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This doesn't undermine the author's point. As another commenter said, people are really underestimating the likelihood of earning a $250k salary at a large comp

• Cyberdog 11y ago
  > It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit senior level and live in a metropolitan area. If, if, if, if. Just by numbers, most devs don't meet these criteria. And even in the periods of time which I personally have, I still was not making anywhere near this kind of money. These numbers are inflated and out of reach to the vast majority of developers in the workplace today, full stop.
  • dsacco 11y ago
    Yes, there are if's involved. It is not certain that you will achieve senior tier at a large company in a metropolitan area. But you are also not certain to earn anything from your startup equity. I will reiterate - you are more likely to reach $250k working at a large company than you are to earn it (in salary or lump sum) at a startup. This has been corroborated by numerous individual's experience in this thread, including my own. I personally interact with companies that pay this on a weekly basis.
    • mkozlows 11y ago
      You need to quit saying "a metropolitan area" when you mean "Silicon Valley and a few places that have satellite offices for companies based in Silicon Valley," is the thing. Show me the companies in Columbus, OH that pay that way. Or Milwaukee, WI. Or or or.
      • darpa_escapee 11y ago
        New York, Philly and DC exist. They all have tech markets that are not at all dependent on SV.
        • ngoede 11y ago
          It is my experience that these figures are well on the high side for Philly though.
  • Retric 11y ago
    So, is hitting the startup jackpot. If a 250k job has 5% odds, and a startup jackpot has 1% odds then it's really worth thinking about.
  • fivedogit 11y ago
    You're exactly right. And it comes down to simple economic truths. If mass amounts of people could "easily" make 130k out of college on a path to 250k then the hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world would give up their ~$100k jobs and go do that. But they don't. Just look at glassdoor salary averages! It's right there in black and white! The sunny salary numbers he posits are, as you said, out of reach for most. (It should be noted that I completely agree with the article's conclusion. I've come to feel that the EV of buying a startup lottery ticket is woefully lower than pg, sama or [insert vc/angel here] assert. If you can land a solid and interesting bigco job, that's probably your best bet.)
    • thedufer 11y ago
      I think a good number of people just don't know that they're underpaid. I worked 3 years at ~100k, then started interviewing and quickly moved up to the kind of numbers mentioned in the article (note: nyc, so all numbers are somewhat inflated). I also gave up some unvested equity, but there's no way it could be worth anywhere near the salary difference.
  • deegles 11y ago
    Of course most devs don't make it to senior, but even fewer devs cash out significantly from startups. I think that's the point they're trying to make. i.e Say there are two groups of 100 engineers of equal average ability. One goes into megacorps and the others do startups. Which group will have earned more as a whole after 5 years? 10 years?
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• noname123 11y ago
  >"senior" is the last level that everyone is expected to hit, and at which you are "allowed" to not seek further promotions. I was under the impression that Senior is mid-level? I thought the ladder went, Junior/Associate, (Just) Software Engineer, Senior (some places have Senior I/II), then Principal, and finally (Optional for really big companies with R&D like Cisco/Juniper/United Technologies), Fellow or Distinguished Engineer (and Senior Fellow). >a senior engineer at a large company (and thus earn ~$250k in salary) I'm under the impression that the $250K salary is total comp, usually $150K in Silicon Valley (which is like $80K in fly-over country) and $100K in stock options/bonuses which varies year to year (e.g., what was the annual bonus of SV programmers in the year of 2002-2005? vested options now worth for employees of TWTR and LivingSocial?); also how secure are these Senior Engineer jobs and people's average tenure at those jobs? What is their hourly wage accounting for how many hours they work? I propose a better formula for salary range for all job ad's, your cost-of-living adjusted annual salary * (1 - % involuntary attrition per year at your company) * (40 hours / avg hours worked of employees in the team) + (50-percentile bonus) + (employee stock options {if not public 0 else 50-percentile of the cohort of the one year price target of stock analysts}).
  • dsacco 11y ago
    Yes, senior is mid-level if you look at a ladder. It's usually SWE I, SWE II, Senior, Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, Distinguished, etc. for large companies. What I meant was that large companies expect all hires to eventually hit senior, give or take 3 - 6 years. If you don't, they have something of an "up or out" approach, where it counts against you in subsequent reviews. However, not everyone is expected to achieve Staff or higher.
  • stvswn 11y ago
    Risk adjustment is definitely appropriate, but I think the author is being conservative even with this in mind. You're right that "Senior" is still mid-level, but the author is being conservative. The reality at a healthy, profitable company is something like this: $250k being the "total comp" for someone is a T5 seems right to me, even adjusting for risk. A T5 at Google, Facebook, or Apple is likely earning much more than this as their stock from 4 years ago is vesting at a much higher price than it was granted at. 150k guaranteed comp, 25k bonus, 75k vesting equity is low for the companies w/ equity run-ups in the past several years, in my opinion. Also worth noting -- the bonus is basically guaranteed. It can be much higher if you get very good performance ratings. The author also didn't include 401k matching (about 8.5k there), free offsites to go skiing or go to Vegas (w/ team trips to Hawaii not unheard of for high profile, long-term projects), generous medical/dental/vision benefits, free food, free gyms, matching charitable donations... And IDK if it's just my team, I don't see people working extremely long hours. You're totally right that you're at the mercy of stock prices in some regard -- but it works in two directions. Both FB and GOOG have gone up something like 150% in the past 5 years. So if someone got an initial stock grant of 200k vesting over 4 years, last year that 50k at vest time was more like 100k. Meanwhile they've gotten subsequent equity refresh grants -- the actual equity comp might be more like 200k, not 75k.
• vonmoltke 11y ago
  > It's really, really doable at a large company within 5 years if you hit senior level and live in a metropolitan area. So Dallas doesn't count as a metropolitan area? I can almost guarantee nobody here is making that kind of money after only five years. In fact, I'm willing to bet that this kind of compensation is extremely rare outside SV, NYC, and possibly Seattle. In fact, based on what I remember of the salary bands at my former company, it was impossible to reach $250k/year in five years, anywhere in the country.
  • humanrebar 11y ago
    Some cost of living calculators make $150k in Dallas equal about $250 in NYC. It's worth noting that $150k is high for Dallas, but not impossible for people with Principal, Fellow, or Chief in their job titles. It's worth noting that using a flat cost-of-living adjustment both overestimates and underestimates things. The kind of place you'd likely rent in Plano or Addison would cost ridiculous amounts in NYC, given comparable neighborhood qualities and commutes. You can easily afford to have three, four, or more kids. In NYC, one kid is doable, two is a challenge, three is crazy. From that metric, $150k in DFW sounds awesome. Though if your goal is retirement, maxing out your 401k in NYC is much easier. If you plan on moving to a lower cost-of-living area to retire, or are otherwise looking to hit a certain dollar-figure for some reason (paying for kids to go to college), NYC probably has the edge. That is, people usually adjust their total salaries for cost of living but ignore that annual contributions to medium-term and long-term savings generally shouldn't be adjusted.
    • atomicUpdate 11y ago
      > It's worth noting that $150k is high for Dallas, but not impossible for people with Principal, Fellow, or Chief in their job titles. No one is reaching any of those titles 5 years out of college though.
      • humanrebar 11y ago
        Absolutely not, no.
• fredkbloggs 11y ago
  They are also overestimating the likelihood of hitting the jackpot at a startup. The d100 rule of thumb guidance is insanely optimistic; there is not anywhere close to a 5% chance that your lottery ticket will be worth life-changing money; it's probably 1% at best (and later discussion suggests that 0.5% might be about right). Nor is there a 30% chance your ticket will be worth anything; 10% is more realistic (ignoring all the ways that your ticket in particular may end up being worthless), and the "anything" is likely to be so small as to be noise relative to a BigCo base salary. Remember, a general rule of thumb across all industries is that 90% of new ventures fail within 5 years. Of course, given today's stock market prices, it's likely that any options you get at BigCo will be out of the money when they finally vest, and there's a good chance your RSUs will be worth less than you're valuing them today. But the effects of these things are still much smaller than the vastly overstated likelihood of ending up with a winning lottery ticket.
• serge2k 11y ago
  > This is so doable within five years that at large companies like Google and Microsoft you are expected to hit senior level, and if you don't it begins to reflect badly on your record. More explicitly, "senior" is the last level that everyone is expected to hit Not at Amazon. They are fine if people cap out at SDE 2. It's a bit of an odd thing IMO, and it's resulted in a comparatively low number of senior and above level SDE.
  • QuercusMax 11y ago
    Probably because Amazon has enough problem with retention as it is, they don't want to encourage even more people to leave.
    • whamalama 11y ago
      Pretty much. The ratcheting hiring bar[1] and the punishing promo process[2] mean that SDE II has to be treated as a career role as a practical matter for the tech orgs to continue to function. As hard as it is to retain good engineers, it'd be even harder to retain good managers if they were expected to manage all their SDE II's up or out. [1] - Every new hire is expected to be better than 50% of the current employees in a given role and level across the company. This means the "bar" for a given role and level continuously trends higher modulo attrition. [2] - Senior engineer candidates typically require at least a dozen peers and managers at or above the senior level to each dedicate a couple of hours to write detailed SBI feedback. The promo candidate's manager then has to spend many more hours crafting a lengthy document from this. The doc then gets reviewed (i.e. picked apart) multiple times at every management tier up to the org VP. At any point along the way it may be punted back for rework, or denied. The process gets even more cumbersome going to principal - so much so that it's often said that the easiest path from senior SDE is to leave Amazon for a couple of years and get hired back as a principal. source: former Amazonian who really liked working at Amazon, but who finally got an offer elsewhere he couldn't refuse.
      • serge2k 11y ago
        > punishing promo process you mean the ridiculous and pretty broken process?