Median salary for SF Region in 2014 was $75,900. Thats ~10k over the median for an ENTRY level position. Sure, could Google pay them more, absolutely. But I don't think 86k a year is anything to scoff at.
Can you post some kind of evidence for this? I know salaries are somewhat secretive, but do you have something to support this?
The reason I'm skeptical is that while I do know people at google as relatively senior dev (very talented, elite CS degrees, 15+ years experience), they were well above 200k a year, but nowhere close to 600k. This was also more than 2 years ago.
Again, I understand data isn't public, but do you have something to support the notion it isn't hard to make 600k as a dev?
glassdoor is inaccurate for google. 200k / yr is too low for a Sr Software Eng. The all in comp is quite a bit higher. And there are a lot of engineers who make a lot more than this...
Interesting. What industry if you don't want to name names? Total comp at Google for a "senior" (8-12 years experience) is $300k-$400k. Rare to hear about a non SV darling paying developers that much.
It was just an example, not referring to an actual position. There isn't even an actual title called "Senior Developer" at neither Google nor Amazon. If you want a real job title to go look at, look at the pay for an L7 SDE at both G and Amazon. At Google: $270k salary, at Amazon: $160k salary (according to levels.fyi)
I swear half the comments on this site are just nitpicking "nuh uh you are wrong about this tiny one word in your comment" while ignoring the actual point of the discussion.
Those salaries on Glassdoor pretty much match what I'm saying, with salaries running up to $165 for senior devs. Add 30% for bonus and $100-150K in stock and you're into the $300K+ range I'm describing.
The $600K+ figure is for director level and above.
The $2M/year individual contributor was an outlier.
No doubt. I'm would not expect that most devs at Google are getting paid $200k. I would expect that the top-of-the-top (i.e. the '5s' here) are getting paid $200k and more, though. Basically, I feel like the entry-level pay here looks reasonably competitive, but the senior pay looks low relative to my experience and what I know of others' salaries and salary ranges. This is of course largely anecdotal, so maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
Yeah he said 500k. I Initially thought the same as you, 1-2mil.
500k for a senior dev is actually not too far out there. I have an L3 friend at Google (l3 is new hire level) who has been at the company for almost 2 years and who's total comp is almost 300k. So some L5s and L6s could certainly be pulling in 500k.
> A software engineer at Google earns, on average, $127k per year [1]. We multiply that by 1.4 [2] to obtain a cost per employee of $177k.
That ignores RSUs, signing bonus, and other bonuses, which make up the majority of the compensation package for senior engineers.
Even at entry level, total comp (ignoring insurance, cost of office space, free food, and other things that aren't directly paid to the employee) is over $127k/yr. A baseline new grad offer last fall included $180k of stock, or $45k/yr, on top of a six figure salary plus a $50k signing bonus. This probably goes without saying, but new grad offers can go significantly higher if the new grad has strong competing offers, and senior offers start out even higher and have a much larger range.
>A Google engineer can afford a condo five miles away in Sunnyvale ($700k)
If we're using the 2-2.5x income definition of "afford" that stands in the rest of the country, no. Total compensation across software engineers at Google looks to be about $160k [0]; a Googler can afford about $400k.
Not a lot of $400k condos around here.
To get to $700k, you'd need a married pair of Googlers (not an easy thing to do in this overwhelmingly male industry), the equity from a paid-off house somewhere else in (more likely), or the willingness (and lenders' willingness) to spend a much higher multiple of your income (seems to be what's happening).
> I wouldn’t trust online, voluntary, self-reported salary “data” even a little. No more than any other form of e-bragging. Everyone who posts online makes $350k, drives a Ferrari, and has a supermodel romantic partner.
Filter the visadoor results with job=software to see only the software developer salaries. These range from $280K to $850K, have a mean of $373K, a median $370K, 24 of 66 are at $400K and above.
This is very much the same ballpark as the self reported average salary of $433K on levels.fyi (I'd expect PERM figures to be slightly lower than average for the company as a whole since I presume they would normally be filed in the first year of employment.)
This strongly suggests to me that the levels.fyi self reported salaries for other companies are also ballpark correct.
> Netflix is known to pay at the top of market, so the highest few compensations there being >$350k make at least a little sense.
47 of 66 in the visadoor figures make $350 and above. While I would expect Netflix's average to be higher than other comparable companies this is because it hires only at Senior Software Developer level and above. Facebook and Google certainly pay their senior and above developers in the Bay Area similarly, albeit with a different RSU/salary mix.
Thanks for the link. I guess I overestimated starting salaries nationwide by quite a bit! But in my defense, I really meant total comp, not just salary.
I know of 2 SF startups that pay $120k ish for entry level. At entry level, forget about equity, the amount you will get will be worthless. The base is your entire package.
Google will give you a total comp (salary, bonus, RSU) of about $150-$160k for entry level. No senior+ person I know there is making less than $250k total comp. Google designs salaries very well to keep everyone in the same level centered at the same total comp. If you take a high salary, your raises and RSU refreshers will be less, regardless of your performance. Personally I think that's very unfair but hey I don't work at Google so who am I to say.
I was making $125k base (maybe $150k total) as entry level at a mid-peninsula bigco back in 2000. I never dipped under $100k going to smallco and startups since then. As you can imagine, I make a fortune these days but I am very highly specialized.
If indeed startups are paying less than $100k here, I can't imagine how they hire anyone, certainly not anyone good.
That would be the base, not total comp. Sr dev at Google is easily $250k.
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