It averages out to $420k/yr. There's this sentiment on HN that "all you have to do" is get a job at a big tech company and you'll make a million dollars a year. It's idiotic, and not true. Yes, there are people who make $500k+ writing code in a cubicle for 40 hours a week. They are the vast, vast, vast minority compared to the people a) making $100-200k doing the same thing; b) making that $500k+ doing everything but writing code.
Unless you're doing infrastructure stuff at Netflix, ad work at FB or Google, or some high level stuff at Microsoft you're not making half a million a year, and you're not doing it at a mid-level anything, anywhere.
As a Belgian, I can't help but look at these numbers in disbelief. 100-200k/annum for churning out code 40 hours a week? Where do I sign up for this? I'm the best paid employee I know, work insane hours, and I'm not even in that bracket.
Addendum: it's very rare to make more than twice the average wage in Belgium as an employee. It's a different matter if you're self employed.
As a Belgian myself: self-employment is the key here. It's not that hard to pull in 100-200K annually in the current belgian tech space, I've done it consistently for the past 5 years, with lots of periods where I did not work full time.
In the US at least, as a contractor, you have to make a lot more in gross pay to come out equivalent to what you'd earn at a lower salary somewhere else. You have to cover:
* Health Insurance
* No paid time off: Want 4 weeks off a year? That's a 7.6% reduction in pay.
* You have to pay both the employee & employer side of payroll taxes
* You're not eligible for unemployment, so you need to save more money to cover that possibility
* No retirement fund so you don't get any matching funds and have to really be on top of what your long term needs are and take that off the top of your income.
As an example, I have a normal salary full-time job, but I also have a hobby business on the side. The money I make from that given the tax bracket I'm in, federal, state, payroll taxes, means my "take home" pay from is taxed around 43%. And that's without needing to take anything extra out of it for paid time off, health insurance, or retirement, all of which are well covered by my salaried position.
In the UK you could make good money but the trick is to be a consultant and bill your employer through your Limited company.
At one place where I worked with a permanent contract, the consultants were billing at 800-1200 gbp per day depending on seniority. There was agency cut of course but overall they made real well. this is when working at the same office at the same hours right next to me, just like an employee.
I haven’t been in the UK since a while so I hear that now things changed so you can no longer pretend to run a company when being essentially an employee.
I haven’t been in the UK since a while so I hear that now things changed so you can no longer pretend to run a company when being essentially an employee.
That's actually been the case for about 20 years now. The relevant term is "IR35".
I am always deeply suspicious of the figures on that site. Right now, I'm looking at a L4 at Google, in London, listing $367K total comp at 0 years of experience.
Figures for my company are spot on, so I assume that they are correct for other ones as well.
Usually base salary for a given level is set (you can see that majority of entries have very similar base salary if you remove outliers).
Bonus is usually preset as % of base salary and therefore will be same/similar for most people.
What could make difference are RSUs. If you are coming from another FAANG or startup and leaving behind lot of unvested stock, you might get that matched. Or if you have other offers they will prefer to increase RSUs rather than base salary. Every year you then get refresher RSUs which are quite significant (as big as your base salary but spread over 4 years).
You need to move to Silicon Valley for that, but cost of living and lose of other benefits of living in Belgium might outweight the higher paid. You can try Switzerland if you want 6 digits salary in Europe.
As a freelancer in Paris, I've been invoicing 625€ daily in 2018 and 2019, and 700€ in 2020, doing Big Data / Scala development with a sprinkle of devops, for the same customer.
I think I could get 800-900€ if I find a customer that pays better and focus on the Big Data / GCP sectors. Just need to find a contract through word of mouth, and not through a recruiter that takes a 100-150€ margin...
You get less as a salaried employee in France though...
>it's very rare to make more than twice the average wage in Belgium as an employee
Yep, software engineer compensation is crap in the EU, while the cost of living is almost as high as in Silicon Valley. Solution? Apply for H1B at a FAANG. Fuck the EU.
In my experience, most engineers, even those fresh out of college, land at above 300k within a few years at Google/FB. You do not need to be a rockstar, and you don't need to work more than 40 hours/week for that (though that can depend on team, I've never encountered one that regularly asks for more than that).
If you're talking finances, Google/Facebook will pay you more, with less risk, and better work life balance than pretty much all startups. There are entirely justifiable reasons to prefer a startup, but you should take a second look at your calculations if you think finances come out favorable on the startup side.
Not necessarily true. I was a mid level product engineer at a recently IPOd company (joined 2 years pre IPO). My base salary was $200k, and the stock and bonus more than doubled that.
There was a little bit of “pick the rocket ship” gamble - I had an Uber offer that probably would have been ended more like $250k/year, but it’s not unreasonable to get half a mill joining a late stage pre-IPO startup, and base salary is high enough you do it with little risk.
Hell, I know some mid-level post-IPO folks at Square making $700k due to it 10xing in share price.
I don't work in FAANG, but I know someone who works at a 1 tier lower big company. He is a mid level engineer. After 1 year at the company - Salary + Monthly vesting comes in at somewhere between 400-450K depending on how the stock performs, and he certainly has room to grow.
I was told FAANG-ers make even more than him, so yeah I tend to believe these numbers.
To make those figures doing "ad work" at FB or Google you probably have to come in as a VP or higher, which already comes towards the end of a very long career arc.
Not necessarily. Bear in mind Facebook's compensation is heavily performance orientated, the bonuses can rack up. You can easily clear $500k at Facebook as a senior engineer, especially if you're getting high evaluations.
Google L5 is $331K a year according to Levels.fyi Eleven years. L6 is half a mil a year. L3 is new grad. L5 is not superhuman. It’s not mid level but it’s not Staff Engineer either, “just” competent and known to be capable of working with minimal direction. FAANG really do pay very, very well.
GOOG has 3x'd in the past 7 years, FB has 10x'd, AMZN has 10x'd, etc. The initial stock grants would be worth a lot more, plus all the refreshers. My friends who are decent software engineers with a few years of experience are getting offers in the >$500k range right now.
And I'm assuming that he would have been promoted at some point. I am comparing what someone with his skills could have earned at a FAMANG, not what an average software developer would earn (they wouldn't even be able to get a job there tbqh).
> My friends who are decent software engineers with a few years of experience are getting offers in the >$500k range right now. ... not what an average software developer would earn...
Which is it? "Decent" developers being courted with $500k+ offers or "average" developers can't get jobs?
Josh seems to be extremely entrepreneurial and independent (https://joshpigford.com/projects) and maybe being a part of a trillion dollar machine isn't worth the $ to him. He succeeded doing what he wanted to do and that's fantastic.
Admittedly, people's attitudes to work differ immensely and being able to live the entrepreneurial life is a privilege, but from my POV, you only live once, so $3.7m made from several years of doing things your own way would handily beat even $10m made from several years of employment (and neither are guaranteed).
Unless you're doing infrastructure stuff at Netflix, ad work at FB or Google, or some high level stuff at Microsoft you're not making half a million a year, and you're not doing it at a mid-level anything, anywhere.