> A senior engineer can easily make almost triple that today.
Salary? Easily? Where?
I've been browsing a lot of staff and principal jobs on LinkedIn recently. Some Crypto firms are around $300k, and I've seen one or two Fintech with specialized knowledge at $400k, but by far the majority are in the $200k region.
From my recent interview experience within the past year as a Google L5 equivalent, all cash discussions were:
- Netflix pays over $500k
- ByteDance pays $530k (they were willing to do all cash at the time, but they may have changed it to 90% cash recently)
- 2 HFTs, both above $750k
Signing bonuses not included. Some companies had >$100k signing.
I'm not a rockstar and I have around 5 YoE.
If you're okay with stock comp (which historically does better than an all-cash offer due to the massive initial equity grant and refreshers), there are plenty of big tech companies offering around the $500k+ mark today.
Can't share datapoints from where I work, but competitive datapoints I've gotten vary from 300k total comp to 800k total comp for senior, staff, principal engineers as well as managers in SF, LA, and DC (though DC is on the lower end). To your point, salaries tend to swing between 150 and 350, but the rest is made up with bonuses and especially stock comp.
Netflix recently advertised an eng mgr role for appsec with a published TC ceiling of 900k, for instance. They even wrote that into the linkedin JD.
That said, the higher you go on TC, the higher the risk that the company doesn't have much of a social contract with its staff and may in fact have a deleterious relationship with society at large - e.g Meta. Not always true, but generally yes.
Nothing about this article or thread is taking about total comp. It’s talking about specifically base salary. ~$200k is in-line with plenty of companies’, even large ones’, bands for L5 FTEs.
Ok. Regardless, you're not going to get a cash offer at a startup that rivals the "today" dollar value of a publicly traded company offering RSUs as compensation. Whether the risk is worth it to you or not is a different and unrelated discussion.
Well a lot of the compensation is not cash, but bonuses and stock grants. I know, stock isn’t cash and is subject to risk, but it’s a lot more than 190k even after you factor in the risk.
Salary? Easily? Where?
I've been browsing a lot of staff and principal jobs on LinkedIn recently. Some Crypto firms are around $300k, and I've seen one or two Fintech with specialized knowledge at $400k, but by far the majority are in the $200k region.