I think people are actually really out of touch with bigco pay scales. 250k is pretty easily achievable in a bigco. At Facebook you'll hit 250k+ in total comp at level 5, at LinkedIn you'll hit 250k+ in total comp at Staff level. If you also factor in stacking allotments of RSUs, your pay can easily exceed 300k at these levels given a few years of tenure.
I live in Dublin, don't work for Google but I have many friends that do (as well as in London and Zurich).
No, they don't pay anything close to that. Actually, AFAIK, in Dublin the salary that Google pays for developers is on the low side of the scale (they offset that, in part, with all the benefits like free food and the rest).
Dublin is in a weird situation. Loads of immigrant here. I lived there couple years and worked in one of those big corps.
Salaries do go quite up a while but statistics on the corporate ladder are stacked firmly against immigrants, the higher you go the less chance you have to find non local people.
With soft career ceiling and continuous influx of people salaries are driven down. You can still make a fine living, but nothing compared to the colleagues on the other side of the ocean.
Does not appear to be the case in London. I know indirectly people working in Google around here and they are on the low side of banking salaries.
Getting $250K is certainly doable in bank, but it does not follow a specific career plan. I have known senior system tester making 150K GBP and for the same job and responsibilities another was making 50K GBP.
Doing it in 5 years out of school is difficult in tech.
It is doable without too much trouble in finance in trading, m&a, ... the trick is that you need to survive which require more luck than skills.
Overall though, in the 4.5 million workers in London, only 120K make between 100K GBP and 200K GBP, and 60K that make more than that.
I am a hiring manager at a big software company and have worked at others in similar capacity. I have seen salary data for my employees in both Dublin and the US.
Is this only in Silicon Valley? Or are these pay scales appropriate for satellite offices as well? For example: could you hit $250k working for Google in Pittsburgh?
In my BigCo experience, they do recalibrate pay scales at different locations, but not nearly to the extent that they should. For example, one of them had three US geo "zones" that were supposed to reflect the cost of living there. The bay area and perhaps Manhattan were the highest, I forget what was in the second, and the third was basically "everywhere else". The difference between the top and bottom was maybe 10-15%, considerably less than the width of the salary band for each grade.
So to make it concrete, a new hire at a particular grade might have gotten $120k in SF or $105k in Little Rock (base). Considering the high taxes and housing costs in SF, the new hire in Little Rock would have had a much higher standard of living.
Of course, working at a non-HQ site is a major career-limiter, so 10 years down the road you might have been better off relocating anyway. Depends on where you are in life and what you want to achieve.
By contrast, non-US salaries are dramatically lower independent of the cost of living at a particular location. So if you're working for a US BigCo outside the US, you had better be in Chiang Mai or Belize, not Berlin or Hong Kong. As the author of this post notes, no one seems to know why this is so, only that it is.
Well, there's really no corresponding data for many other markets . Facebook and Google don't really do Work From Home and don't have a lot of remote locations for development depending on where you are. (Amazon is another example). I don't know what they offer datacenter staff, but in many areas, recruiters are pretty adamant about people moving.
From my experience, say, the North Carolina scene, you're lucky if you are going to get $120-ish with ten years of experience. There's some give or take, but includes large companies and banks. You can do a little better at something like a Cisco if you are willing to trade quality of work. Most big companies as well as startups are paying new grads somewhere in the low-high 60s or maybe 50s depending on where. I don't have hard data, but it's no where near $130k.
Data from cost of living comparison sites that some companies use indicates that these companies hiring someone in the bay area may pay those people 20% more for cost of living at most.
Startups pay substantially less on average, with senior level personnel getting around $100k, maybe $120k if you're excellent and the startup is well funded - but this is 10 years of experience kind of stuff. I have unfortunately had to turn down some great folks because they wanted north of that - and they were worth it. I've also seen companies where their maximum pay tier tops out at 135 for what amounts to principle engineer level positions. (I'd assume a fellow at IBM would do better, but they are uncommon and few have a chance of surviving the machine to get there).
Conversely, really senior level software development positions at basically-exit-ready startups in CA aren't going to be much better than 40-50% better than the above. Some of these can be obtained remotely - sometimes.
What the article states as common for Google and Facebook are absolutely not the norm, and I'm not really sure how achievable that is for most people even there.
It's great if Google/Facebook can allow to pay people that, definitely. I just wouldn't say it's even remotely common and does not translate.
I've heard some ancedotal completely crazy numbers from hedge funds that most people would hate working for elsewhere, but nothing nearing the numbers in this article.
I don't really have hard data on the New York software scene or Texas, but .. again, this isn't normal. HN may be more of a microcosm than expected if most people do feel this is normal.
To put it in perspective, this is still amazingly high compared to a lot of other positions and you'd still have it really good.
I was in NC and made about $100K after 7 years. I kept hearing people made $150K elsewhere so I took a gamble and moved. After my first position making $130K I doubled my salary at another well known company to about $260K.
I know from recruiter spam that $260K seems to be on the high end, with only the top firms mentioned paying close to that. I have friends that dwarf what I make, but they had good stock options at companies that made it to IPO. Definitely don't regret leaving NC.
I'd love to know what someone mildly famous like Mbstock, Rich Hickey, etc would make. I am a nobody and have done what I consider well.
> Facebook and Google don't really do Work From Home and don't have a lot of remote locations for development depending on where they are. I don't know what they offer datacenter staff, but in many areas, that's all they have for "not CA".
It's completely accurate - hence the location part. If you sought to add clarification, the first sentence was unneccessary. Let's confine this to "they won't hire in most of the Continental United States". Even for exceptional candidates, remote is also completely out of the question for them. That's obviously their right and I don't hold them against them. (But it's worth contrasting with someone like Red Hat, who will hire someone from anywhere if they are awesome).
I have had lots of experience with Google and Amazon recruiters where CA was the only viable option. Google also tended to have a bad habit of offering SRE positions for datacenters in the sticks, but that was not a development-flavored SRE thing in the least. They pretty much close the door on you if you don't want to move and are dropping the ball on some pretty awesome development centers IMHO.
Facebook is often avoided by some very sharp kernel (and other) folks, because they greatly insist on a boot camp and can't guarantee what department you are going to work for. They lost some brilliant folks as a result. I wouldn't work for them for that reason, as I think the team and the manager are the most important parts of the hiring decision.
Yes, Google has other offices, but they are not hiring people in some pretty darn major development regions. There is allegeldy an office in Chapel Hill for instance, but it seems to be on the edge of being decomissioned and no recruiter will tell you anything about it.
So, yeah, it's not quite like you can just work anywhere.
> Facebook is often avoided by some very sharp kernel (and other) folks, because they greatly insist on a boot camp and can't guarantee what department you are going to work for. They lost some brilliant folks as a result. I wouldn't work for them for that reason, as I think the team and the manager are the most important parts of the hiring decision.
That sounds better than Google's "work on what we tell you to" approach.
At least it would be only BigCo in USA and the tech sector.
I know only numbers from germany and somebig corporations here. Apart from management you would here be very unlikely to even hit 100k (neither $ nor €).
There was an internal, self-reported survey of compensation within Google that showed very little variance of total compensation at the same level in different offices.
