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My progression: 2008: Graduated with a BS in CS from University of London. I grew up in Europe. 2008: €30K - Joined a small company in Europe as their only pr
by DVassallo 8y ago
My progression:
2008: Graduated with a BS in CS from University of London. I grew up in Europe.
2008: €30K - Joined a small company in Europe as their only programmer doing vehicle GPS tracking.
2009: €30K - Still there.
2010: €50K - Joined Amazon in Dublin, Ireland as an SDE-1 (entry level) in the AWS CloudWatch team.
2011: €75K - Still at Amazon, same team.
2012: $120K - Moved to Seattle with the same team. Promoted to SDE-2.
2013: $150K - Still at Amazon, same team.
2014: $185K - Promoted to SDE-3 (senior level), same team.
2015: $230K - Still at Amazon, same team.
2016: $390K - Still at Amazon, same team.
2017: $470K - Still at Amazon, same team.
2018: $511K - Still at Amazon, same team.
2019: Left Amazon last month. You can read more about why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19135399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19135399
All figures are gross income as shown in my W2. My last 3 year-end (Dec) paystubs: http://imgur.com/a/EgIVQln http://imgur.com/a/EgIVQln
Ask me anything.
- fwip 8y agoWhatcha doing now that you're a millionaire?
- DVassallo 8y agoI’m working for myself. I’m exploring some ideas right now. My target is to have something on the market by around May, and then keep iterating/changing based on market feedback. Going to live off my savings until my work can cover my family’s expenses. I’m hoping that happens before I run out of savings.
- aerovistae 8y agoHow could you possibly run out of savings when you had that kind of income? Were you spending most of it? What is your monthly expense rate now? Perhaps you bought a multimillion dollar house?
- DVassallo 8y agoI live in Seattle (high cost of living area) and have 2 small kids (2 & 4). Just housing and insurance (health, life, disability, etc) are $84K/year. That’s before food and utilities. My total expenses are about $150K. I start with a round $1M in liquid savings, so it’s about 5.5 years of runway. There’s more detail about my finances in this post for those curious: https://danielvassallo.com/from-employee-to-bootstrapper/ https://danielvassallo.com/from-employee-to-bootstrapper/
- fwip 8y agoI live in Seattle too, and this is the first year I made more than $85k. But I don't have kids.
- DVassallo 8y agoYes, it’s more expensive with a family. The cheapest health insurance from Obamacare was $15K/year, with a $14K decidable. I live in a 2,500 sqft 3-bed townhouse and all housing costs are $64K/year (mortgage, HOA, and insurance). Then I have another $5K for life, disability, umbrella, and auto insurance.
- aerovistae 8y agoVery interesting blog post, to me at least.
- nicolashahn 8y agoHow common are these huge annual salary bumps at Amazon?
- kornish 8y agoThose total comp bumps from 2015-2019 were probably due to massive stock appreciation more than salary increase.
- DVassallo 8y agoOnly 2016 and 2017. The other years had minor impact from stock appreciation (~$5-15K). In 2016 I got a big bump because I got a competing offer from Oracle at $380K, and Amazon matched it.
- bitcoinmoney 8y agoCan you share what sort of skills related to cloud would net me 380k/year? Got a phd ee doing C++ mostly.
- DVassallo 8y ago5 years experience at one of the leading cloud companies (AWS, Azure, Google) will very likely put you right in that market. Nothing special to join. It’s very hard to enter directly as an SDE-3 (or equivalent) without having experience at one of the big companies. I think in 8 years at Amazon I’ve only seen 1 person doing that. With a phd and some work experience you can likely join as an SDE-2 and get to an SDE-3 level in about 5 years. The exact timing depends a bit on the opportunities you’d find, but I’d say that’s definitely very realistic. I can put you in touch with a recruiter from Amazon if you’re interested. My email is in my profile.
- bitcoinmoney 8y agoDo SDE3 interviews still do it leetcode style?
- sometechie 8y agoCare to share more about that retention bonus? Are those regularly used? Did they have a sense you’d be leaving?
- DVassallo 8y agoNo. I got that in 2016 because I had an offer from Oracle that included a $25K cash signup bonus and Amazon countered with an exact match.
- sometechie 8y agoYou must be missed at Amazon and were a good employee. Congrats!
- beamatronic 8y agoGraduated in the late 90s with a degree in CS. I read this and I wonder, where the hell did I go wrong? If this is commonplace, then how did I fail so spectacularly?
- isostatic 8y agoIt’s not commonplace.
- DVassallo 8y agoI was just in the right place, right time. Ten years ago my target was to make $100K/year by 2020. Never would have I imagined these amounts were even possible. But once I attained a basic level of financial security, additional income stopped mattering for my satisfaction. It’s one of the reasons I left, despite everything was going well by every traditional measure.
- meritt 8y agoA significant portion of his compensation was via recurring Amazon.com stock grants (RSUs). By year 4+ most employees are looking at least 3 separate stock grants vesting every single year. Had you bought $100,000 of $AMZN in 2010, it'd be worth $1.35M today (and $1.6M in September) which would go a long way toward evening things out in a similar manner.
- DVassallo 8y agoIt’s true that a big part of my comp was in stock, but I only meaningfully gained from stock appreciation in 2017 and 2018. In the other years stock appreciation accounted for only $5-$15K. I sold all my stock as soon as it vested, so I sold a lot at $200, $300, $400... etc. Even in 2017, I got it at all under $1000. Now it’s $1700.
- gok 8y agoHow many RSUs did you walk away from?
- DVassallo 8y agoAbout $650K that were going to vest in 2019 and 2020.
- koolba 8y agoThat’s insane. Do you seriously expect in five years to be in better financial shape then you would have been had you stuck it out?
- DVassallo 8y agoNo. But I'm not optimizing my life to make as much money as possible. I'd like to work on my own terms, doing things that intrinsically motivate me. If I can do that while covering my family expenses, I think I would have improved my life.
- koolba 8y agoI can’t speculate on mindset or motivation, but based on purely financials I’d have suggested sticking it out for a few more years to build up a larger nest egg. It’s not just the risk of not succeeding at your next venture; there’s the follow up risk that after failure you can’t get back in the game where you left off. That said, best of luck to you. Fortune favors the brave!
- gok 8y agoAssuming DV was able to save a good% of their money and get a reasonable return on it, their nest egg could easily be a couple million today. After taxes etc another 3 years might only grow that 10-15%.
- 8y ago
- rv-de 8y agothe relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19135399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19135399
- person_of_color 8y agoCan you do the same but only include base salary?
- DVassallo 8y agoBase salary was $160K since 2014. But why? The stock part ended up as money in my bank. These aren’t stock options like startups give. Public companies like to pay with stock because it didn’t impact their cash flow. The shareholders pay for it via dilution.
- person_of_color 8y agoDid you sell stock as soon as it vests? Why?
- ghaff 8y agoIf you don’t, you need to ask the question: if I had a pile of cash to invest, would I use it to purchase my company’s stock given that the stock price snd my employment opportunities there are at least loosely correlated?
- DVassallo 8y agoYes I did. I was always very exposed on the Amazon stock since I always had 2-3 years worth of granted RSUs that hadn’t vested yet. I didn’t want that much exposure.
- Double_a_92 8y agoDiversification. Even if you want stocks, you don't want them all from the same company. It would be better to just stick that money into some S&P500 index fund.
- eel 8y agoHow did you make SDE-3?
- DVassallo 8y agoI had the opportunity to lead the development of CloudWatch Logs in 2013-2014.
- aatma 8y agoI work in Canada government on Java ee for 3 years, worked on other legacy application on cobol etc earlier for 10 years. I have undergrad in CS. What technology can I learn to level up my salary with current market standards? I will appreciate any other advice to get up to those level.
- yomly 8y agowhat do L5s and L6s SDEs earn in London - do you have any insight into location based differences?
- DVassallo 8y agoI don’t know unfortunately. But if I were to guess, I think in the same ballpark as Seattle, maybe a bit lower.
- philpem 8y agoI look at numbers like this and think... where did I go wrong? I must have gone seriously, seriously wrong...