, but also it's not "an statistical fluke" so to speak
I’d be very happy to work remotely as a $150k emgineer, but I doubt that’s possible. I can see around zero job ads e.g on StackOverflow careers that approach FAANG figures.
If you look at the last "Who's hiring" thread, there was even a company in Amsterdam offering €200k salaries. I know Uber offers more than that too.
And a friend of a friend just got an offer from Facebook in Germany for €400k.
I do not live in one of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the US. The closest top 20 metro area is 250 miles away (I suppose this meant more before Covid and WFH).
I do not have a college degree.
In terms of programming work, I have some part-time experience at very low pay at very small, pre-seed startups for a few years, and then two years of programming at a big company where I work full-time. At the time I was at these places I was also taking college courses and working another non-tech job.
My W2 last year was over $165k, all pay from my company. I have to check the numbers, but with 401k matching and stock discount, I think my real TC was actually more like $175k.
If I cared more about getting money in the near-term, and spent more time doing Leetcode I am sure I could make tens of thousands more in TC. Over $200k easily (easily be able to make it, spending weeks doing Leetcode is not easy for me to make time for currently).
At my company I know people just out of college for a year or two who are very good but who made <$100k. One left and is making more than me now, the other joined last year.
Levels.fyi used offer letters, W2s etc. The numbers look real to me, and everyone I talk to seems to agree. I do not work at a FAANG, I work at a traditional Fortune 500 company.
I am sure you can find something that pays quite a bit more if you look around. I am earning 75k eur (82k usd) a year with 4 years of experience, although as a somewhat niche-specialized engineer. This is in Germany.
https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...
But ofc I know better and I know that's a personal bias (specially when I see this same bias stronger in my friends with who I grew up with) so now my question is "if this is real how can I be one of those people making $500k+?", even if it's just a mental exercise -because I'm not willing to move to the US-.
Edit: ofc the best jobs are not in Stackoverflow, if you try to buy a new ferrari you don't go to ebay.com, so the best jobs are only found mouth-to-mouth, in company-specific pages (normally without price attached), or in more niche places like Ask HN as my fellow commenter suggested: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ or look at what Uber has to say: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
In the US in 2020: "Software Developers made a median salary of $110,140 in 2020. The best-paid 25 percent made $140,470 that year, while the lowest-paid 25 percent made $84,020."
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope....
Keep in mind the completely different situation of medical insurance in the US. Remote is an option but then companies claim to pay according to where you are based.
Bay Area/San Francisco based 250k compensation does not impress, after you apply taxes, and you realize you will have to share a flat with four other colleagues...
Scalability isn't a reason for salaries to be higher.
It doesn't matter if an employee generates $1M/year or $100M/year for the company; if somebody else would accept to do it for $100k/year that's what he's getting.
Very true but they aren’t. That’s what makes it a hot market.
To understand that scalability (/margin per employee) is true, a good counter example would be: if there was a constrain of McDonnalds employees for some reason and that persisted, the company could not afford to pay them $100k salaries because it just doesn't make that much profit per employee (does not scale).
If you can’t build out a *full* team in one region, you have to go where you can. So while you might be able to find plenty of engineers in Poland (for example), if you can’t also get a product manager, a designer, and an eng manager, you may not be able to hire any of those engineers, and you’re just going to have to look for where you can hire everyone. That may mean going to the Bay Area and paying engineers there their market rate.
Just a theory.
And the foundation was all very well in place before the 21st century came around.
Few people working in West Coast tech believes that, and hires accordingly. In the traditional West Coast tech market, engineers are modeled more as elite athletes who are members of a sports team. You can't replace Lionel Messi with a bunch of scrubs from the local pub. Having elite talent in key roles can make or break your company/project. Anecdotally, this tends to be true in practice too. Ambitious companies will pay almost anything to have elite engineers in every position of their team if they can make it happen. Being cheap doesn't matter if you never win.
I don't believe that's true. We also have our "rockstars" in Europe that we know are nigh unreplaceable, from Santiago Calatrava (architect), soccer players as you said, etc. in modern times to all of the classic artists and architects which are known by name.
I think one big difference is that technology came a decade or more later to e.g. Spain, so there's still a strong generational difference where older hiring people do not see a big difference from a "kid" fixing their computer/phone or making a website, and don't see the value so much. Add all of the other related things, like even if they saw it valuable there's little related infra, specific knowledge, etc.
*weeell technically Argentinian but the high of his career was in Spain
"Ambitious companies will pay almost anything to have elite engineers in every position of their team ... Being cheap doesn't matter if you never win"
This mentality and most of the wage inflation is down to extremely loose VC markets that are almost entirely focused on software, not something actually inherent to the USA or the job market. There are huge numbers of firms and industries which are not winner takes all, and in which price does matter. Being cheap can in fact matter if the market you're in simply doesn't have a single winner and lots of losers.
VCs generally aren't interested in such businesses however, because they only care about businesses that could potentially have absurd levels of return, which in practice means they select firms that make promises of entirely dominating their chosen area. But that's really hard to do through skill alone, hence the proliferation of companies that simply attempt to buy the entire market using nothing but VC money (see: Uber).
Same here, left a role with a NYC company for this reason. Was a big culture shock for me coming from West coast companies.
2) I'm in South Africa, I've recently been approached on linked-in to (quote) "Earn a US based salary working remotely from South Africa". So it seems some US recruiters are starting to look further afield.