4 ms·

>For instance I received an offer that was 160 base, 325 cash bonus and 5% of my RSUs for my first year, putting my TC at ~510k. Second year was a slightly smal

>For instance I received an offer that was 160 base, 325 cash bonus and 5% of my RSUs for my first year, putting my TC at ~510k. Second year was a slightly smaller bonus, and 15% of my RSUs. Jeebus man. What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do? For reference: I do Angular and Python development. Is there like some open source project or code samples that give an idea of the complexity of code that 510k developers are writing? Man you got me day dreaming about that kind of money: I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities.

JaimeThompson 5y ago
If you look at it as FANNG's employing people to keep them from working for others it makes a bit more sense.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  That makes no sense
ndstephens 5y ago
"I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities." reference didn't go unnoticed. nice one.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  If I put a smile on at least one person's face, I consider that a big win! :D
hardolaf 5y ago
> What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do? They quit when the numbers don't match what they feel they are worth. You see the same thing in finance. One bad year can send 20-30% of your workforce walking out the door in a matter of a few months post bonuses.
- doopy1 5y ago
  Where do they go? Is it that easy to hop from one FAANG to another?
fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
If only the code was the hard part.
vmception 5y ago
Its not different, its not more complex, the employees are unremarkable, the hours are 10am-6pm, the engineers are still undervalued to the organization. You can easily be in a team or circumstance that is more demanding, inspiring on your engineering journey, or even toxic. But you can just as easily coast. The compensation is supposed to make it worthwhile not to do your own startup or project. So expect comp to continue rising.
xionon 5y ago
> What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do? A meager defense follows. I've worked both "midwest design shop" and FAANG-adjacent jobs, from junior to staff to manager. The main thing is supply and demand. The supply of engineers willing to work at a FAANG, in a region that FAANG is willing & able to support, and are willing and able to go through the technical hazing process called a "hiring panel," is very much short of demand. On the other side, profits per employee are phenomenal at scale, so making hires at these rates still makes sense financially. But to answer your real question: it's less about the complexity of the code on a day to day basis, and more about the complexity of the system you have to work within, both technical and political, and the expectations of scale. A microservice system has both network and political boundaries to work through, whether making changes or RPC calls. Then, while a small scale system might see a one-in-a-million event once per year, a large system will see it many times per hour, or even per minute. Managing simple things like changes to a database becomes a multi-step process, involving tools and stakeholders, instead of just a quick 2 minutes of scheduled downtime. Engineers need to be capable of thinking through those sorts of things. Stuff gets real weird at scale. As a result, of both the above, engineers frequently find themselves doing highly specialized work, which is even harder to hire for. The guy who knows scaling properties of Postgres inside and out hasn't written production web code in a decade; his skills are almost worthless outside of FAANG-scale problems. Amazon has folks working for years on all sorts of niche network optimizations, because microseconds matter to them, but good luck transferring those skills back to fullstack web dev. Last, a not insignificant number of engineers at FAANG are doing fantastically easy work on the same pay scale. Someone has to manage the wordpress (or whatever) installation for the docs site, or some backend process written in Django just for six important people. They often still get an engineer title and pay scale. So, it frequently is harder, but certainly not always.
optimiz3 5y ago
People are paid based on value created and responsibility. All else being equal, better to work for companies where you create more value.
- therealdrag0 5y ago
  Put another way, work-context can matter as much as work-content. A bartender in Manhattan is going to make more than a bartender in Puerto Rico for the same work-content. Same with an engineer from non-FANG to FANG. Or another way, the revenue per employee at FANG-like companies is higher than non-fang-like companies, so the company can afford to pay them more.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  “People are paid based on value created and responsibility.” Oh you sweet, sweet child.
brimble 5y ago
> Jeebus man. What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do? Nothing, for nearly all of them. Hell, half the time they're not even particularly impressive at executing on the totally-ordinary things they do. The companies just have firehoses that spit out money so can afford to spend more on developers, and choose to do so for a variety of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with how challenging most of the work actually is. One reason (of several): insanely high comp means everyone (more or less) wants at least some time in a FAANG(-alike) job to bank some money. The flip side is that their hiring process is hellish. Put those together and you have high motivation for people to apply from one side, and a strong disincentive for anyone who's got any amount of doubt in their ability to pass the interview, any reluctance to put in the time to prep for them, or low bullshit-tolerance, or whatever. The result is that practically their entire candidate pool would be good hires (=good enough at the actual job, and willing to jump through hoops), so they don't have to bother figuring out how to spot good (for their purposes) developers, they just keep comp high and interviews unpleasant and time-consuming, and it all sorts itself out. Combine that with several companies all in similar situations trying to do the same thing, and you get what you see before you WRT developer compensation in a narrow slice of the industry. Except when they collude to keep wages down, which they have done and (speculation) almost certainly are still doing in less-obvious ways. [EDIT] Just to be clear, some of the work they do is Actually Hard, but that's not unique to FAANG (though it probably is more common there than, say, at your average Web agency or whatever). More of it's not especially hard but is hard to get experience with outside of FAANG (scale-related and fine-tuning stuff mostly, some of which is hard but much of which isn't more difficult than most other development or ops stuff, just different)
hintymad 5y ago
Given $160K + $350K bonus for the first year, I assume this was an L6 role. In Amazon, an L6 engineer pretty much functions like a staff engineer and even a senior staff engineer. That is, they spend majority of their time sorting out priorities, convincing teams which direction to go with, and align all kinds of stakeholders. They are also responsible for the project management of those projects that span across multiple teams and sometimes multiple orgs. So in a word, Amazon pays L6 engineers to sort out ambiguities and to shepherd teams. This may not be more complex than your work, mind you. It's just Amazon or companies large enough to have a tech ladder value this kind of role.
jedberg 5y ago
> Jeebus man. What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do? I worked at the N in FAANG for four years. It's not that we did anything so much differently, it's the people we did it with. When I worked for non-FAANG, there were some people who I'd have to work with and think, "boy, how does this person get/keep their job?". They just were not great to work with, had a hard time understanding hard concepts, and didn't produce great work. I never had that at Netflix. Every person I worked with was someone I'd want to work with again and could trust and depend on. When a hard problem presented itself, everyone had a great solution, and we'd discuss the pros and cons, and then someone would implement that solution. Also, many of our internal tools were best in class. Sure they had their warts, but not like the ones other companies had. Even our corporate directory had cool features and was actively developed. So that's really the difference. It's the people you get to work with and the tools you get to use. > Is there like some open source project or code samples that give an idea of the complexity of code that 510k developers are writing? https://github.com/Netflix https://github.com/Netflix is a good place to look. Again, it's not that it's more complex, it's just the way it came about.
sershe 5y ago
Almost nothing special, actually - although the average developer in FAANG/etc. in my experience is considerably better than an average developer outside, that is in part because "the outside" is much larger. I think the best analogy here is sports... there's a sharp pay cut when you go from playing in an NFL team, to not playing in an NFL team. NFL teams have N slots and they want the best players. That means that the N-th best football player modulo measurement noise is going to be paid much more than the N+1-th. FAANG/etc. job count is not fixed and measurement noise is probably much higher (i.e. we can't actually determine which developers are best with that much confidence, and so I think a lot of developers could make it into a FAANG and do fine work there), but the same principle applies.

JaimeThompson 5y ago

If you look at it as FANNG's employing people to keep them from working for others it makes a bit more sense.

spywaregorilla 5y ago
That makes no sense

ndstephens 5y ago

"I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities." reference didn't go unnoticed. nice one.

nebula8804 5y ago
If I put a smile on at least one person's face, I consider that a big win! :D

hardolaf 5y ago

> What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do? They quit when the numbers don't match what they feel they are worth. You see the same thing in finance. One bad year can send 20-30% of your workforce walking out the door in a matter of a few months post bonuses.

doopy1 5y ago
Where do they go? Is it that easy to hop from one FAANG to another?

fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago

If only the code was the hard part.

vmception 5y ago

Its not different, its not more complex, the employees are unremarkable, the hours are 10am-6pm, the engineers are still undervalued to the organization. You can easily be in a team or circumstance that is more demanding, inspiring on your engineering journey, or even toxic. But you can just as easily coast. The compensation is supposed to make it worthwhile not to do your own startup or project. So expect comp to continue rising.

xionon 5y ago

> What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do? A meager defense follows. I've worked both "midwest design shop" and FAANG-adjacent jobs, from junior to staff to manager. The main thing is supply and demand. The supply of engineers willing to work at a FAANG, in a region that FAANG is willing & able to support, and are willing and able to go through the technical hazing process called a "hiring panel," is very much short of demand. On the other side, profits per employee are phenomenal at scale, so making hires at these rates still makes sense financially. But to answer your real question: it's less about the complexity of the code on a day to day basis, and more about the complexity of the system you have to work within, both technical and political, and the expectations of scale. A microservice system has both network and political boundaries to work through, whether making changes or RPC calls. Then, while a small scale system might see a one-in-a-million event once per year, a large system will see it many times per hour, or even per minute. Managing simple things like changes to a database becomes a multi-step process, involving tools and stakeholders, instead of just a quick 2 minutes of scheduled downtime. Engineers need to be capable of thinking through those sorts of things. Stuff gets real weird at scale. As a result, of both the above, engineers frequently find themselves doing highly specialized work, which is even harder to hire for. The guy who knows scaling properties of Postgres inside and out hasn't written production web code in a decade; his skills are almost worthless outside of FAANG-scale problems. Amazon has folks working for years on all sorts of niche network optimizations, because microseconds matter to them, but good luck transferring those skills back to fullstack web dev. Last, a not insignificant number of engineers at FAANG are doing fantastically easy work on the same pay scale. Someone has to manage the wordpress (or whatever) installation for the docs site, or some backend process written in Django just for six important people. They often still get an engineer title and pay scale. So, it frequently is harder, but certainly not always.

optimiz3 5y ago

People are paid based on value created and responsibility. All else being equal, better to work for companies where you create more value.

therealdrag0 5y ago
Put another way, work-context can matter as much as work-content. A bartender in Manhattan is going to make more than a bartender in Puerto Rico for the same work-content. Same with an engineer from non-FANG to FANG. Or another way, the revenue per employee at FANG-like companies is higher than non-fang-like companies, so the company can afford to pay them more.
imwillofficial 5y ago
“People are paid based on value created and responsibility.” Oh you sweet, sweet child.

brimble 5y ago

> Jeebus man. What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do? Nothing, for nearly all of them. Hell, half the time they're not even particularly impressive at executing on the totally-ordinary things they do. The companies just have firehoses that spit out money so can afford to spend more on developers, and choose to do so for a variety of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with how challenging most of the work actually is. One reason (of several): insanely high comp means everyone (more or less) wants at least some time in a FAANG(-alike) job to bank some money. The flip side is that their hiring process is hellish. Put those together and you have high motivation for people to apply from one side, and a strong disincentive for anyone who's got any amount of doubt in their ability to pass the interview, any reluctance to put in the time to prep for them, or low bullshit-tolerance, or whatever. The result is that practically their entire candidate pool would be good hires (=good enough at the actual job, and willing to jump through hoops), so they don't have to bother figuring out how to spot good (for their purposes) developers, they just keep comp high and interviews unpleasant and time-consuming, and it all sorts itself out. Combine that with several companies all in similar situations trying to do the same thing, and you get what you see before you WRT developer compensation in a narrow slice of the industry. Except when they collude to keep wages down, which they have done and (speculation) almost certainly are still doing in less-obvious ways. [EDIT] Just to be clear, some of the work they do is Actually Hard, but that's not unique to FAANG (though it probably is more common there than, say, at your average Web agency or whatever). More of it's not especially hard but is hard to get experience with outside of FAANG (scale-related and fine-tuning stuff mostly, some of which is hard but much of which isn't more difficult than most other development or ops stuff, just different)

hintymad 5y ago

Given $160K + $350K bonus for the first year, I assume this was an L6 role. In Amazon, an L6 engineer pretty much functions like a staff engineer and even a senior staff engineer. That is, they spend majority of their time sorting out priorities, convincing teams which direction to go with, and align all kinds of stakeholders. They are also responsible for the project management of those projects that span across multiple teams and sometimes multiple orgs. So in a word, Amazon pays L6 engineers to sort out ambiguities and to shepherd teams. This may not be more complex than your work, mind you. It's just Amazon or companies large enough to have a tech ladder value this kind of role.

jedberg 5y ago

> Jeebus man. What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do? I worked at the N in FAANG for four years. It's not that we did anything so much differently, it's the people we did it with. When I worked for non-FAANG, there were some people who I'd have to work with and think, "boy, how does this person get/keep their job?". They just were not great to work with, had a hard time understanding hard concepts, and didn't produce great work. I never had that at Netflix. Every person I worked with was someone I'd want to work with again and could trust and depend on. When a hard problem presented itself, everyone had a great solution, and we'd discuss the pros and cons, and then someone would implement that solution. Also, many of our internal tools were best in class. Sure they had their warts, but not like the ones other companies had. Even our corporate directory had cool features and was actively developed. So that's really the difference. It's the people you get to work with and the tools you get to use. > Is there like some open source project or code samples that give an idea of the complexity of code that 510k developers are writing? https://github.com/Netflix https://github.com/Netflix is a good place to look. Again, it's not that it's more complex, it's just the way it came about.

sershe 5y ago

Almost nothing special, actually - although the average developer in FAANG/etc. in my experience is considerably better than an average developer outside, that is in part because "the outside" is much larger. I think the best analogy here is sports... there's a sharp pay cut when you go from playing in an NFL team, to not playing in an NFL team. NFL teams have N slots and they want the best players. That means that the N-th best football player modulo measurement noise is going to be paid much more than the N+1-th. FAANG/etc. job count is not fixed and measurement noise is probably much higher (i.e. we can't actually determine which developers are best with that much confidence, and so I think a lot of developers could make it into a FAANG and do fine work there), but the same principle applies.