[mangotrees]

I'm in management at a FAANG company.

Total comp for my college hires averages around $150k.

Total comp for my career level ICs averages a smidge over $200k.

My top 10% have total comp in the $350k neighborhood.

The very few folks who are at the staff/principal range (depending on which companies titles you're using) are taking home $500-800k (mostly in stock). If we consider attrition, it's probably only 1 in 150 of the engineers we hire who ever hit this tier or above.

The levels.fyi info seems pretty accurate to me. Their estimate for my personal role is within 2% of my actuals.

[newfangle]

Which FAANG? That matters apple and amazon are not anywhere as competitive as the rest.

[dgemm]

They have to be competitive especially at the more senior levels.

[enahs-sf]

So the question for me as an engineer becomes, do I grind it out at a FAANG company and try to be one of those level 7’s OR do I roll the dice on the startup? My intuition is that the former has a better outcome on average. Seems pretty rare to become staff/principal/whatever at a big co and based on the data from levels.fyi, you gotta be pretty far along in your career.

[mkoryak]

I worked at ~6 startups for about 10 years before google. What do I have to show for it? A slight beer belly and less motivation to build something from the ground up yet again only to see it burn down. Yeah, I had a ton of fun too.

Would I trade all those years at startups for going straight to google? eeh, maybe 4 of them. On the other hand though, I don't think I would have made it through the interview without knowing a lot of random shit I learned at startups.

Also being a dad and working at a startup does not mix well.

[pm90]

Interesting. Maybe FAANG's do so well in SV because they have a nice pipeline of startup burnouts who learn all this weird shit that you only learn from working at startups for a decade, and then finally end up in FAANG's, use all their wisdom to build even better systems....

[caymanjim]

Or neither? Very few people will reach senior management and very few startups are successful. Any IT career is going to set you up for a comfortable life even if you're a mid-level non-management workhorse. Excelling is partially about skill, but vastly more about persistence and luck. Find something you enjoy and don't worry about where you'll be in 20 years.

[MuffinFlavored]

> Total comp for my college hires averages around $150k.

What cities is that number for?