Your circle of 2/300k engineers does not represent average people. 99% of Americans should not be able to get a faang job even if the exact park was laid in front of them before college.
I have never worked for a FAANG company, or anything close, and can usually not get in the front door at any "prestigious" company.
In my last round of interviews nearly all startups/small companies I talked to where offering 200k+ for remote senior engineers. It's not hard to break 200k remote as a software engineer.
If you're not there I highly recommend you start looking around, even in this market, rather than simply dismissing this comp as "prestigious faang only". Personally I think the 500k+ TCs are going to disappear for all but the rarest of cases (this is closer to what FAANG engs that I know make), but 200k+ is likely to be the baseline for the foreseeable future for experienced software engineers.
I do hiring for small companies, no one is paying that much. 130-150k is base for seniors. Also seeing a decrease in US based developer jobs, lots of offshoring happening. I'm halfway considering moving to Costa Rica and running a firm down there.
They must be very small because I don't know of anyone hiring senior devs in that range. Even those smaller, early stage companies I know are offering at least 150-190k base, and they struggle to hire.
However if you're dealing with dev roles that are being actively outsourced I suspect you're dealing with an entirely different class of software jobs.
Yes and so do all of my teammates and every senior engineer at a publicly traded company you've likely never heard of.
Again it's pretty standard anywhere in tech right now, startup or otherwise, to get 200k base + equity. Technically most startups I've chatted with also offer 300k+ TC... but that assumes the equity component eventually becomes liquid.
Around 200k base is very easy to get anywhere right now, and getting larger than that is a factor of how liquid your equity is. If you join a publicly traded company you should easily be able to get 200k base + 100k/year of RSUs
And to be clear: I'm talking about Senior Engineer level in the US. Most of these roles I've looked at are remote so the NY/SV part is not necessary.
edit: your profile says you work at a FAANG so this should be old news for you.
I make well above 300k. It wasn’t an “easy” interview by any means.
You can go look at levels.fyi and see that there are plenty of F500 companies that don’t pay 300k for L5. Just spot checked for Ford, Disney, AT&T, Verizon, Target, and more.
FWIW, 200-300k is not that uncommon far outside of FAANG or the usual tech cities for experienced senior engineers with current skills. We are not even talking startups necessarily but boring industrials and other companies no one thinks of as tech companies. Every large business is being forced to be much tech savvier and this reality has diffused high-paying tech jobs among a much wider range of companies and locales.
You are correct on one point: most Americans don't have the skills for these jobs. That is why these jobs pay so well, almost definitionally.
It is trivial, in the US, for someone to work at the older large tech companies and get over $300k just by staying in the job. Your typical SWEIII is making $220k base with a 20% bonus and gets roughly 50k/3 RSU grants each year. After 3 years, that's $50k annual due to stacking. This for relatively easy big company roles, and not even lead.
To be fair, I think op was referring to engineers specifically. You don't need Faang to make 200k as a sr. Look at non tech focused fortune 500 companies. 200k is available to sr engineers, even remote if US based
In my last round of interviews nearly all startups/small companies I talked to where offering 200k+ for remote senior engineers. It's not hard to break 200k remote as a software engineer.
If you're not there I highly recommend you start looking around, even in this market, rather than simply dismissing this comp as "prestigious faang only". Personally I think the 500k+ TCs are going to disappear for all but the rarest of cases (this is closer to what FAANG engs that I know make), but 200k+ is likely to be the baseline for the foreseeable future for experienced software engineers.