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My base salary is $220k; this year my bonus plus equity will be around $200k, so my total compensation will be over $400k. I've been out for a number of years

My base salary is $220k; this year my bonus plus equity will be around $200k, so my total compensation will be over $400k. I've been out for a number of years, and the bonus plus stock is performance based, and of course the value of the stock compensation may change depending on the future direction of Google stock --- it's climbed very nicely since the beginning of the year! The main point is that ignoring the stock and bonus portion of the compensation leaves a huge portion of the story missing. And stock at a publicly traded company, whether it's Amazon, Facebook, Google, or IBM, is quite different from equity at a start up....

lefthander 13y ago
Interesting. Would you mind revealing your level?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- lefthander2 13y ago
  Above Sr. SWE my impression is that the level is less tightly coupled to compensation. There are probably some Staff Engineers getting paid more than some Sr. Staff, and so on. A lot more will depend on how many rounds of equity refresh you have under your belt, whether you've done something that's saved the company millions or helped the bottom line of the company millions; and of course, if you were formerly at another company, what your salary/level you had at that former company. At Staff Engineer and above, the levels are more about the scope of your responsibilities at Google, and while compensation is somewhat correlated to that, there are other factors. If you can drive huge amounts of value to the bottom line, either via innovations that save the company $$$ or by working on a project which is "up and to the right", in my experience sooner or later you will be compensated for it --- either at your current company, or somewhere else. Google is pretty good at making sure it's "at your current company". And so long as you are doing something that you love, does it really matter what level you are at? Personally, for me it's less about the money, since I have enough to be comfortable, and I haven't gotten really expensive habits (like wanting to learn how to fly, or drive race cars, or children to put through college :-). So it's it's more about doing what I love, and doing it in the company of smart people who are fun to be with. Figuring ways of making this intersect with adding as much value as possible to the company is just a bonus.
  - fkdjs 13y ago
    The problem with that is, the unsexy non-customer facing projects that allow for saving/making millions are not recognized, or at least a monetary value cannot be established for them, and become understaffed, which leads to inefficiencies. To get to the big bucks, you really have to look out for #1 and join the sexy groups. Which is partly why you see things like reader die: reader does not a bonus/promotion make. You gotta be churning out new stuff at minimum, hopefully on sexy new products, maintenance of the old stuff is less sexy and doesn't give you the promotion/bonus. Of course you can reimplement a cache server every 6 months, if all else fails.
    - tytso 13y ago
      Actually, in some ways it's easier for those of us who work in the infrastructure groups to demonstrate monetary value. Google has a very large number of machines, and an even larger number of hard drives. Hard drives have fundamentally not changed seek times in over a decade, even as capacity has doubled (up until relatively recently) every 18 months. So more often than not, for many work loads (not just at Google, but across the entire industry) are seek constrained, not capacity constrained. So when Google migrated from ext2 to ext4, it's actually pretty easy to calculate how much money was saved by utilizing disks more efficiently, and the team which spearheaded this _was_ in fact recognized by the company and by the founders. As far as the need to continue to derive new value to the company, of course! This is true everywhere; the phrase "what have you done for me lately" is one that is not unique to any one company, and would _you_ respect someone who did one great thing many years ago, and then proceeded to rest on his or her laurels? Of course there are many different ways of adding new value. If you can demonstrate how a new cache server is faster or more scalable, and thus can drive value to the company, that's certainly one way. Or maybe there is new technology, such as faster networking technology or faster flash storage, which means that assumptions made five years ago are no longer true, and that can be a justification to rewrite some part of the infrastructure. But Google is a data-drive company, which means you need to be able to justify why the rewrite is necessary.
      - fkdjs 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
zerr 13y ago
I had an impression that Google/Microsoft provided much less compensations compared to those financial/HFT/etc.. shops on Wall St. or similar.
gniv 13y ago
For those wondering, that's pretty typical for a staff engineer at Google (ie, about four promotions or 6+ years from fresh grad).
- bearmf 13y ago
  400k is not typical at Google at all.
- tytso 13y ago
  Um, promotions every 18 months is not unheard of, but it's not what I would call typical. There are lots of people way smarter than me at Google, so I'm sure some folks have managed to reach Staff Engineer in six years, but IMHO it's a bit unreasonable to assume that as a normal pace.

lefthander 13y ago

Interesting. Would you mind revealing your level?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
lefthander2 13y ago
Above Sr. SWE my impression is that the level is less tightly coupled to compensation. There are probably some Staff Engineers getting paid more than some Sr. Staff, and so on. A lot more will depend on how many rounds of equity refresh you have under your belt, whether you've done something that's saved the company millions or helped the bottom line of the company millions; and of course, if you were formerly at another company, what your salary/level you had at that former company. At Staff Engineer and above, the levels are more about the scope of your responsibilities at Google, and while compensation is somewhat correlated to that, there are other factors. If you can drive huge amounts of value to the bottom line, either via innovations that save the company $$$ or by working on a project which is "up and to the right", in my experience sooner or later you will be compensated for it --- either at your current company, or somewhere else. Google is pretty good at making sure it's "at your current company". And so long as you are doing something that you love, does it really matter what level you are at? Personally, for me it's less about the money, since I have enough to be comfortable, and I haven't gotten really expensive habits (like wanting to learn how to fly, or drive race cars, or children to put through college :-). So it's it's more about doing what I love, and doing it in the company of smart people who are fun to be with. Figuring ways of making this intersect with adding as much value as possible to the company is just a bonus.
- fkdjs 13y ago
  The problem with that is, the unsexy non-customer facing projects that allow for saving/making millions are not recognized, or at least a monetary value cannot be established for them, and become understaffed, which leads to inefficiencies. To get to the big bucks, you really have to look out for #1 and join the sexy groups. Which is partly why you see things like reader die: reader does not a bonus/promotion make. You gotta be churning out new stuff at minimum, hopefully on sexy new products, maintenance of the old stuff is less sexy and doesn't give you the promotion/bonus. Of course you can reimplement a cache server every 6 months, if all else fails.
  - tytso 13y ago
    Actually, in some ways it's easier for those of us who work in the infrastructure groups to demonstrate monetary value. Google has a very large number of machines, and an even larger number of hard drives. Hard drives have fundamentally not changed seek times in over a decade, even as capacity has doubled (up until relatively recently) every 18 months. So more often than not, for many work loads (not just at Google, but across the entire industry) are seek constrained, not capacity constrained. So when Google migrated from ext2 to ext4, it's actually pretty easy to calculate how much money was saved by utilizing disks more efficiently, and the team which spearheaded this _was_ in fact recognized by the company and by the founders. As far as the need to continue to derive new value to the company, of course! This is true everywhere; the phrase "what have you done for me lately" is one that is not unique to any one company, and would _you_ respect someone who did one great thing many years ago, and then proceeded to rest on his or her laurels? Of course there are many different ways of adding new value. If you can demonstrate how a new cache server is faster or more scalable, and thus can drive value to the company, that's certainly one way. Or maybe there is new technology, such as faster networking technology or faster flash storage, which means that assumptions made five years ago are no longer true, and that can be a justification to rewrite some part of the infrastructure. But Google is a data-drive company, which means you need to be able to justify why the rewrite is necessary.
    - fkdjs 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

zerr 13y ago

I had an impression that Google/Microsoft provided much less compensations compared to those financial/HFT/etc.. shops on Wall St. or similar.

gniv 13y ago

For those wondering, that's pretty typical for a staff engineer at Google (ie, about four promotions or 6+ years from fresh grad).

bearmf 13y ago
400k is not typical at Google at all.
tytso 13y ago
Um, promotions every 18 months is not unheard of, but it's not what I would call typical. There are lots of people way smarter than me at Google, so I'm sure some folks have managed to reach Staff Engineer in six years, but IMHO it's a bit unreasonable to assume that as a normal pace.