4 ms·

"For each engineer that we hired in the Bay Area, we could have hired 10–15 outside of it. Everyone has heard of 10x engineers, but what they don't tell you is

"For each engineer that we hired in the Bay Area, we could have hired 10–15 outside of it. Everyone has heard of 10x engineers, but what they don't tell you is that the Bay Area doesn't have a monopoly on them." This really surprised me, thought it was a big gap, but not this big

sokoloff 8y ago
To be clear, this is SFBay Area vs India, not SFBA vs Midwest. We have excellent engineers in India (and other locations in the world); it's not nearly as easy or quick to build high-performing teams in India, but it's absolutely doable.
- leesec 8y ago
  There are excellent engineers in the Midwest too.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    But the salary differential between top engineer in the Bay Area vs. top engineer in the Midwest is more like 2-3x than 10-15x.
    - pageandrew 8y ago
      OK, it's not 2-3x. Especially if we're talking salary. Salary for a top individual contributor engineer in the Bay Area (full stack), outside of specific skillsets like ML/AI, will top out around $200k. Midwest, someone with the same skillset would probably make $125-150k.
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        Total comp in Bay Area is often around $300-400K. That includes generous equity though, so may not be relevant when talking about startup salary affordability.
        bdamm 8y ago
        Often? Seems like $150-200k is closer to the norm.
        nostrademons 8y ago
        For FAANG I'm pretty sure it's in the $300-400K range. If you include all tech jobs (including startups and old-line jobs at eg. IBM, HP, Oracle, National Semiconductor, etc.) I could see it averaging out to $150-200K, but only because the previous-generation companies don't give equity and equity in many startups is worthless. The flip side of this is that if you pick the right startup (AirBnB, Lyft, Uber, Stripe, etc. when they were startups), your equity is worth millions.
      - opportune 8y ago
        this is not true for TC at all, case in point see levels.fyi. $200k is basically one level above a new grad at some of the higher paying, well known companies
        pageandrew 8y ago
        I was referring to salary. I'm looking at Levels.fyi and at Google you only start to break $200k salary at L6 (Staff Engineer).
    - golemiprague 8y ago
      There is also cultural and distance difference, if you quantify it into money and time it might make the difference not so big, those things matter a lot especially in a startup. As opposed to the common touted dogma, diversity is not a strength and most successful startups are quite homogenous.
    - electricslpnsld 8y ago
      I’d say smaller than that. Working in Pittsburgh there are plenty of folks netting Bay Area comp packages (180K+ base salaries, 100K+ stock grants, big bonuses, etc). I don’t think the point of opening a Midwest office is cheaper engineers, but the ability to tap into local expertise cocentrations (robotics and AI/ML in the case of PGH).
HillRat 8y ago
Those are rather lower than what I would expect to pay for top India-based talent (however, I don’t buy on the open market), but not too many sigmas out of expectation. More like five or six devs once you factor in both US salary and benefit load factors, or perhaps two to four devs doing particularly high-value work such as AI/ML. Having said that, you have to include your on-site management (people and project), various other cost drivers (taxi or car costs, for example), domestic PMO and architecture oversight, and accept your delivery-days overage due to timezone and distance factors. In addition, those latter factors, plus a few regional-culture aspects, tend to result in needing more people (devs, supervisors, etc.) per function point than a pure colocated dev team. (Whereas a Mexico or LATAM team, while more expensive per developer, tends to be more agile for US-based projects due to timezone if nothing else.) Cheaper? Per developer, absolutely. Solid development chops? Sure. An unalloyed win? Not without its caveats, but definitely worth exploring.

sokoloff 8y ago

To be clear, this is SFBay Area vs India, not SFBA vs Midwest. We have excellent engineers in India (and other locations in the world); it's not nearly as easy or quick to build high-performing teams in India, but it's absolutely doable.

leesec 8y ago
There are excellent engineers in the Midwest too.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  But the salary differential between top engineer in the Bay Area vs. top engineer in the Midwest is more like 2-3x than 10-15x.
  - pageandrew 8y ago
    OK, it's not 2-3x. Especially if we're talking salary. Salary for a top individual contributor engineer in the Bay Area (full stack), outside of specific skillsets like ML/AI, will top out around $200k. Midwest, someone with the same skillset would probably make $125-150k.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      Total comp in Bay Area is often around $300-400K. That includes generous equity though, so may not be relevant when talking about startup salary affordability.
      - bdamm 8y ago
        Often? Seems like $150-200k is closer to the norm.
        nostrademons 8y ago
        For FAANG I'm pretty sure it's in the $300-400K range. If you include all tech jobs (including startups and old-line jobs at eg. IBM, HP, Oracle, National Semiconductor, etc.) I could see it averaging out to $150-200K, but only because the previous-generation companies don't give equity and equity in many startups is worthless. The flip side of this is that if you pick the right startup (AirBnB, Lyft, Uber, Stripe, etc. when they were startups), your equity is worth millions.
    - opportune 8y ago
      this is not true for TC at all, case in point see levels.fyi. $200k is basically one level above a new grad at some of the higher paying, well known companies
      - pageandrew 8y ago
        I was referring to salary. I'm looking at Levels.fyi and at Google you only start to break $200k salary at L6 (Staff Engineer).
  - golemiprague 8y ago
    There is also cultural and distance difference, if you quantify it into money and time it might make the difference not so big, those things matter a lot especially in a startup. As opposed to the common touted dogma, diversity is not a strength and most successful startups are quite homogenous.
  - electricslpnsld 8y ago
    I’d say smaller than that. Working in Pittsburgh there are plenty of folks netting Bay Area comp packages (180K+ base salaries, 100K+ stock grants, big bonuses, etc). I don’t think the point of opening a Midwest office is cheaper engineers, but the ability to tap into local expertise cocentrations (robotics and AI/ML in the case of PGH).

HillRat 8y ago

Those are rather lower than what I would expect to pay for top India-based talent (however, I don’t buy on the open market), but not too many sigmas out of expectation. More like five or six devs once you factor in both US salary and benefit load factors, or perhaps two to four devs doing particularly high-value work such as AI/ML. Having said that, you have to include your on-site management (people and project), various other cost drivers (taxi or car costs, for example), domestic PMO and architecture oversight, and accept your delivery-days overage due to timezone and distance factors. In addition, those latter factors, plus a few regional-culture aspects, tend to result in needing more people (devs, supervisors, etc.) per function point than a pure colocated dev team. (Whereas a Mexico or LATAM team, while more expensive per developer, tends to be more agile for US-based projects due to timezone if nothing else.) Cheaper? Per developer, absolutely. Solid development chops? Sure. An unalloyed win? Not without its caveats, but definitely worth exploring.