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(throwaway I guess) I make over $1m as a SWE. “Senior Staff” or “Level 7” role at a big tech company everyone knows. I mostly write code! I am way faster than

(throwaway I guess) I make over $1m as a SWE. “Senior Staff” or “Level 7” role at a big tech company everyone knows. I mostly write code! I am way faster than most others here, and I have encouraged and mentored the people on my team to be similarly efficient. I also help decide technical direction but it’s far from the “architecture astronaut” stereotype that writes no code. It’s an infra team so no significant influence on product direction, other than considering our frameworks and tools products. I do consider them in that way, but it’s still a big difference from being involved in the direction of the external product.

philangist 4y ago
> mentored the people on my team to be similarly efficient What were the main changes you introduced/points you mentored them on to get their productivity to also be similarly efficient?
- throwayayay123 4y ago
  A lot of it is pretty related to company internals and is tooling specific. At a large company there is a lot of infra and tooling that can break in all kinds of fun ways, quality is very mixed, so helping the team become experts in this is very useful for productivity and unblocking oneself. I see people on other teams that seem to be stuck for days sometimes, on a really basic error that they haven’t really tried to debug at all. Seriously, just read the error message or dig into the code! My team also has a strong culture of just pushing code changes. This is including tons of deletions and simplifications, it’s not just writing a million lines of code. It’s also a very senior team, so I can’t take credit for everyone’s growth from junior engineers. Another part of it is creating an environment that productive senior coders want to join, so that they can avoid process-heavy teams and get stuff done. There is an extreme level of trust on the team because everyone is senior and frankly extremely good at their job, which allows us to be even more productive.
twalla 4y ago
One a scale of 1 to 10, how much did good timing with regard to equity play into your overall comp?
- throwayayay123 4y ago
  Probably -5 actually, I got promoted to this level right around when tech stocks started to dip. However, I’ve since had some retention bonus grants that will make it even more absurd if the stocks do go back up. Timing gets a 10/10 for my $750k year at staff level though.
dahfizz 4y ago
Is that TC or salary?
- throwayayay123 4y ago
  TC. It’s like 70-80% stock. Depends on price of course. I sell immediately and put it in index funds.
  - frozencell 4y ago
    And do you work a lot?
mattgreenrocks 4y ago
Congrats on your career success! I'm surprised infra can pay that well; I suppose at some companies they understand infra basically ensures the ship keeps running as it should.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  At large companies the payscale for different types of engineers is usually the same or very close.

philangist 4y ago

> mentored the people on my team to be similarly efficient What were the main changes you introduced/points you mentored them on to get their productivity to also be similarly efficient?

throwayayay123 4y ago
A lot of it is pretty related to company internals and is tooling specific. At a large company there is a lot of infra and tooling that can break in all kinds of fun ways, quality is very mixed, so helping the team become experts in this is very useful for productivity and unblocking oneself. I see people on other teams that seem to be stuck for days sometimes, on a really basic error that they haven’t really tried to debug at all. Seriously, just read the error message or dig into the code! My team also has a strong culture of just pushing code changes. This is including tons of deletions and simplifications, it’s not just writing a million lines of code. It’s also a very senior team, so I can’t take credit for everyone’s growth from junior engineers. Another part of it is creating an environment that productive senior coders want to join, so that they can avoid process-heavy teams and get stuff done. There is an extreme level of trust on the team because everyone is senior and frankly extremely good at their job, which allows us to be even more productive.

twalla 4y ago

One a scale of 1 to 10, how much did good timing with regard to equity play into your overall comp?

throwayayay123 4y ago
Probably -5 actually, I got promoted to this level right around when tech stocks started to dip. However, I’ve since had some retention bonus grants that will make it even more absurd if the stocks do go back up. Timing gets a 10/10 for my $750k year at staff level though.

dahfizz 4y ago

Is that TC or salary?

throwayayay123 4y ago
TC. It’s like 70-80% stock. Depends on price of course. I sell immediately and put it in index funds.
- frozencell 4y ago
  And do you work a lot?

mattgreenrocks 4y ago

Congrats on your career success! I'm surprised infra can pay that well; I suppose at some companies they understand infra basically ensures the ship keeps running as it should.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
At large companies the payscale for different types of engineers is usually the same or very close.