[zests]

It feels like there are two classes of engineers in the US. One class of engineers makes 60k-120k and the other makes 150k-500k.

Is this just a really well kept secret? I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class. I'd expect most software engineers would jump through hoops at the prospect of doubling their salary.

[borroka]

For every job that it's open in one of the FAANG, recruiters get thousands of applications. It sounds like many are trying, but the vast majority never gets a call back. Others cannot pass the interview. Others again are not interested in working in a very demanding environment.

I worked at a FAANGs, now I work in lower-tier tech company. I make 3/4 (low-ish upper tier) of what I used to make, I work 1/8 of the hours I used to work, work stress is non-existent. Many people, many reasons.

[Mandatum]

Weird, it was the opposite for me. Went from 60 hours in consultancies and low tier to 30ish at FAANGish. Remote probably helped with COVID, but the output is consistent.

[borroka]

I can see that. My point is that there are many reasons for not wanting to work at a FAANG, even for someone like me who has worked in one and could work, I guess, in others. My reason is that I make enough money currently not to want to work there. I was working a standard 35-40 hours per week at a FAANG. There are also many others in non-FAANG tech who make half my salary and work much more. And maybe I will be one of them at some point, there are no guarantees in life!

[bradlys]

$300k at 5-10hrs/week is likely to be obscenely obscure and not a good reference point for anyone.

Yours would be way more desirable than the FAANG stuff. People could moonlight for your job easily…

[borroka]

Agreed about the extremeness of my case, although I would not call it as "obscenely obscure". There are plenty of people who went from FAANG to tech jobs of lesser responsibility, maybe they don't work 10 hours a week but 20, maybe they are half of what they used to make (not my money - say from 500k to 250k), they have greatly reduced worked-related stress, they can play with their kids or partners, and they would not go back to back-stabber friendly meat-grinders.

[lapaz17]

Omg. Could you share your company in private?

[daniel-thompson]

I did it a few years ago.

For me, the former type of job required very little actual work. It was comfortable. It was easy. It paid well enough for a single young person. My nights and weekends were free to pursue other interests, some of which were very time-consuming (e.g. flying helicopters part-time in the military).

The big turning point for me was having kids. The inherent danger of flying caused me to leave the reserves. The increased monthly budget required for kid-raising got me out of my comfort zone. I looked for a new job for the first time in 10+ years. My TC now is double what it was when I started that process 2.5 years ago and I'm well into the latter category. Partly that's due to moving to a name-brand company. Partly it's just a great market for SWEs. Partly it's years of 3 - 5% COLAs that made me fall behind market rates.

Switching jobs is hard mentally & emotionally, especially if you're basically comfortable already. I suspect that's why many people don't do it.

[eldavido]

I think this is a big part of it. I've worked in Silicon Valley ~10yrs and I'm surprised how little actual work people do at these 60-80k jobs.

It really isn't comparable. The way SV people work, the expectations, level of responsibility, selectivity in hiring, and sometimes hours/stress, are of a kind only found in law or medicine elsewhere.

[theflyinghorse]

> Is this just a really well kept secret

It's very hard. Not having FANG/unicorns on your resume probably contributes massively to this. FANG style interviews are a skill of their own - I recently had a 6 hours of interviews back to back with Amazon and it was a mix of pretty tough technical questions and very specific behavioral questions. Even with practice solving sole of the question was very hard. For instance, I solved a DP question in a top down and interviewer asked me to then solve it bottom up for him in the remaining 5 minutes. You can't do this without a solid amount of practice.

[trav4225]

Yeah, personally, I constantly receive calls from FAANGs for interviews, but I pass on them all. My current lack of free time to work on interview prep is the sole reason. I almost feel like it's impossible to find the time to prep without quitting my current job first... :-/

What's always been a little baffling to me, though, is how easily these companies hire fresh grads. I have several friends that walked straight into FAANG jobs right out of school with little more than a couple quick phone interviews. One recruiter told me that the bar is lower for fresh grads because they can be more easily molded into the company culture.

[tester756]

dafq

so, If I'm fresh grad with 3 years of commercial, full time experience, then it'd be better for me to lie that I have no experience? :o

[trav4225]

I dunno. I think they just treat fresh grads differently. They probably look more at one's graduation date than at one's (lack of) experience at that point. They want really fresh meat. ;-)

My views here are purely anecdotal, and based only on interactions with former peers (students) and something an Amazon recruiter told me at one point.

[whymauri]

From the people I've talked to, they enjoy the WLB and location of their job enough to not hop.

[kyawzazaw]

I think people wrong associate high pay with bad WLB at top paying tech companies

[arwhatever]

I’ve wondered about this myself - might you have any more information or be able to point me/us to any particularly good data sources?

[weeblewobble]

I've done both, in my experience at a FAANG you choose your own WLB. If you want to go for a promotion, you're going to have to work a lot. If you want to just get by for a couple years and vest stock, that's an option too. I think people also put a lot of pressure on themselves because it's unclear where the bar is and they don't want to get fired for performance reasons.

At a smaller company there simply isn't that much work to do, nor is there much of a path for promotion (when your boss is the CTO...)

[ryandrake]

> At a smaller company there simply isn't that much work to do, nor is there much of a path for promotion (when your boss is the CTO...)

Ouch! That’s exactly right. Ultimately I bailed on small/medium companies because of the “boss is the CTO” promotion problem. There’s nothing to grow into at a smaller company. Also, most of them have no technical promotion track for Individual Contributors. You start at Junior Engineer, maybe get promoted to Senior Engineer, and that’s it. No more level ups unless you want to people-manage, which is a whole different skill set.

Contrast that with some place like Google, that has something like 7 or so distinct engineering levels with huge pay bumps and responsibility bumps between each of them! If you are a ladder climber by nature, the smaller company will infuriate you.

[kyawzazaw]

It's not going be to complied into data sources or research papers.

You simply have to experience or hear second hand.

Or just go to teamblind.com and ask people's experiences

[thebean11]

As someone in the latter category (and whose network is in the same category) I don't see much of a correlation.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Personally, I've found pay and work life balance to be positively correlated in my SV career.

[cyrux004]

Correct, this what I understand. Before the remote workplace, they were just too comfy in their location to think about locating to the limited tech cities where these salaries are being paid

[thatguy0900]

I mean, I'll be honest, I make around 50k in a non tech job in a low cost of living area.i really don't want for anything. Maybe I just don't like really expensive toys, but anything I want, I buy. I go on nice vacations in country, plenty of wilderness around me. I don't have to look at receipts or bills before paying them and I never think about my bank account. I'm really totally unsure what making 500k instead would do for me, besides retiring super early.

[reidjs]

Once you get to higher levels of income it sounds cliche but certain doors open up. You start rubbing shoulders with “influential people.” Now that money is no longer on your mind, you realize the value of your time over everything else. It’s a different perspective on everyday situations. I don’t think money is a prerequisite to have this mindset, like you said, you don’t want for anything more. but once you get a taste of the luxury it’s hard to go back

Mo money mo problems.

[devoutsalsa]

> besides retiring super early

The less obvious one is save a shit ton of money so you never have to worry about big healthcare expenses, whether it be illness or injury. It's amazing how quickly life can go from pretty good to pretty not good when you're unable to work for a while, especially when your health insurance is tied to your employment. One bad bike accident took me from a six figure income at the beginning of my career to struggling for over a decade, including a stretch of homelessness.

[kyawzazaw]

Financial Independence is a big thing. (Not just retire)

Do you have kids? Have you thought about generational wealth? These are the things that are in people's minds. If you want to understand more visit subreddits like /r/FIRE or /r/bogelheads or /r/personalfinance?

[thatguy0900]

I don't really want kids, thankfully. I can see how that would be an issue if I did though, true.

[kyawzazaw]

What about donations? Even as a student, I liked to donate frequently (maybe it's in my culture).

Being able to donate a decent amount to a cause whenever I feel like it, is a plus.

[j7ake]

At 50k you can easily provide for one maybe two people, but at higher salaries you can support a larger family (aging parents, children, relatives) and create generational wealth.

[dilat]

Isn’t retiring early exactly what it offers? A 500k job would pay the equivalent of ten years of work (ish… taxes).

[swiftcoder]

Not for most people. A silicon valley job means a silicon valley house and mortgage - you're in for at least a couple of million for a house in those parts, and it'll be fairly modest by US standards. If you have kids, you have silicon valley school fees and activities. And since all your new friends are silicon valley friends with silicon valley money in their pocket, all your own activities are going to grow more expensive too.

If you don't make a very conscious decision to step off that flywheel, a lot of people find themselves in the position where that 500k is mostly going to maintain your new normal lifestyle.

[dilat]

Ah, I confused this a bit with another remote thread. My intended point is that you can get that TC full-time remote from at least F and G now. They scale down salary based on the market, but not that much, for a 6+ position I think you’d definitely still be at that TC.

[BuckRogers]

And that would be easy if you didn't raise kids or have a spouse that will very quickly be acclimated to all of this. Yanking the rug so you can retire early? That's a quick way to ensure you'll be back at work anyway, because your spouse may take the kids and bail.

It's only a for-sure viable option for those that never marry or have children. And even then I'd caution someone to do it as long as you possibly can stand, you have no idea what lies ahead expense wise in life in your long retirement.

[thebean11]

The house can be sold though, not exactly "spent" money beyond the buying/selling/maintenance fees

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

> besides retiring super early.

This is the dream. Get the second half of my life for myself, if I'm lucky.

[prezjordan]

I worked at a non-profit with a lot of happy ex-FAANG people that wanted to do some social good for a while. It definitely happens!

EDIT: (I just answered the inverse of your question didn't I?) People definitely grind leetcode for a FAANG gig after working elsewhere.

[rawtxapp]

Anecdotally, it's either they can't relocate because of reason x,y,z (family usually) or they can't pass the interviews for those highly paid positions (or some people just aren't pursuing money above everything else).

[908B64B197]

> I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class.

I don't think they can in the first place. It's like law, where compensation is highly bimodal.

[sxp]

https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/ covers this well.

This skew is not obvious to people outside Silicon Valley, but it's discussed more now that sites like levels.fyi are providing data. Even more shocking is the split between SV/NYC/SEA salaries and the rest of the world. When the Google internal Salary Spreadsheet was created, people were amazed and the difference in salaries between LON/EU SWEs and US SWEs given that both groups are equally skilled.

Getting a FAANG job is hard, but it's worth it for the ability to retire after a decade of hard work compared to working for multiple decades at a normal tech company.

[reidjs]

Equally skilled at engineering, but is there something special USA engineers bring to the table to warrant a higher salary? Easier to work with? More business sense? Longer hours/less holidays? Better understanding of the target market?

Don’t get me wrong. it might just be that life’s not fair.

[BuckRogers]

I'm American but have worked in the EU, France specifically. There's no comparison in how hard you're pushed in the US vs over there, as you're insinuating. Everyone knows that part. And most of us on the US side are not in Silicon Valley nor do we make those wages. The EU guys have the better deal. They just need to actually secure full-time employment at all, which is hard to do there outside of Germany. That's the part no one will tell you.

It won't happen here, because our working class is asleep to the economic game being played, but the best blend is probably the UK and it's where we need to head as far as our demands.