4 ms·

I wouldn't even call this inflated in the valley anymore. There are outliers making serious money right here, right now. Such a salary pairs nicely with our l

by varelse 11y ago

I wouldn't even call this inflated in the valley anymore. There are outliers making serious money right here, right now. Such a salary pairs nicely with our lovely $1M+ median house price to insure we can never afford to buy one without living like a monk or going up to our eyeballs in debt. If you don't believe me, then just who's buying those $2M+ houses that stay on the market a week or two? SPOILER ALERT: Double income couples each making that kind of money. In fact, I'm making the kind of money from my first post (not bragging, you asked for evidence). But what's really funny are the isolated unicorns out there making $1M+ annually because they were both very smart and very lucky to have the specific skills for a hot technology that ignited a runaway bidding war between giants. I have never been close to that lucky but I have witnessed it firsthand. As for me, my offers are $250K+ when I've interviewed for big co or late stage startup positions. In contrast, my startup offers are $150-$200K with 0.7% or less equity. The startup offers are completely uninteresting to me at that level. I'm better served branching out on my own which I may or may not do someday (YOLO and all that).

ryandrake 11y ago
Congratulate yourself, because you are, for sure, a fortunate outlier! I don't doubt that there exist engineers out there making $250K+, but they are definitely not the norm, big company or small. Check out a bigger sample of Bay Area companies on Glassdoor. My bet is you'll find the middle 90% to be between, say, $90K and $150K.
- varelse 11y ago
  Really? My starting salary as a level 1 engineer in the first dotcom boom was $115K. Now had I taken a more fun (but as it turns out in reality frequently not very fun) job in the game industry, that salary would have been ~$70K. This of course is an industry segment with its own crazy outliers. Fortunately, someone sensible figuratively smacked me upside the head and convinced me to take a more practical job (which ended up pretty fun actually).
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    That's about 3X what mine was for a similar junior position during the same time period, so again, congratulations :-)
- exacube 11y ago
  Every level 5 (senior) engineer at Google and Facebook converge around $250k in total yearly income (probably more for facebook recently since their stock tripled in the past year).
- rhc2104 11y ago
  Here's Google on Glassdoor, for "Senior Software Engineer". http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E9079_D_KO7,31.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engin... About 250k in total comp. A lot of it is in stock grants, but those are completely liquid.
vlasev 11y ago
Would you care to expand on what makes you such an outlier? Would another person be able to go along in your footsteps?
- varelse 11y ago
  A) I am not a (major) outlier (or many of my friends are major outliers too). Bottom line: Senior Engineers can make $250K+ today. Burn that into your synapses. The Netflix listings already posted here demonstrate that. I know Facebookers and Googlers making twice that or more and they weren't even acqui-hires. Glassdoor (valuable information source it is) IMO oversamples the discontent. Senior engineering positions at hedge funds can be $800-$900K. B) Sure, without getting too specific, I started out as a videogame developer writing games entirely in assembler, branched out to multi-processor and multi-user games also in assembler, and that set me up nicely for writing device driver code for Windows and that's how I got my first gig in the valley. You can follow exactly in my footsteps by really learning C/C++ and how to optimize it on x86 processors or whatever takes their place down the road. I'm not writing x86 much anymore, but I'm still writing very low-level parallel code, and it is next to impossible to find people who are really good at this because they've either been snatched up by Big Co and hedge funds making far more than I do or they're nowhere near as good as they think they are. But who knows what they future will bring, so don't follow it exactly but instead go learn the things that are both in demand and that people complain are too hard. That's what worked for me. When game developers said 3D was too hard, I jumped into it. When game developers said multi-core was too difficult, I mastered it. And those are the skills that led to my biggest paydays(1). 1. You can of course make $100M doing nothing but Ruby/Javscript/Python (and especially PHP), but that wasn't the path I took (though sometimes I think I should have).
  - storgendibal 11y ago
    Curious, are you talking salary $250K, or total comp, including (public) equity $250K?
  - vlasev 11y ago
    Thank you for your detailed response! > But who knows what they future will bring, so don't follow it exactly but instead go learn the things that are both in demand and that people complain are too hard. That's what worked for me. When game developers said 3D was too hard, I jumped into it. When game developers said multi-core was too difficult, I mastered it. And those are the skills that led to my biggest paydays(1). That sounds like a rather neat advice right there.

by varelse 11y ago

ryandrake 11y ago

Congratulate yourself, because you are, for sure, a fortunate outlier! I don't doubt that there exist engineers out there making $250K+, but they are definitely not the norm, big company or small. Check out a bigger sample of Bay Area companies on Glassdoor. My bet is you'll find the middle 90% to be between, say, $90K and $150K.

varelse 11y ago
Really? My starting salary as a level 1 engineer in the first dotcom boom was $115K. Now had I taken a more fun (but as it turns out in reality frequently not very fun) job in the game industry, that salary would have been ~$70K. This of course is an industry segment with its own crazy outliers. Fortunately, someone sensible figuratively smacked me upside the head and convinced me to take a more practical job (which ended up pretty fun actually).
- ryandrake 11y ago
  That's about 3X what mine was for a similar junior position during the same time period, so again, congratulations :-)
exacube 11y ago
Every level 5 (senior) engineer at Google and Facebook converge around $250k in total yearly income (probably more for facebook recently since their stock tripled in the past year).
rhc2104 11y ago
Here's Google on Glassdoor, for "Senior Software Engineer". http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E9079_D_KO7,31.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engin... About 250k in total comp. A lot of it is in stock grants, but those are completely liquid.

vlasev 11y ago

Would you care to expand on what makes you such an outlier? Would another person be able to go along in your footsteps?

varelse 11y ago
A) I am not a (major) outlier (or many of my friends are major outliers too). Bottom line: Senior Engineers can make $250K+ today. Burn that into your synapses. The Netflix listings already posted here demonstrate that. I know Facebookers and Googlers making twice that or more and they weren't even acqui-hires. Glassdoor (valuable information source it is) IMO oversamples the discontent. Senior engineering positions at hedge funds can be $800-$900K. B) Sure, without getting too specific, I started out as a videogame developer writing games entirely in assembler, branched out to multi-processor and multi-user games also in assembler, and that set me up nicely for writing device driver code for Windows and that's how I got my first gig in the valley. You can follow exactly in my footsteps by really learning C/C++ and how to optimize it on x86 processors or whatever takes their place down the road. I'm not writing x86 much anymore, but I'm still writing very low-level parallel code, and it is next to impossible to find people who are really good at this because they've either been snatched up by Big Co and hedge funds making far more than I do or they're nowhere near as good as they think they are. But who knows what they future will bring, so don't follow it exactly but instead go learn the things that are both in demand and that people complain are too hard. That's what worked for me. When game developers said 3D was too hard, I jumped into it. When game developers said multi-core was too difficult, I mastered it. And those are the skills that led to my biggest paydays(1). 1. You can of course make $100M doing nothing but Ruby/Javscript/Python (and especially PHP), but that wasn't the path I took (though sometimes I think I should have).
- storgendibal 11y ago
  Curious, are you talking salary $250K, or total comp, including (public) equity $250K?
- vlasev 11y ago
  Thank you for your detailed response! > But who knows what they future will bring, so don't follow it exactly but instead go learn the things that are both in demand and that people complain are too hard. That's what worked for me. When game developers said 3D was too hard, I jumped into it. When game developers said multi-core was too difficult, I mastered it. And those are the skills that led to my biggest paydays(1). That sounds like a rather neat advice right there.