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> Doctors earn well but not particularly different from FAANG-style software salaries. Yes, but ALL doctors earn that much ALL the time, whereas the FAANG sala

> Doctors earn well but not particularly different from FAANG-style software salaries. Yes, but ALL doctors earn that much ALL the time, whereas the FAANG salaries you read are the lucky/skilled top 5% of the industry and only during a once-in-a-generation share price boom where stock grants exceed salaries. And yes, doctor/nurse salaries are a big part of US healthcare excess cost (as is over-prescription, obesity,insurance profits, insurance admin overhead)

pc86 6y ago
No man, this is HN where everyone makes $300k/yr cash comp 6 months out of school. You didn't know? I think your 5% number is right on point. There are almost 4 million software developers in the US. Company-specific numbers are hard to come by, but estimating, Facebook only has a few thousand developers - Goldman Sachs has approximately 9000 and several sources say FB has "less." Netflix has less than 9,000 employees total and I think it's unlikely a huge percentage of those are developers. Google has less than 30k (and that's assuming 100% of R&D and Ops groups are engineers). Microsoft has about 40k. Even adding a bit to each of these estimates, you're looking at maybe 110,000 developers at FAANG companies themselves. Let's double that to account for other companies (mostly finance) that will pay comparably - it's certainly less. That's about 5.5%. And you touch on stock price which I think is super important. This isn't cash compensation. It's massive stock grants which are subject to losses. If some black swan event happens and one of the FAANGs goes out of business there are going to be a lot of bankrupt principal and staff engineers. Doctors don't have that problem because their $500k is W2 cash compensation. The median software engineer salary is somewhere around $100-110k. Half the developers in the US don't even make six figures.

pc86 6y ago

No man, this is HN where everyone makes $300k/yr cash comp 6 months out of school. You didn't know? I think your 5% number is right on point. There are almost 4 million software developers in the US. Company-specific numbers are hard to come by, but estimating, Facebook only has a few thousand developers - Goldman Sachs has approximately 9000 and several sources say FB has "less." Netflix has less than 9,000 employees total and I think it's unlikely a huge percentage of those are developers. Google has less than 30k (and that's assuming 100% of R&D and Ops groups are engineers). Microsoft has about 40k. Even adding a bit to each of these estimates, you're looking at maybe 110,000 developers at FAANG companies themselves. Let's double that to account for other companies (mostly finance) that will pay comparably - it's certainly less. That's about 5.5%. And you touch on stock price which I think is super important. This isn't cash compensation. It's massive stock grants which are subject to losses. If some black swan event happens and one of the FAANGs goes out of business there are going to be a lot of bankrupt principal and staff engineers. Doctors don't have that problem because their $500k is W2 cash compensation. The median software engineer salary is somewhere around $100-110k. Half the developers in the US don't even make six figures.