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.
500 and 700k is about the level of comp of Google’s Staff and Senior Staff levels correspondingly, assuming a high yearly review rating. Let me assure you, there are a lot more of them than you think, at Google and elsewhere. It is true that almost all of the engineers at those levels are exceptional however.
$200K is entry level for Google in the Bay Area. $800K is probably 95th. percentile for individual contributors but you don’t have to be management to hit that. It is rare.
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?
The reality is that "$600K at BigTech" isn't as common as HN would have you believe. It's not easy to be at the $600K total compensation level at FAANG. It's not necessarily uncommon, but it's not like the majority of engineers there are at that level. Just look at https://levels.fyi and search for a FAANG company. For example, Google's L6 total compensation average is ~$450K. L6 (the rough equivalent of principal or senior principal engineer at many, perhaps most, other companies, including the one I work for) isn't easy to achieve at Google and the vast, vast majority of SEs at Google are not making L6 compensation.
In fact, I'd wager (not assert, as I haven't actually run the numbers from levels.fyi or industry salary data), that the vast majority of Silicon Valley software engineers plateau around the $300k mark on the high end.
I worked at Google. $300k is a few years out of college if you do ok and get promoted once. You write code and maybe onboard a junior now and then. 8 hour workdays, but nobody checks so you can work less if you want. So it is just a regular coding job.
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