[kamaal]

Getting a 30% raise yoy, is something even the most optimistic entrepreneur starting up out there would salivate at.

Even going from 50 -> 300k, is no easy joke. Its not even worth starting a company if you can make these kind of 6x increase in fortunes in years.

Imagine going to the stock market and claiming to have 30% return yoy.

I'd like to believe even at FAANGs these mad salaries aren't common. And I would be very wary of hiring anyone with a yearly jump trail on a resume, with a high salary. That resume is basically signalling the candidate does no work apart from hopping jobs. Hiring a non performer one has to replace in 10 months is a non starter.

[jrockway]

It does happen to people. In 2004, I worked at the University of Chicago making web apps for internal users, and got paid $45,000 a year. In 2017, I was a senior software engineer at Google making around $300,000 a year (that's salary + bonus + stock).

This is probably an anomaly because I was massively underpaid at my first job, but you've got to start somewhere. (The first three years of my career was basically job hopping. I started at UofC, went to a part of Doubleclick in Chicago, then went to a bank. UofC -> Performics doubled my salary. Bank -> Google doubled my salary.)

As for job hopping, you can have whatever weird criteria you want, but the average engineering tenure these days is about a year, so if you want someone who has 20 years of experience you probably shouldn't be surprised by 20 jobs. If you don't want people to leave to get more money, give them a raise. Why should people take less than market compensation because of your odd idea that they should be "loyal"? People stopped being loyal to companies in approximately 1950. The market for software engineers is ridiculously competitive on the buy side. That's just the reality.

[chipotle_coyote]

> I'd like to believe even at FAANGs these mad salaries aren't common.

My impression -- as someone who is neither an engineer (anymore) or at a FAANG, but is making above the apparent market rate for technical writers in Silicon Valley at a company that needs to compete with FAANGs for talent and chooses to do so by offering high base pay and bonuses rather than stock options -- is that at this moment in time, these mad salaries are common in both FAANG and competing-with-FAANG companies, but only in specific fields and specific locales.

Personally, I'm not convinced this is sustainable any more than the SF Bay Area housing market is sustainable. If the shift to fully remote or "hybrid remote" workforces is truly underway, it's probably just a matter of time before that starts pushing down income levels. If you cut your cost of living in half by moving from Mountain View to Boise, employers will start factoring that into your compensation -- many already do.

In the long run, of course, that would lead to a slow creep toward equalization of cost of living across the country; there are already anecdotal (but loud!) reports of housing costs increasing substantially in surprising places as people leave the west coast and the northeast and move inland. Eventually that should make COL adjustments smaller or less common, but it will likely also make "I'm making $350K right out of college" less common. (Or whatever $350K is adjusted for inflation in a decade.)

[reedjosh]

> Even going from 50 -> 300k, is no easy joke.

Yeah, it does take a lot of effort. I put in a lot of 50hr weeks to get this kind of gain, but it's totally doable.

> That resume is basically signalling the candidate does no work apart from hopping jobs.

I get a _lot_ of work done in even just 6 months.