4 ms·
At the engineering departments of most large tech companies including Microsoft, people at the same pay grade are supposed to be making about the same amount of
by lacker 7y ago
At the engineering departments of most large tech companies including Microsoft, people at the same pay grade are supposed to be making about the same amount of money. The idea is that if you deserve a raise, you deserve a promotion too. So your job title and your salary aren’t like two different things.
Differences arise for many reasons. The most common in my experience is people who negotiate a higher starting salary. You don’t want to just give them more money forever so every year they get their salary tweaked back a bit toward the average for their level. There are also some bonuses that operate outside the normal system.
- DP0o4Dy4jWe2 7y ago> At the engineering departments of most large tech companies including Microsoft, people at the same pay grade are supposed to be making about the same amount of money. The idea is that if you deserve a raise, you deserve a promotion too. So your job title and your salary aren’t like two different things. This is not true. At FAANG companies and Microsoft, the total compensation bands for levels at or above "Senior SWE", "Senior SDE" are really wide. This is by design, and its widely communicated that this is the case. Most of the variation is in equity grants and bonus, rather than salary - if your management chain recognizes that you made a huge impact last year, you'll probably get huge equity refreshes and a giant bonus, although your salary might not rise by much. Promotions are a separate thing, because promotion beyond "Senior" implies a change to your role and expectations (more leadership, more "people coordination" even if you're not a people manager, etc.) It's totally possible that you're making an amazing impact in your current role in a way that merits additional compensation, but you're not meeting all the criteria for the next step on the ladder. That's fine - you're still going to get paid a huge amount more than the average for your level.
- joshuamorton 7y ago> This is not true. At FAANG companies and Microsoft, the total compensation bands for levels at or above "Senior SWE", "Senior SDE" are really wide. Ehh, not really. Up to the director level (well above senior), if you give me someone's level and last two performance evals, I can probably tell you their TC to within 5%. There's certainly a wide variance within senior and above levels, but it's not as bonus based as you suggest, and sustained high performance will often (although not always) lead to promotions. It's not like there are two senior SWEs with one making 2x what the other does. At least not at Amazon, M, or G. Since netflix doesn't have levels, that's possible, and my understanding is facebook has huge bonuses on occasion, but I'm also pretty sure you'll just end up getting promoted if you get too many of those.
- fierro 7y agohelllll no this is 100% not true. I worked at Google, and there is an internal spreadsheet with compensation that is contributed to on a voluntary basis, and has n=1000+ for many levels. The variance is far greater than 5%. *for Googlers, you can find this at go/salarycomp or something like that, I can't remember
- joshuamorton 7y agoI'm well aware of it. It doesn't include performance ratings. Which I mentioned ;)
- throwaway43892 7y agoWell, yeah - if you control for performance ratings, then pay is normally similar. The pay bands are wide due to pay for performance. Within a given level, employees with really high performance will be paid much more than those with average performance. At the FAANG company I'm familiar with, there are definitely "Senior SDEs" making ~double the average "Senior SDE" comp, because they consistently get really high performance ratings.