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Please consider publishing your salary data like this as well. Strong agree! I do this too: https://jefftk.com/money https://jefftk.com/money
by jefftk 4y ago
Please consider publishing your salary data like this as well.
Strong agree! I do this too: https://jefftk.com/money https://jefftk.com/money
- xupybd 4y agoWhoa, those are some big numbers! Well done!
- googlryas 4y agoUnfortunately the 2021 numbers were really juiced because of stock performance. It looks like OP took a different job, but if he didn't, he should expect his comp to drop to a measly 400k or so in 2022
- jefftk 4y agoThat's about right: three things would have combined to decrease my 2022 comp: * When I came back to Google my stock grant vested evenly over four years, creating a 'cliff' in year five. They don't do this anymore, I think because people tend to leave. * My 2021 comp included several past years of stock grants, and the company's stock had been growing much faster than the market. * The market overall is down since 2021. I think I would have made about $470k in 2022 if I'd stayed the whole year. 2023 would have been higher, because it would have been my first year getting the full L6 comp. (And I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I definitely wouldn't consider $400k "measly" -- even after donating 50% I had much more to live on than most Americans, let alone most people globally)
- spacemadness 4y agoThey’re absolutely being sarcastic.
- xupybd 4y ago> measly 400k Here in NZ $140,000NZD would be a good wage for a software developer. That is about $80,000USD. $400k US is about $700,600NZD. That is a massive amount of money for one years work. Edit: My sarcasm meter is broken. In reading other comments I seem to have missed the joke. Sorry.
- slyall 4y agoAs a NZ person in tech I'd be embarrassed to post my salary history here. Been doing it for years and still paid under $US100k.
- viraptor 4y agoKeep in mind Google is a massive outlier inside massively successful startups which are outliers inside SV which is an outlier inside... Lots of places in the US are as far from those numbers as NZ. Google numbers should not be an reference point to almost anyone, anywhere or they're likely to be disappointed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pc86 4y agoSerious question, how many years? I ask because 1) I make really good money now, especially if you ignore the SV/FAANG outliers that everyone here pretends are the norm, but it still took me 7-8 years to break 100k USD, in the US. 2) Maybe because there are so many new devs now but I hear people say a lot "I've been doing this for years!" then when you dig into it "years" means 2 or 3. These are also the same people who don't consider themselves junior 6 months into their first job, or consider themselves senior after 3 years. A career is 30-40 years long. The median income for a dev in the US is 100k. That's going to skew down due to lots of juniors but it also includes everyone making several hundred thousand dollars a year. I am taking a pay cut down to 160 for better WLB on a product I have used for years as a customer and really care about, and I think if you ignore the outliers I am very well compensated at 12 YOE and existing domain knowledge.
- zaarn 4y agoOP has a page for the proper pronouns to use in this situation, in case you didn't notice it.
- xupybd 4y agoAre you sure you're talking about the right op? This is in response to the ex Google employee not the author of the article.
- phist_mcgee 4y agoYou would forgive someone for not checking a website to find their personal pronouns page surely?
- zaarn 4y agoWell, it would be atleast polite to use gender neutral pronouns.
- jefftk 4y agoIf you're talking about me I'm fine with he/him. (Also fine with they/them FWIW: https://www.jefftk.com/p/they-is-ok-by-me https://www.jefftk.com/p/they-is-ok-by-me)
- zaarn 4y agoWas talking about Top OP.
- cuteboy19 4y agoWhile employer pay transparency is a good thing, I am not sure about employee pay. It allows your next employer to lowball you
- Aeolun 4y agoI’m not sure if I would qualify ‘needing to pay more than 600k/year’ as low-balling.
- HWR_14 4y agoIt absolutely could be! If the employee is capable of generating 60MM a year in savings or additional revenue, that's a pittance.
- pc86 4y agoIf a non-founder employee can do that the company is already at Google or FB scale and they're going to be paying accordingly. And the SDE isn't the only person making the money come in, it's just (usually) very easy to draw a line between new products and revenue, or code changes and lower infra costs. There are a lot of other people - hundreds - contributing to that $60MM but everyone here likes to pretend if the SDE isn't getting 98% of it they're getting screwed by The Suits.
- HWR_14 4y ago> If a non-founder employee can do that I never understood why people thought there was a giant leap in value between employee #1 and a founder, in terms of value-add. (And if someone can explain it to me, I would be appreciative. I understand how it makes a difference when getting seed money, but not after that.) Meanwhile, sometimes it is dependent on lots of people. Sometimes it isn't. A programmer is the only person who has the possibility to rewrite some code and make a process take 1% the same amount of time. Depending on the industry, this can be a 99% reduction in cost, a 1% reduction or a massive, massive increase in revenue (HFT).
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- jongjong 4y agoNot sure I'm reading this right. You went from making $634K per year to $72/hour??? I can't understand why any company would pay so much money for a software engineer and I especially can't understand why someone would quit such a job. That is life-changing money. It's like winning the lottery.
- mhb 4y agohttps://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-acid-observatory https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...
- yieldcrv 4y agoPeople quit because they make enough. Between real estate, and the equities market, a few million dollars can support your lifestyle indefinitely. But also factor in that this group of people can also be limited partners in Private Equity and Hedge Funds forever and get tiny pieces of a couple big bets (and I would seriously ignore articles that say the S&P beats them. YMMV, good luck!)
- jefftk 4y agoFWIW I don't have a few million dollars or other large investments, and I do still need to make some money from my work. But I can also live well on much less than I had been making!
- amarshall 4y ago> That is life-changing money. Yes, and it seems they used it to change their life.
- mcv 4y agoYeah, it's not like it was a couple of months for that kind of money; it was years. More than enough to change your life and start working for fun or charity instead of for money.
- jldugger 4y ago
- yieldcrv 4y agothank you for breaking it down between nominal and actual! the data out there is so bad! Even Levels.fyi takes both nominal offers as well as actual outcomes like W-2's, which can be wildly different in a volatile market. So nobody really knows anything.
- goodpoint 4y agoMassive salary! I hope you donate a lot to FOSS projects.
- matwood 4y agoI think this a great idea, but how do you deal with people who are simply weird/jealous about money? For example, the responses here are a mix of 'cool, how can I do that' to 'you don't deserve that much'. Every time I've seen people find out what others make there is a group that always first assumes they are getting hosed and are jealous. Even for numbers as small as .5% difference. Personally, I'm not a jealous person so I don't understand the group I mentioned. But, the emotions/reactions I've seen are always in the back of my head when thinking about opening salaries.
- jefftk 4y agoI've never gotten negative feedback in person on this, and negative feedback online for it is both rare and not something that bothers me much? In general how much I care about feedback is weighted by some combination of how much I care about the person giving me the feedback and how important it seems. When someone on HN or elsewhere gives me feedback the former is low, so I'm mostly thinking about the latter. If the feedback is "you're wrong to be working on detecting novel pandemics because of detailed reasons XYZ" I'll take that quite seriously, but if it's just "you're a bad person for trying to earn a lot of money", especially without any sort of argument, I just ignore it.