Slightly-related: has anyone interviewing with Airbnb used the author's public starting offer of $220k total compensation to negotiate their own starting offer? Genuinely curious.
Really sad to know he didn't get a good offer in Airbnb and you both think it's a good offer. But this looks totally like a new grad offer.
I have my friends who just got offers in Airbnb who are getting paid 180k in salary and ~600K in stocks which is basically $330k/year.
My other friend who is senior engineer with 5 year experience is compensated around 500k/year.
I have similar experience and i recently did a job switch with around 11 competing offers and negotiated well more than the previous number. I negotiated with every offer except snapchat whom didn't move their needle but their offer was good not the best.
If you're really good, you can easily negotiate up to 400k/year real money(cash + stocks).
- Googler/Fb employee with 4 year work experience here.
O.o These numbers are surprisingly high, to the point of almost being unbelievable.
And I go around telling my friends that software engineers can make 120k right out of college, and I'M getting laughed at by my friends at how apparently unbelievable ridiculously high this is.
I've got 3 years experience and I'm making not much more than that working at a midsized startup (I went to a top tech school and everything!).
And then I go on Hacker News and learn that the fair salary for people working at big companies, with around my experience is 330k!?! Man what am I doing wrong.
Is this what it is like being the mythical, 10x developer unicorn that I hear so much about?
Sorry, but this is real. It's very normal for a new grad googler to make $185k total comp in first year.
Offers i had got,
Uber,
Airbnb,
Snapchat,
Google,
Robinhood,
Netflix,
Salesforce,
Affirm,
An investment bank in NYC,
Two stealth startup in SF.
In Facebook, it's very common for one high perfoming engineer getting discretionary equity of 1M+ if you do re-defines or create a meaningful impact.
I'm sorry i'm not going for any startup soon as it's hard for employees to make money now. People join startups thinking they are going to do 10X. But investors give equity to startup engineers at 4X inflated valuation. So outcome is probably 2.5x with very high risk.
You do exceptional performance at google/facebook/uber and get noticed by your director and he throws 1M worth RSUS on you in next review cycle. Do it twice and there goes `rest and vest`.
The worst part is if you think this is the best offer for the years of experience, then you're totally mistaken :D
Thank you, anonymous person on the internet. You are talking about outlier people at outlier companies. The majority of software engineers not in top roles inside top companies are not making even close to that.
Every compensation discussion on HN invariably brings out of the woodwork That One Guy Who Knows That One Guy Who Makes $400K at Google. The take-away from reading these threads should NOT be that this is an ordinary compensation.
He's not joking. This is the talking style of all those people from IIT and IIM bragging about their "pay packets" to "freshers" about to be ragged. I wonder if he is going to copy/paste that directly into his matrimonial.
Thanks for sharing an above average scenario and congrats. Genuinely curious, where did the offers initially start out (I'm assuming based on your previous comp) and how much were you able to negotiate up? And were the offers from startups like Robinhood/Affirm and the I-bank competitive with the big tech cos?
I had negotiated 2-2.5X with most of the companies on stocks. Shocked? Well, if you ask for 10% more and accepted the offer, it's a party in next recruiting meetings in the company. Always flinch, start with 3X and make the recruiters feel bad. They should do atleast 5-10 calls just in negotiating the numbers. Imagine as a software engineer, how many tasks you had to complete for a project and how many times you have to meet/dial-in the customer/other teams during/after the project. You are the project for the recruiter for this month. Let him/her work for you this month.
> And then I go on Hacker News and learn that the fair salary for people working at big companies, with around my experience is 330k!?! Man what am I doing wrong.
Early stage startups are making a joke out of engineers by pitching the bro-culture and talking about freedom and 10X- 100X.
And yeah, with a big hype from VCs and investors tweeting about startupX, Y, Z, engineers get fooled and join a startup and work for 4 years and later figure out it was a bad idea.
It's a very bad idea to join a startup for money unless you know the founders really well who have a track record of selling themselves to Google/Facebook/Oracle/MSFT.
It's a not a joke. You work in consultancy which is a service company where margins are not high as goog/fb/msft.
I work in product company with high profits in billions. It's common for new grad engineers who join as L3 and become L5 in 3-5 years in all the above companies.
That's not what I said, but thanks for your contribution all the same.
Airbnb offered him less to start. So I'm curious if someone in similar shoes (say, similar level of experience) used his expanded offer as a point of negotiation.
Did you miss the part where the guy had been coding for less than 1 year? 250k might not be the pinnacle of software engineer compensation, but it's as good as it gets for his level of (in)experience.
I have my friends who just got offers in Airbnb who are getting paid 180k in salary and ~600K in stocks which is basically $330k/year.
My other friend who is senior engineer with 5 year experience is compensated around 500k/year.
I have similar experience and i recently did a job switch with around 11 competing offers and negotiated well more than the previous number. I negotiated with every offer except snapchat whom didn't move their needle but their offer was good not the best.
If you're really good, you can easily negotiate up to 400k/year real money(cash + stocks).
- Googler/Fb employee with 4 year work experience here.