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.
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.
As someone on TC put it, a mid-range dev at Google could easily be a superstar dev elsewhere. Ignoring that, if you factor in vesting stock and the annual bonus, 150k doesn't seem that insane to me.
$300 constitutes, before taxes, around $550k. This is not unheard of for senior / director level product management or engineering hires at some large tech firms. Do not believe what you read on glassdoor. There are plenty of Googlers that are making around $1M in salary in these types of roles.
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.
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?
Everything I had read previously stated that Google salaries were nothing special compared to industry averages, and it was the perks and culture that differentiated them
But there's no way $150k is average for a mid-range developer.
You can hit $300K (All-in) as a senior engineer at Google.
Various finance firms on the east coast can also send recruiting e-mails, touting their >400K comp. I think the key to that one is having work experience in an investment bank, as well as at AMAPGOFA.
Just adding not all Googlers make that much. I have 7 years in industry, L4, and make 117 base with 40k of stock a year in San Francisco (was 30k at grant time). If you can convince Google you're worth more they will pay it but not all Googlers are making crazy cash (btw wish I was in Seattle given CoL difference).
At Google making 300k total comp means you're probably a high-performing L4 or a new L5 (senior). Your day can look like absolutely anything.
I know people making 300k that are writing hundreds of lines of high-quality code in important systems every single day for years in a row and also doing code reviews, system design, etc. Very productive engineers doing traditional tasks.
I also know people at that level who spend their days watching YouTube videos and hoping nobody notices. On many teams, nobody ever does. It's easier to hire one extra person at these big companies than to fire one.
All these two people have in common is that they can pass an interview and they know how to write an email.
(Aside: the latter category makes me pretty angry because I know so many good programmers in India, Eastern Europe, etc who could change their whole families' lives with that kind of money but can't get it from a lazy American)
We're talking about premium developers here. People making $150K/yr or more. I literally had people stolen by Google that were offered more than $250K/yr.
You are talking about something completely different than the rest of us.
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