[comp_throw7]

Google, Amazon, and Apple together almost certainly hit 100k by themselves. Facebook is a bit smaller than those 3 in terms of engineering headcount but not by much. Netflix is tiny, relatively speaking, I'll give you that.

But, I mean, new grads at MSFT can get pretty close to 200k, even though the comp scales up poorly with career progression compared to FAANG. There are a bunch of other companies where you can hit numbers that are in that ballpark, and they also employee a non-trivial number of engineers: Snapchat, Uber, Lyft, Twitter, Square, Stripe, Doordash, Roblox, etc, etc, etc. Sure, add them all up with FAANG and you probably barely touch 200k. But, uh, 200k is roughly 5% of the software engineers in the country (_very_ broadly classified; I think a more reasonable classification would put it closer to 10%). So, sure, it's not the _default_ outcome, but "top decile" is hardly shooting for the moon.

[exdsq]

Netflix don’t hire grads do they?

Also this is specific to the Bay Area - they don’t pay these rates internationally or even everywhere within the US. And finally, it’s not every grad & stocks massively inflate this number.

I’m sure some people reading this will have done it - it’s not ‘common’ and definitely isn’t the pay of the top decile of developers in the world, the West, or I bet even in the US.

[filoleg]

>Netflix don’t hire grads do they?

Yep, they don't even hire mid-level engineers. They hire seniors and above. But their size is tiny compared to the rest of those top tier tech companies, so Netflix could be ignored for all intents and purposes here.

>Also this is specific to the Bay Area

Not really. Seattle has pretty much the same level of comp and no state income tax. And pretty much all of those companies discussed above have significant presence in Seattle too (minus Netflix afaik). But yes, still an expensive place to live in.

>stocks massively inflate this number

How is this "inflation" or an issue at all? You can sell stocks immediately as they vest and treat it just like cash comp. Or you can hold and hope they grow in price (which a lot of times is a valid strategy). But for all intents and purposes, stock compensation at publicly traded companies is just as valid as cash compensation. It isn't some stock options that "might be worth a lot when we go public, but currently is just a monopoly money you cannot do anything with" in a privately held startup.

>it’s not ‘common’

It depends on how you define "common". Among my peers who applied to those top tier companies and got the offers, around $200k starting out of college was way more common than not. And no, I didn't go to Stanford or anything like that, it was a public state college in Georgia (albeit a very good one, but still, nothing "exclusive" like MIT/Stanford/etc.). There were a couple of people who were truly exceptional, and their starting offers reflected that appropriately (closer to $300k than $200k), but $200k seemed to be the baseline.

And no, none of those companies require some wild credentials or experience to interview. Pretty much anyone can get a Google interview at some point (everyone I know from my school who tried applying, got at least one shot at the Google interview process; I also know a lot of people with either no college education at all or those that went to colleges that no one has even heard of, and they all got invited for Google interviews), the problem is that most don't pass. But it doesn't seem to be just pure luck (even though it is a non-insignificant element of it), given that the people I know who studied the hardest were also the ones who had the highest pass rate for those interviews (as well as the highest offers).

[saagarjha]

> Google, Amazon, and Apple together almost certainly hit 100k by themselves.

No way. Amazon might be coming close (I don't have a very good idea of their size, but my guess is they have like ~75k software engineers); Google probably has about 50k, Apple has like 10k.

[pcthrowaway]

I think you missed the key word of the parent "together"

[comp_throw7]

Yeah, as the other response said, I meant combined.

[elzbardico]

Not all new grads are the same.