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What kind of work is being performed by those at the 200k level? machine learning or just like react, etc?
by coding123 8y ago
What kind of work is being performed by those at the 200k level? machine learning or just like react, etc?
- akhilcacharya 8y agoMy friend is making about that as a new grad at a trading company. He writes performant React code for high-speed table rendering. I know another guy making about that much at FB as a new grad. He works on Messenger games.
- symlinkk 8y agoSo in other words it's about how rich your company is, not how good your skillset is.
- pm90 8y agoIt’s both. You might be able to get a great offer, but usually won’t be able to get promoted without the skills.
- twblalock 8y agoThe rich companies are generally pretty demanding about the skillsets of job applicants. They can afford to be picky.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoNot really. The richest companies (1T peak valuations) don’t pay new grads this much.
- RhodesianHunter 8y agoLots of Java/C++/Go works pays 200k+
- marcell 8y agoI'd look at it from a different perspective. A low-level SWE salary might be $120k, and the all-in cost of employment might be $160k (benefits, taxes, office space, lunches, etc.). For a senior person, the base salary might be $200k, and the all-in cost might be $260k. So how does the senior person justify that extra $100k? Well, they just have to output about 2x more impact. In my experience, it is not very hard to be 2x more impactful than a junior engineer. This is not meant to be arrogant, just that it's very easy for a junior engineer to waste time on useless stuff. In some cases junior (or bad) engineers will be 10x or 50x slower than they should be. I've seen some really bad examples in my 10 year career. For example at my last job, a team of 2 engineers was using the wrong tool for a task, and this resulted in them taking 5x longer to deliver a worse product than alternates. I was able to do the same thing as them, but deliver much faster and at lower cost. In other cases, junior engineers will make poor decisions, or write bad code that needs to be refactored later. This can be simple things like thinking on the wrong layer of abstraction. Refactoring the bad code is effectively 10x slower than doing it right the first time. In all, I think paying an extra $100k for a good engineer is a real bargain for companies, because the impact can be so huge. The real challenge is figuring out who is a legit senior engineer.
- trolleyhacker 8y agoThanks to you, I've learned that I don't suffer from imposter syndrome. I just suck.
- twblalock 8y agoJust normal mid-to-senior-level stuff. I know people in that range who work in front end, Python, Java, Clojure -- sometimes just cranking on code all day, but often having some design and collaboration responsibilities. New grads can get that kind of total comp at Facebook and Google these days. But experience engineers can get that at a lot of larger companies.
- vkou 8y agoDepends on the company. FAANG will happily pay people 200k total comp to write plain-old Java.
- chx 8y agoI summarize my extra value succintly: I have already made the mistake you are about to make.