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> That may be true but will also effectively exclude strong experienced candidates with options. What options will you have as an experienced candidate which a

> That may be true but will also effectively exclude strong experienced candidates with options. What options will you have as an experienced candidate which are competitive with FAANG? I'm an experienced engineer, and my leading FAANG offers were over 50% higher than my top non-FAANG offer. In fact, my non-FAANG offers as an experienced engineer weren't much better than the offers junior candidates get. So unfortunately, it seems if you're an experienced candidate who wants to be appreciated and rewarded for your experience, FAANGs are basically your only option. Non-FAANGs will pay you maybe 30% more than a junior, and for that they'd expect you to lead a team and work twice as hard.

honkycat 7y ago
Yep. You just nailed my latest hiring experience. I moved on triumphantly from my previous programming job where I built a company's product from Greenfield to million a month with awesome performance and features. Other start-ups in my area are offering me 5-10k more than I was making at my last job to do the same thing again. My counter offer from a large company was 50k higher for a laid back environment. Guess which opportunity I took. Hilarious to me. One lead engineer is worth three junior engineer at least. I see startups doing the same thing over and over again. Hiring Junior developers fresh out of boot camp who are completely worthless, and refusing to spend money on high quality candidates who are interested.
- NeverFade 7y ago
  > One lead engineer is worth three junior engineer at least. Far more, I'd say. Fresh graduates and juniors are often held to almost no production bars at all. In many startups, you could be a junior for a year, accomplish very little, yet be in no danger of failing any performance metrics. Before I left the startup world behind, I observed that seniors were often held responsible to 95% of the production that was happening at their startup. You'd expect them to be paid x10-20 times as much as juniors, but instead it's typically no more than x1.3-1.4. So as a senior engineer with a track record of shipped projects, I get to work harder than all juniors, be held to x20 their performance metrics, and for that I get 30% better pay? No wonder every single senior engineer I know has a "FAANG or bust" attitude nowadays.
dilyevsky 7y ago
There’s a number of companies (mostly public, ofc) in the bay that pay competitively. In fact google is known for lowballing unless you collect offers from fb etc
- scarmig 7y ago
  My experience is that FB will offer a marginally better offer (30k or so more than G) for comparable levels, and those other public companies give a vaguely competitive offer that still falls short of G by about the same amount. Though I'd love to see actual data.
- NeverFade 7y ago
  What companies in the Bay pay better than Google? Google is known for "low-balling" if you compare to Facebook. My Google offer was higher than both my Amazon and Microsoft offer by a significant margin, and these offers in turn were higher than almost any other offer I had in the Bay. The only companies that got anywhere near Google on pay were some very exceptional unicorns.
  - coachdarek 7y ago
    Google will definitely “lowball” you if you don’t have competing offers. However once you do have them, google is very quick to match them. This is just my anecdotal experience though.
    - NeverFade 7y ago
      Not in my experience, nor that of my friends who got offers. My typical friend who got a Google offer, already had a bunch of other offers by the time their Google process finally completed. Then the Google offer came in and it was typically higher than most or all of these outstanding offers. Often substantially so. However, if you have an outlier offer that is based on some theoretical equity valuation ("an extra $1m in stock options based on our last fundraising round"), Google will not match it. Frankly, they don't need to when their initial offer is already higher than most other options, and far safer. Also from what I've seen, Google won't just match other offers, but they do have some specific companies whose offers they will match, like FB. FB is also one of the few companies that may offer you higher comp than Google.

honkycat 7y ago

Yep. You just nailed my latest hiring experience. I moved on triumphantly from my previous programming job where I built a company's product from Greenfield to million a month with awesome performance and features. Other start-ups in my area are offering me 5-10k more than I was making at my last job to do the same thing again. My counter offer from a large company was 50k higher for a laid back environment. Guess which opportunity I took. Hilarious to me. One lead engineer is worth three junior engineer at least. I see startups doing the same thing over and over again. Hiring Junior developers fresh out of boot camp who are completely worthless, and refusing to spend money on high quality candidates who are interested.

NeverFade 7y ago
> One lead engineer is worth three junior engineer at least. Far more, I'd say. Fresh graduates and juniors are often held to almost no production bars at all. In many startups, you could be a junior for a year, accomplish very little, yet be in no danger of failing any performance metrics. Before I left the startup world behind, I observed that seniors were often held responsible to 95% of the production that was happening at their startup. You'd expect them to be paid x10-20 times as much as juniors, but instead it's typically no more than x1.3-1.4. So as a senior engineer with a track record of shipped projects, I get to work harder than all juniors, be held to x20 their performance metrics, and for that I get 30% better pay? No wonder every single senior engineer I know has a "FAANG or bust" attitude nowadays.

dilyevsky 7y ago

There’s a number of companies (mostly public, ofc) in the bay that pay competitively. In fact google is known for lowballing unless you collect offers from fb etc

scarmig 7y ago
My experience is that FB will offer a marginally better offer (30k or so more than G) for comparable levels, and those other public companies give a vaguely competitive offer that still falls short of G by about the same amount. Though I'd love to see actual data.
NeverFade 7y ago
What companies in the Bay pay better than Google? Google is known for "low-balling" if you compare to Facebook. My Google offer was higher than both my Amazon and Microsoft offer by a significant margin, and these offers in turn were higher than almost any other offer I had in the Bay. The only companies that got anywhere near Google on pay were some very exceptional unicorns.
- coachdarek 7y ago
  Google will definitely “lowball” you if you don’t have competing offers. However once you do have them, google is very quick to match them. This is just my anecdotal experience though.
  - NeverFade 7y ago
    Not in my experience, nor that of my friends who got offers. My typical friend who got a Google offer, already had a bunch of other offers by the time their Google process finally completed. Then the Google offer came in and it was typically higher than most or all of these outstanding offers. Often substantially so. However, if you have an outlier offer that is based on some theoretical equity valuation ("an extra $1m in stock options based on our last fundraising round"), Google will not match it. Frankly, they don't need to when their initial offer is already higher than most other options, and far safer. Also from what I've seen, Google won't just match other offers, but they do have some specific companies whose offers they will match, like FB. FB is also one of the few companies that may offer you higher comp than Google.