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> Real example: One person I know has 2 $150k jobs for a total of $300k. If they joined as a jr engineer at a FANGMULA or equivalent, they would be making $300k

• aqme28 5y ago
  Agreed. I was a software engineer in New York, not SF (where salaries a _little_ higher), but salaries were nothing like this unless maybe you worked at a top-end hedge fund. The myth that every other random software engineer has this kind of pay is harmful.
  • chii 5y ago
    I think the OP is adding equity compensation, which with the current bull market, is hugely inflating that number. If you only count take home pay in cash, it's nowhere near $500k! Closer to 200k for a senior engineer imho. Vesting of shares takes a few years, so the extra $200k that you "get" is because 2 years ago, you were paid $150k in equity, and it grew to $200k (or more).
    • theptip 5y ago
      Yes, absolutely - in case this isn’t clear to anyone reading, you need to evaluate total compensation when comparing roles. Salary, equity, and on-target bonus (which are often agreed ahead of time). For public companies you can sell your RSUs as soon as they vest. For context: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
• novok 5y ago
  I've worked at FANGMULA for many years, I'm an immigrant, I've recently become a hiring manager and hired people on my team weeks ago, I've done hundreds of interviews within my bigtech company, I barely finished my computer science degree from a mid-tier university (so I'm not that exceptional) and on top of that I've done the research with how promo systems work at these companies. I know what the current comp packages are for jr engineers too. When I do say jr eng, I do mean the L4 level, not the straight out of college no work experience L3 level. L5 is the terminal sr engineer level. This friend that I'm giving an example of is real, and I feel like he has the potential to get into FANGMULA with my mentorship and then get promoted within that time frame. It's definitely all real and the post was kind of my own internal speech to get him to come over. Go look at https://levels.fyi https://levels.fyi , and look at the jumps in comp between bands. Yes some companies may pay +/- %10 more, but it is what it is. Also the market has gone up, yet again, so even levels is a bit behind. People thinking what I'm saying is BS is just a bunch of cope. You don't have to be a super genius with the grit of god to get into these companies.
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    I don't care about levels.fyi. I work at one of the companies you've mentioned. You're lying if you're saying that getting 50% increase is the norm or that the average promotion time is 2 years. Perhaps, for example, an E3 at Meta can go to E4 in 2 years, but an E3 isn't making 300K total comp at Meta in California to begin with, nor would they go to 500K after promotion. If you're a hiring manager then I don't need to explain to you that a 50% increase even with the highest ratings isn't some normal thing that happens. Maybe you've seen it happen, I believe you. My point is that it's not the norm and you should stop saying it like it is.
    • novok 5y ago
      L4 is around $300k, L5 is around $500k 500/300 = 1.6. At many of these companies, if you haven't gotten to the next step in about 2 years until L5, you start becoming a target and managed out, and I know multiple former coworkers who have been promoted from L4 -> L5 within a year or two, especially if you have a mentor or actively research on how to get yourself get promoted vs. just being passive about it.
• nostrademons 5y ago
  "You think getting promoted at FAANG gives you an over 50% increase in total comp as the norm?" It's like $30-50K base each level (~18-25%), but the stock grants can make a huge difference. As a junior engineer you might make ~$35K/year in stock grants; at staff it's like $200K+; and at principal it's $600K+. In total comp you can easily go from ~$350K/year at senior to $500K at staff to $750K at senior staff to $1M at principal, which is close to 50% each time. Note that the biggest benefit is that getting promoted opens you up to having more negotiating leverage. If the company doesn't want to keep you or if they're sure they'll keep you anyway, then sure, you'll be getting < 10% raises. Same if you came in at a very high baseline because of savvy negotiating or lots of competing offers. But if you're managing a critical team with a sustained record of high performance and then you get an offer elsewhere, that's what opens you up to those $M+ stock counteroffers. Junior engineers are not going to get that regardless of performance, because they just aren't that important to the business.
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    I'm not denying that you can make a lot of money. I'm saying that I know a lot of people who've been promoted. 1. Getting promoted in 2 years, especially once you're midlevel is very rare. 2. People at the lowest level (E3/L3/59 etc etc) are not receiving a 50% increase in total comp by being promoted usually. People are getting confused because FAAANG stock has increased so much, and many bullish employees have not sold their stock and so their compensation (including appreciation) went up 50% during COVID. It's a trend that will likely not continue.
    • bitexploder 5y ago
      Yeah, that’s decency bias for you.
      • actually_a_dog 5y ago
        Decency bias? I think you mean "recency bias?" Edit: It's too bad "decency bias" isn't actually a thing. I wish it was.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Sometimes I wonder if the people saying this stuff really even work there. It's not impossible, but the kind of person who would be promoted that fast wouldn't be working two crappy jobs to begin with. In my experience, people often stumble into these situations by simply not quitting their old job when they get a new job. The idea is to continue to collect paychecks from the old job until they lay you off with severance. This usually catches up with people later on when someone puts two and two together or hears from a friend of a friend that the person is working at a certain company. Imagine being recruited to a new company and seeing your former company coworker in Slack and he's been there for months. Word gets around. This absolutely destroys reference checks. Another reason to always do reference checks and always confirm someone's end dates with the other company.
• Jach 5y ago
  I brought up the 7% raise thing to a friend, apparently Google's solution (not sure if this took place earlier though) was to change their 4 year vesting schedule to a 3 year one. This basically acts like a raise. So many compensation discussions are hard to get into because of the reliance on adding (sold or unsold) stock as part of total compensation. It's very reasonable for a junior engineer to get a $125-$150k base salary offer these days, but whether their total comp after 1 year pushes that to $300k, let alone if they can get a promotion that adds significantly more stock to push total to $500k the next (noting their first stock is still vesting and contributing), depends so much on the particulars of the company's stock price set by the market and stock grant plans that unless you name names and package specifics people won't believe you. Like it's possible as you say that you get promoted but with no new stock and a paltry raise, yet nevertheless your total comp over the next year goes up to $500k, this can be entirely due to the stock raising. Not very useful in a discussion trying to get at actual salary trajectories that don't depend on market luck. The job I quit last year (Salesforce, fortune 137) I reached the "Lead" position (roughly equivalent to L5/senior at a place like google, but "Staff" at other places, titles are dumb) but I only ever had two stock grants in the years I was there: one at the beginning, one after reaching "Lead", and the second one was almost insultingly tiny (much smaller than the initial one) and I wasn't phased at all to give up ~70% of it in leaving. So for all my years there my comp was basically dominated by the base salary + the annual % bonus nearly everyone always gets and peaked at a "mere" $200k, stock didn't impact it much. A random mid-stage startup in Utah of all places trying to recruit me was throwing out $200k base as comparison. This sort of experience, especially the lack of significant stock refreshes ever, is pretty common, but there are companies (like Facebook) that give significant annual refreshes not even tied to promotions and can make stories like the GP's not too crazy. A final factor in making these discussions difficult is that there are a lot of senior+ folks who've stayed with a place for 4+ years and are essentially getting shafted in terms of their earning potential and they don't want to admit that they need to change jobs (or even just leave and come back later) to get a lot more than they currently do, which leads them to dismiss very real likelihoods of newly hired junior or "standard" roles (what do we even call just a plain "software engineer" when so many are either junior or senior) getting as much as they do after stocks are added in.
  • 5y ago
• halpert 5y ago
  In my experience, the stock grant from a promotion is generally 50% higher than the previous level, and base salary is around 15% higher. Given that stock is a majority of comp, a promotion comes pretty close to 1.5x the previous comp. In another comment, you’ve mentioned that you don’t care about levels.fyi, which is basically saying you don’t care about accurate data. levels.fyi actually underestimates total comp, because they use base + (grant / vesting period) to calculate comp. For high growth tech companies, stock usually grows so comp gets higher naturally over time.
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    which company and when? levels.fyi didn't support the thesis, so obviously I don't care about it. also, I don't believe in using appreciation of stock as part of comp. were you paid less if you held on to vested RSUs and the stock dropped? no. you just decided not to sell and faced the consequences. same way I wouldn't count someone taking their entire salary and dumping it into options successfully as "apprecation"
    • halpert 5y ago
      If the stock price drops, yes you get paid less going forward. If the stock goes up, you get paid more. That’s how it works. Try telling Uncle Sam at tax time that you want to calculate your income tax based on your RSU grant price. I’m sure the IRS would be thrilled.
      • endisneigh 5y ago
        What your income is at tax time and how much you were compensated are not the same
        • deleted 5y ago
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        • halpert 5y ago
          How are they different in this scenario?
• AmericanBlarney 5y ago
  Incorrect on background checks - there are employment verification services that get quite a lot of data (many companies opt in to sending them payroll data).
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    Which ones? HireRight and Sterling both only verified what I sent.
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    That's not a meaningful statement without quantifying what "a lot of data" and "many companies" mean.
  • sgerenser 5y ago
    I tried pulling my TheWorkNumber report, and I was surprised to see my weekly salary history not only at my current and prior BigCo jobs, but also at my prior small (~100 employees) company. Apparently they used ADP for payroll and that was enough to get into the Work Number database. I’m not sure I HireRight always cross references with databases like TheWorkNumber, but it would be trivial for them to do so.
    • masterof0 5y ago
      Isn't that illegal? Checking on candidates current salary?
      • actually_a_dog 5y ago
        Not in most states. California is a big exception.
• deleted 5y ago
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