HN has a curious relationship to money some of the time.
a) Many of us watched our classmates go into management consulting, investment banking, finance, medicine, law, etc. These are all fields where $250k is not exactly outlandish for a 29 year old.
b) We have a lot of friendly, accessible fellow posters who write computer code and are financially very successful.
c) We talk about $X million valuations and $YY million acquisitions and $Z billion IPOs the way catering company owners discuss the price of tomatoes.
d) We have heard many credible people complain of how difficult it is to hire and retain engineers. So difficult, in fact, that they'd pay $10k+ just for an introduction or $50k+ for an actual placement.
e) We understand incentive structures and equity grants exist.
f) We routinely read industry news like "Google and Facebook in heated war for talent", "The going rate for an acquisition-to-hire is $1 million per engineer", "Four large technology firms were engaged in a gentlemen's agreement to conspire against their employees until the government told them it was cartelicious", "Productivity per engineer is going through the roof", "Company Z supports Q00,000 paying customers per engineer", "Efforts of individual engineers have succeeded in adding millions to billions of dollars of value to some companies", etc etc etc, and generally seem to be at least as savvy as C-students in Microecon 101.
and yet
g) Talk of engineers receiving wages above some magic threshold is met with disbelief, scorn, and a wee bit of jealousy.
It isn't hugely interesting to me what any particular person at a particular company is making, but is $250k an outlandish total compensation number? No, it is clearly achievable. Do you have to be programming demigod to achieve it? No, compensation moves along with several different axes and programming ability isn't the main one. Is this anecdote a freak of nature which we'll never see again? No, signs point that this will become increasingly more common over time.
As a point of data, I work at Google and am at a similar point in my career. My base salary a year ago was $136k, but there was a companywide 10% raise last winter, and now my base is $150k.
You get a cash bonus each year that's around 15% of your base, but if you're a superstar it can be double that, or if you're a total disappointment, it can be nothing. But if I perform as expected, that's another $22k.
Finally, I was granted 300 shares of stock that vest annually over four years. So each year, I get 75x the value of a Google share. GOOG is trading around $600, so that's another $45k.
So my total annual compensation this year will be $217k. If I were bragging to an ex-employer, I'd probably round up to "a quarter million" too. :)
I'm also an under-30 engineer making ~250k in the Bay Area (at a publicly-traded gaming company, not at Google). My company has six pay grades for pure engineers; I'm at the second highest. My 2011 comp breaks down as follows:
* 166k base
* 45k bonus
* 35k stock grants (RSUs)
Note this does not include 401k matching, stock purchase plan, healthcare, or any other quantifiable perks.
When I took this job a year ago, I had a similar offer from a prominent NYC startup: ~220k (150k base, 30k bonus, 250k options over 4 years using offer-time valuation). I was 26 at the time.
For added context, I did not attend an elite school. I did not complete my undergraduate degree. I'm smart, but not extraordinarily so (800/710 math/verbal SAT). I interview well. I have a "disruptive" skill (cloud expertise).
Do you know if the 10% raise is automatically applied to the base salary of new hires as well?
I'm looking for a new job, and strangely, Google's base is about 10% lower than the base from my other offers (Apple, Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn), rather than 10% higher.
Also, to add my own datapoint: I'm four years out from undergrad at an elite school, and Google offered me $120k base and 500 stock units over four years. My recruiter said that given the way annual bonuses work (15% bonus if you perform average, all the way up to 15% * 3.5 = 52.5% if you're extraordinary), I should haven't have much trouble getting about a 30%-35% bonus. So my expected annual salary from base, stock, and bonuses is about $120k + 125 stock units * $600 (which is what Google is currently trading at) + 30% * $120k = $231,000.
If I'd joined Google right out of school, I expect this would be even higher, since I would have received the 10% raise last year (and also, I've made a series of poor career decisions to join no-name startups that I think have kept my current base salary lower than normal and made me a little less desirable). Pure speculation, though.
I'm at another large valley company, at a similar point in my career, and I have almost the same base / equity compensation. Added up I hit around 220k.
I've had offers from other shops in the same just-over-200k ballpark, and I know peers at google pulling in around the same. I don't doubt 250k for a second.
Let me add some perspective to this as both an engineer and a Google employee.
The first thing I'll say is this: people lie about their incomes. They even do this anonymously (Glassdoor, etc). Not that I'm calling (or even suggesting) this a lie but be very careful believing anyone's salary claims unless they show you an original offer letter, employment contract or a W-2.
I'm not even sure if they're simply bad at math, lying to themselves or lying to others. Whatever the case, they lie.
With respect to Glassdoor and similar sites, another problem is different people have different ideas of what "salary" means. Does it include stock? Actual bonuses? Expected bonuses?
Likewise it's a skewed sample. I kinda have my doubts that many principal/distinguished engineers have the inclination to accurately report their incomes on such sites.
That being said, my experience in the outside world is that your salary quickly tops out as a senior engineer, architect, whatever. The only way to increase it is to move into management.
While you can move into management at Google, you can go very far (in terms of career and compensation) being simply an engineer if you're good at what you do, get things done and have a lot of impact.
This compensation can take many forms (vested stock, base salary, annual and periodic bonuses, etc).
Also, Google realizes that after you've been here awhile you become increasingly valuable. This is true for an engineer no matter where you work. The cost to a company of replacing someone who has worked there for years is huge (both in recruitment costs and getting them up to speed). Google is simply the only company I personally have worked for that seems to both recognize this and build it into the compensation system.
This really is a great place to work. That alone attracts and retains an awful lot of people. You can also get to work on some very large problems and systems (another draw card). The fact that Google does (or can) pay you very well is just icing on the cake.
Do you or anyone else know how much/little Google outsources their development work?
I was having a discussion with a fellow engineer about the outsourcing model and innovation.
Speaking as a Google engineer: There are three components to compensation here. Base salary, annual cash bonus, and stock grants. When he says he "takes home" $250k, he probably means the sum of all three. When the author says he thought the average Google salary was $130k, he might be referring just to the base.
Most of the comments in this thread are similarly ambiguous. If you post a comment, please be clear about whether you're talking about base or total compensation!
Without wanting to sound stupid, when you talk about salaries do you always mention the amount before or after tax? Here in Europe it's almost always after tax.
The position above, Senior Engineer, averages $130k.
There doesn't seem to be an incentive for 1,500 people to understate their earnings by 50%+ on an anonymous poll, especially a poll of engineers at one of those most engineering-centric companies in the world, where corrupting a dataset would likely feel akin to high treason.
Not inclined to trust second-hand information from one individual - sounds like they're either working at a much higher level than regular programmer, inflating their salary by including perks/stock/etc to make it seem higher, an extreme outlier, or just lying (people who tell their friends how much they earn in casual conversations also sound like the kind of people who would inflate that number).
I believe this post. I took a peek at the MSFT numbers on glassdoor, and either they are salary-only or total compensation packages have been reduced significantly since I was a manager ~6 years ago. I remember the general salary ranges for each of the levels (those titles correspond to numeric level ranges which had fixed salary, bonus, and stock ranges), and the glassdor numbers are reflective of salary data, not stock.
Stock would be hard anyway because they vest over N years so how much you vest in a given year depends on a) your promotion velocity b) whether you got any gold stars/special bonus grants and c) how you ranked within your peer group.
A few months ago I heard a first-hand account from within Google of a developer who was paid a $1M annual bonus, a team that divided a cash and stock bonus between them that was worth $1m+ to each team member, a PM who was paid $40M (and another who got ~$20M IIRC) not to go to Facebook and many other similar stories from Google that make $250k a year sound rather normal.
The theme is that Google has upped compensation in the past 12-18 months in order to retain top talent, with a lot of cash bonuses and base salary increases since competing against Facebook stock options with Google stock options isn't a fair fight any more.
Edit: apparently they also don't like developers talking to each other about this (although team bonuses are highlighted within the company), since they don't want developers interviewing with Facebook or another co. just for the purpose of getting some cash out of Google.
I have no clue why people are obsessing over 250K. If you care about money as a programmer, you are better off working at a hedge fund.
My programmer friends at hedge funds (all between 22 and 26) are averaging 500K salary with 100K bonuses (note: as a programmer, base is much higher but bonus is lower). So if google isn't paying those types of numbers to people, then money cannot be the only factor at play.
This is certainly true (I've worked both sides of the fence in terms of types of firm).
To add a generalization, my rule of thumb is the variable part of compensation varies most for the domain experts. So in technology for the sake of technology style companies like Google, total comp shoots up based on stock/bonuses. In reality, Google is an advertising company so presumably the ad sales folks bringing in whales aren't hurting either. Naturally numbers get skewed by overpaying to keep certain people (i.e. overshoot on retention packages), and given large scale, there are always some overpaid due to lucky timing/placing. Such is life! In hedge funds, the traders get the big bonuses, but the programmers get a solid salary so lower bonuses don't hurt quite so much. Luck also plays a part for those folks var comp. For those in hft, I'm aware of a few places where given the right mix of skills, someone who likes to think of themselves as a programmer can get the trader style bonuses.
i think what's happening here is that no one really envies hedge fund programmers. sure, they make a lot of money, but the job itself is perceived as unpleasant, unfulfilling, boring, stressful, or some combination of those. google, on the other hand, is a standard[1] software job - the type that most people in the hacker news demographic are probably doing, so it is seen as directly comparable.
[1] i don't mean that in a dismissive sense - i work there and it's the best job i've ever had, but the work is not qualitatively different from what you'd do in other software-focused companies. hedge funds are not software-focused.
What kind of backgrounds do they have? CS or STEM degrees at ivy league or similar schools? Does people with liberal arts degrees and a finance MBA get those kinds of jobs? (Assuming they can program.)
the idea was that you had to take a 5x pay cut to do interesting work in a good environment with smart people. it's interesting that it has reduced to a 2x paycut.
It seems like we're missing some important information. I'd be interested to know what he did before going to Google - i.e. he didn't go there straight from university. So he worked for Jacques, then left and some unspecified stuff happened in the middle, and now he's at Google. What did he do in that period that made him so valuable?
Maybe I can shed light on why some of us are "shocked" about this number, while others seem to think it's no big deal.
I work for Cisco, which is certainly not considered a Google or Amazon, these days, but still a fairly respectable place. I'm a software engineering doing embedded work for the last three years out of my BS in CS. I got hired on at $73k with 300 options (now underwater).
I have had consistently good reviews, though only given one promotion and one raise - with a whopping $79.5k in salary afterwards. A bonus is typically 6%, though this year I've got the highest rating possible, so I had a 12% bonus. I've been given RSUs once, at a value of about $10k, though the stock price dropped and they are sitting at around $5000 now.
So, my yearly compensation is about $90k or so, though they've jacked up our medical costs, taken away free drinks, raise prices in our cafeteria, taken away the home broadband reimbursment, etc etc since I've been here.
So, Anyone need an embedded engineer with a network security focus?
Polish up that resume and start the search (the easiest way IMO is via contracting agencies, since they only make money when you do). Everyday you spend working below your market rate is a day you leave cash just laying on the table. You only have so many years you're going to be able to earn, I wouldn't waste them.
I'm in a similar situation (except with an even bigger tech company) but I work in a geographic area with no other tech employers. I do believe this cuts down on the number of people leaving for greener pastures and helps keep salaries down.
This smells funny to me. From everything I saw when I worked at Google, Glassdoor had the salary range right. For all the guy's self-deprecation, if he was really making $250k, even after bonus and stock, he must have been promoted multiple times, or hired at a fairly high level.
I too recently lost a co-founder to a Valley company of similar size. Considering that he is very green, not exactly the best in our startup and that we are based somewhere with rather low pay for engineers in general, the offer he received was very hard to believe for everyone. It's hard to convince people to stay when those work in Valley could be as interesting without the stress and come with a big fat cheque.
I recently interviewed with several companies, and my experience shows that including bonuses, this isn't an unrealistic amount to expect. I had only one offer that ended up under $200K and that's only because the company didn't have a bonus program at the time. Many of the offers were much higher.
It was a really had choice to turn them down to start my own company, but I figure that being my own boss had some value, and being able to create something that was completely my own vision was more enticing. However, at the same time it gave me some confidence that if my startup didn't go according to plan, I did have a decent fallback.
250K is a lot of money depending on where you live.
You can't take simple things for granted in the Bay Area. Want to raise a family of four and actually have three or four bedrooms, you're looking at a million+ dollar house.
250K is what you should be shooting for if you have goals such as these.
Probably not health care. The value of that is hard to deduce.
Possibly not 401k match. Most people don't factor that into their totals.
Traditionally, compensation package for an engineer means salary, bonus, stock.
During a boom time, wages rise. Wages are "sticky", meaning they lag behind the current state of the economy. Wages for programmers have really gone out the roof in the last few years due to lack of US computer science graduates, stingy visa provisions, etc.
In a few months, the funding wave will start to level off and dip, but wages will still be as high as ever. That's the crunch. Winter is coming.
EDIT: Think about it this way: in 2009, a 1M seed got you 10 engineers for a year. Now it gets you 6, maybe 7. Ouch.
I'm not sure why people find this so unbelievable.
The revenue per employee at GOOG is $1.2M in a very high margin business. That means some of their best developers, the guys whose products generate all the revenue, take home only 20% of the pie. In finance, this would be laughable.
I've been meaning to ask some of my founder friends about this.
I've casually heard that Google and Facebook have driven the starting salary for Bay Area developers up above $150k/yr for college kids with no experience.
I'm a talented 25 year-old web developer who jumped from contracting to full time a year ago. I received a $110k/yr (not eligible for bonus) offer. The people I asked at the time said it was a competitive salary and not worth negotiating.
Now I'm wondering if it's time to move on. I see boxes in on job applications for "expected annual salary" and I don't know what to put. I know the money you save when you're young is what allows you to retire/start a company/etc., and want to make sure I'm being paid competitively. At the same time, I don't want to misread the market and come across as out-of-touch on one of these apps.
Guys, what's the going rate for a talented front-end web developer in the Bay Area about 4 years out of school?
I see boxes in on job applications for "expected annual salary" and I don't know what to put.
"Negotiable", "Market rate", etc. That box is asking you to compromise your negotiating position. There is no legal or moral stricture that says you have to oblige them.
The people I asked at the time said it was a competitive salary and not worth negotiating.
This makes me angry. Of course it is worth negotiating. What would have happened if you had said "That is an interesting number. How would you feel about $115k?" Answer: in all probability, you'd be a couple thousand dollars richer now for three minutes of work, the worst possible outcome would have been accepting the offer at $110k, and nobody at your company would care either way because the difference is bat guano to them.
Someone -- and indeed, looking at the real estate ads -- a lot of someones -- have to be running up the demand for $1M++ houses throughout Silicon Valley.
From what I've seen, as an outsider with a lot of friends that work at and/or have interviewed at Google, they seem to have some serious issues with sexisim, issues that go beyond a pay gap. They are trying, but man, they are not doing so well, and they are losing out on talent because of it.
This must be partly a team-specific culture issue, because my observations are different. In my area of the company there are quite a few women engineers who are highly regarded, extremely influential, and well-compensated. The gender ratio is still poor like most places in the industry, but I haven't seen any evidence of women doing worse in career advancement.
Another effect this will have on the start-up scene is that if you build your company in 'The Valley' that companies like Google will be competing with you for talent. You may have an upside from being in the SV eco-system in the first place, however you may find yourself paying a lot more for developers than if you were in a place where parties with pockets as deep as Google are rare.
Headquarters in Silicon Valley, development somewhere else might be a good strategy if you want to keep the burn rate under control.
Any thoughts on this? Can a small startup compete with the Googles and Apples in the Valley?
While it might be harder to get good employees cheaply, you would expect that finding financially independent co-founders would be easier.
If you have reasonable financial discipline, 5 years of $250,000 can easily build yourself a war chest of a few years living expenses: the perfect co-founder.
I'm not living in the Valley (far from it, mind you :-) but I think a small startup has more to be worried about other small startups than about Google/Apple.
[+] [-] patio11|14 years ago|reply
a) Many of us watched our classmates go into management consulting, investment banking, finance, medicine, law, etc. These are all fields where $250k is not exactly outlandish for a 29 year old.
b) We have a lot of friendly, accessible fellow posters who write computer code and are financially very successful.
c) We talk about $X million valuations and $YY million acquisitions and $Z billion IPOs the way catering company owners discuss the price of tomatoes.
d) We have heard many credible people complain of how difficult it is to hire and retain engineers. So difficult, in fact, that they'd pay $10k+ just for an introduction or $50k+ for an actual placement.
e) We understand incentive structures and equity grants exist.
f) We routinely read industry news like "Google and Facebook in heated war for talent", "The going rate for an acquisition-to-hire is $1 million per engineer", "Four large technology firms were engaged in a gentlemen's agreement to conspire against their employees until the government told them it was cartelicious", "Productivity per engineer is going through the roof", "Company Z supports Q00,000 paying customers per engineer", "Efforts of individual engineers have succeeded in adding millions to billions of dollars of value to some companies", etc etc etc, and generally seem to be at least as savvy as C-students in Microecon 101.
and yet
g) Talk of engineers receiving wages above some magic threshold is met with disbelief, scorn, and a wee bit of jealousy.
It isn't hugely interesting to me what any particular person at a particular company is making, but is $250k an outlandish total compensation number? No, it is clearly achievable. Do you have to be programming demigod to achieve it? No, compensation moves along with several different axes and programming ability isn't the main one. Is this anecdote a freak of nature which we'll never see again? No, signs point that this will become increasingly more common over time.
[+] [-] googlethrowaway|14 years ago|reply
You get a cash bonus each year that's around 15% of your base, but if you're a superstar it can be double that, or if you're a total disappointment, it can be nothing. But if I perform as expected, that's another $22k.
Finally, I was granted 300 shares of stock that vest annually over four years. So each year, I get 75x the value of a Google share. GOOG is trading around $600, so that's another $45k.
So my total annual compensation this year will be $217k. If I were bragging to an ex-employer, I'd probably round up to "a quarter million" too. :)
[+] [-] fake_handle|14 years ago|reply
I'm also an under-30 engineer making ~250k in the Bay Area (at a publicly-traded gaming company, not at Google). My company has six pay grades for pure engineers; I'm at the second highest. My 2011 comp breaks down as follows:
* 166k base
* 45k bonus
* 35k stock grants (RSUs)
Note this does not include 401k matching, stock purchase plan, healthcare, or any other quantifiable perks.
When I took this job a year ago, I had a similar offer from a prominent NYC startup: ~220k (150k base, 30k bonus, 250k options over 4 years using offer-time valuation). I was 26 at the time.
For added context, I did not attend an elite school. I did not complete my undergraduate degree. I'm smart, but not extraordinarily so (800/710 math/verbal SAT). I interview well. I have a "disruptive" skill (cloud expertise).
[+] [-] teratau|14 years ago|reply
I'm looking for a new job, and strangely, Google's base is about 10% lower than the base from my other offers (Apple, Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn), rather than 10% higher.
Also, to add my own datapoint: I'm four years out from undergrad at an elite school, and Google offered me $120k base and 500 stock units over four years. My recruiter said that given the way annual bonuses work (15% bonus if you perform average, all the way up to 15% * 3.5 = 52.5% if you're extraordinary), I should haven't have much trouble getting about a 30%-35% bonus. So my expected annual salary from base, stock, and bonuses is about $120k + 125 stock units * $600 (which is what Google is currently trading at) + 30% * $120k = $231,000.
If I'd joined Google right out of school, I expect this would be even higher, since I would have received the 10% raise last year (and also, I've made a series of poor career decisions to join no-name startups that I think have kept my current base salary lower than normal and made me a little less desirable). Pure speculation, though.
[+] [-] dodedo|14 years ago|reply
I've had offers from other shops in the same just-over-200k ballpark, and I know peers at google pulling in around the same. I don't doubt 250k for a second.
[+] [-] xytop|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] felipemnoa|14 years ago|reply
That last part about "a quarter million" made me crack up. Awesome stuff!
Now, down votes, come to me.
[+] [-] cletus|14 years ago|reply
The first thing I'll say is this: people lie about their incomes. They even do this anonymously (Glassdoor, etc). Not that I'm calling (or even suggesting) this a lie but be very careful believing anyone's salary claims unless they show you an original offer letter, employment contract or a W-2.
I'm not even sure if they're simply bad at math, lying to themselves or lying to others. Whatever the case, they lie.
With respect to Glassdoor and similar sites, another problem is different people have different ideas of what "salary" means. Does it include stock? Actual bonuses? Expected bonuses?
Likewise it's a skewed sample. I kinda have my doubts that many principal/distinguished engineers have the inclination to accurately report their incomes on such sites.
That being said, my experience in the outside world is that your salary quickly tops out as a senior engineer, architect, whatever. The only way to increase it is to move into management.
While you can move into management at Google, you can go very far (in terms of career and compensation) being simply an engineer if you're good at what you do, get things done and have a lot of impact.
This compensation can take many forms (vested stock, base salary, annual and periodic bonuses, etc).
Also, Google realizes that after you've been here awhile you become increasingly valuable. This is true for an engineer no matter where you work. The cost to a company of replacing someone who has worked there for years is huge (both in recruitment costs and getting them up to speed). Google is simply the only company I personally have worked for that seems to both recognize this and build it into the compensation system.
This really is a great place to work. That alone attracts and retains an awful lot of people. You can also get to work on some very large problems and systems (another draw card). The fact that Google does (or can) pay you very well is just icing on the cake.
[+] [-] rudy750|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] raldi|14 years ago|reply
Most of the comments in this thread are similarly ambiguous. If you post a comment, please be clear about whether you're talking about base or total compensation!
[+] [-] mvgoogler|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stef25|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_baker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garethsprice|14 years ago|reply
The position above, Senior Engineer, averages $130k.
There doesn't seem to be an incentive for 1,500 people to understate their earnings by 50%+ on an anonymous poll, especially a poll of engineers at one of those most engineering-centric companies in the world, where corrupting a dataset would likely feel akin to high treason.
Not inclined to trust second-hand information from one individual - sounds like they're either working at a much higher level than regular programmer, inflating their salary by including perks/stock/etc to make it seem higher, an extreme outlier, or just lying (people who tell their friends how much they earn in casual conversations also sound like the kind of people who would inflate that number).
[+] [-] larsberg|14 years ago|reply
Stock would be hard anyway because they vest over N years so how much you vest in a given year depends on a) your promotion velocity b) whether you got any gold stars/special bonus grants and c) how you ranked within your peer group.
[+] [-] liuwei6|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gujk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
The theme is that Google has upped compensation in the past 12-18 months in order to retain top talent, with a lot of cash bonuses and base salary increases since competing against Facebook stock options with Google stock options isn't a fair fight any more.
Edit: apparently they also don't like developers talking to each other about this (although team bonuses are highlighted within the company), since they don't want developers interviewing with Facebook or another co. just for the purpose of getting some cash out of Google.
[+] [-] veyron|14 years ago|reply
My programmer friends at hedge funds (all between 22 and 26) are averaging 500K salary with 100K bonuses (note: as a programmer, base is much higher but bonus is lower). So if google isn't paying those types of numbers to people, then money cannot be the only factor at play.
[+] [-] stuntprogrammer|14 years ago|reply
To add a generalization, my rule of thumb is the variable part of compensation varies most for the domain experts. So in technology for the sake of technology style companies like Google, total comp shoots up based on stock/bonuses. In reality, Google is an advertising company so presumably the ad sales folks bringing in whales aren't hurting either. Naturally numbers get skewed by overpaying to keep certain people (i.e. overshoot on retention packages), and given large scale, there are always some overpaid due to lucky timing/placing. Such is life! In hedge funds, the traders get the big bonuses, but the programmers get a solid salary so lower bonuses don't hurt quite so much. Luck also plays a part for those folks var comp. For those in hft, I'm aware of a few places where given the right mix of skills, someone who likes to think of themselves as a programmer can get the trader style bonuses.
[+] [-] zem|14 years ago|reply
[1] i don't mean that in a dismissive sense - i work there and it's the best job i've ever had, but the work is not qualitatively different from what you'd do in other software-focused companies. hedge funds are not software-focused.
[+] [-] Selvik|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omlette|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SandB0x|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtfcisco|14 years ago|reply
I work for Cisco, which is certainly not considered a Google or Amazon, these days, but still a fairly respectable place. I'm a software engineering doing embedded work for the last three years out of my BS in CS. I got hired on at $73k with 300 options (now underwater).
I have had consistently good reviews, though only given one promotion and one raise - with a whopping $79.5k in salary afterwards. A bonus is typically 6%, though this year I've got the highest rating possible, so I had a 12% bonus. I've been given RSUs once, at a value of about $10k, though the stock price dropped and they are sitting at around $5000 now.
So, my yearly compensation is about $90k or so, though they've jacked up our medical costs, taken away free drinks, raise prices in our cafeteria, taken away the home broadband reimbursment, etc etc since I've been here.
So, Anyone need an embedded engineer with a network security focus?
[+] [-] danssig|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_reader|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwillen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asknemo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluesmoon|14 years ago|reply
It was a really had choice to turn them down to start my own company, but I figure that being my own boss had some value, and being able to create something that was completely my own vision was more enticing. However, at the same time it gave me some confidence that if my startup didn't go according to plan, I did have a decent fallback.
[+] [-] shin_lao|14 years ago|reply
Let's be realistic a minute, $ 250k/year is a lot of money.
[+] [-] aantix|14 years ago|reply
You can't take simple things for granted in the Bay Area. Want to raise a family of four and actually have three or four bedrooms, you're looking at a million+ dollar house.
250K is what you should be shooting for if you have goals such as these.
[+] [-] surt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danssig|14 years ago|reply
>The revenue per employee at GOOG is $1.2M in a very high margin business.
$250k/year is not a lot compared to that.
[+] [-] mmahemoff|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nateberkopec|14 years ago|reply
During a boom time, wages rise. Wages are "sticky", meaning they lag behind the current state of the economy. Wages for programmers have really gone out the roof in the last few years due to lack of US computer science graduates, stingy visa provisions, etc.
In a few months, the funding wave will start to level off and dip, but wages will still be as high as ever. That's the crunch. Winter is coming.
EDIT: Think about it this way: in 2009, a 1M seed got you 10 engineers for a year. Now it gets you 6, maybe 7. Ouch.
[+] [-] dev_jim|14 years ago|reply
The revenue per employee at GOOG is $1.2M in a very high margin business. That means some of their best developers, the guys whose products generate all the revenue, take home only 20% of the pie. In finance, this would be laughable.
Corporate America baffles me sometimes.
[+] [-] Joakal|14 years ago|reply
There's also an oversupply of labour in the city though.
[+] [-] anonsalaryqtion|14 years ago|reply
I've casually heard that Google and Facebook have driven the starting salary for Bay Area developers up above $150k/yr for college kids with no experience.
I'm a talented 25 year-old web developer who jumped from contracting to full time a year ago. I received a $110k/yr (not eligible for bonus) offer. The people I asked at the time said it was a competitive salary and not worth negotiating.
Now I'm wondering if it's time to move on. I see boxes in on job applications for "expected annual salary" and I don't know what to put. I know the money you save when you're young is what allows you to retire/start a company/etc., and want to make sure I'm being paid competitively. At the same time, I don't want to misread the market and come across as out-of-touch on one of these apps.
Guys, what's the going rate for a talented front-end web developer in the Bay Area about 4 years out of school?
[+] [-] patio11|14 years ago|reply
"Negotiable", "Market rate", etc. That box is asking you to compromise your negotiating position. There is no legal or moral stricture that says you have to oblige them.
The people I asked at the time said it was a competitive salary and not worth negotiating.
This makes me angry. Of course it is worth negotiating. What would have happened if you had said "That is an interesting number. How would you feel about $115k?" Answer: in all probability, you'd be a couple thousand dollars richer now for three minutes of work, the worst possible outcome would have been accepting the offer at $110k, and nobody at your company would care either way because the difference is bat guano to them.
[+] [-] thibaut_barrere|14 years ago|reply
I know a couple of people running brick-and-mortar shops (think: selling furniture etc), or lawyers, or other professions that earn just as much too.
[+] [-] impendia|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rachelbythebay|14 years ago|reply
These are 2011 numbers, personally researched.
[+] [-] lsc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bikepump|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] savrajsingh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|14 years ago|reply
Headquarters in Silicon Valley, development somewhere else might be a good strategy if you want to keep the burn rate under control.
Any thoughts on this? Can a small startup compete with the Googles and Apples in the Valley?
[+] [-] mseebach|14 years ago|reply
If you have reasonable financial discipline, 5 years of $250,000 can easily build yourself a war chest of a few years living expenses: the perfect co-founder.
[+] [-] thibaut_barrere|14 years ago|reply