Anecdote: I'm a Sr. Staff Engineer at a large employer in a LCOL city. Typical middle class houses cost $300k - $500k here, with luxury houses costing roughly $1m and small starter homes costing $200k (just using real estate as a rough proxy for cost of living).
My base salary is $150k/yr. My cash bonus maxes out somewhere around $80k/yr, and typically falls in the $50k - 70k range. I also receive equity worth roughly $12k - $15k per year. Counting in the value of benefits, my comp package is worth roughly $280k - $300k/yr.
I am extremely well paid for the area I live in. It's very unlikely that I could make more money without moving to a different metro, getting lucky with a remote position, or going into niche contracting.
Just throwing this out there, because a $250k salary (plus bonus) is doing well even in a HCOL area.
Sure, if you work at many hedge fund you'll make similar money, and likely more if you are good at the job and the fund has success.
One other nice thing is that instead of restricted stock you get actual money.
And generally the money will be locked up for less time than the 4 year vesting that these companies often follow.
And on top of that you can usually invest your money fee free in your own fund to help juice your returns.
The downside is that there is almost certainly going to be more stress on you and probably no where to hide if you want to just rest and vest.
Your team and company will likely be pretty small and everyone will be very aware of what everyone's contribution to the company's success.
Two tried and tested methods, neither guaranteed of course.
1) Be better than the overwhelming majority of your peers, and be noticed for this. You are quite likely to find interesting opportunities come your way. I do mean overwhelming though - small fraction of a percent.
2) Specialize in something most people can’t or won’t do. This includes difficult, obscure, and unpleasant work.
In both cases some of the biggest $ comes from independent consulting, once you’ve built up a network and a reputation for fixing a particular pain point corporations have (bill for value, of course).
Yes. Some of the opportunities exist in odd corners of the software universe.
To offer just one example, I'm aware of a software company that does nine figures in ARR making high performance computing software for very large financial institutions. There's basically no chance you've ever heard of them. They're very low key. The company hasn't grown headcount much in the last decade, and their employees don't really leave. But some of their people writing really low-level code are certainly making multiples of representative peers at FAANG.
I’m aware of a couple people at health systems/hospitals that work maybe 400 hours/year making $500k+/year. Experts in legacy languages, specifically COBOL and MUMPS. For legacy billing and EMR/EHR and related systems code, respectfully. One guy gets flown out to the east coast from his ”chateau” in Utah every month or two; the only downside is he’s on-call pretty much all year round. I’ve heard banks have people like this on-site too but I’ve never met any.
I just wrapped up a long job search process, where I got offers from a handful of companies. I currently work at FAANG, so I was looking for a pay bump.
The only companies that could beat my current comp are other big tech and finance, but there were a couple of surprises along the way.
For example, a Tier 3 (i.e. you never heard about them) company offered me 450k TC for a Staff level position. This compares to the 500k TC for a senior level position at FAANG. I also interviewed for a Startup that offered 650k TC for a Principal level, although the stocks were paper money.
To your point, "random" companies can come close to FAANG salaries for high enough levels, but it's far from a given. In fact I'd say most random companies probably top in the 200k range.
If you are interested just start every conversation with a recruiter asking for their comp range. I found these days almost all recruiters answer, and then you can decide if it is worth your time to go ahead.
it'a catch 22 with some of those companies.
1. they don't hire often & usually have small teams 2. they make so much money, that they don't make noise about it. & you won't hear about them, unless one day you randomly run into one of their employees saying they're hiring on reddit / hn 3. they work in unsexy industries or high risk stuff e.g gambling 4. they're usually located in places you wouldn't expect
Civil servants living in the DC or SF metro areas max out at about $195k not including benefits. The benefits include an actual pension, really good health insurance, and 1-1 salary matching into a 401(k)-like retirement fund (the TSP).
Also, you're actually expected to work 40 hours a week and generally not more, and you're expected to take all your vacation.
It takes a while to get to that level, or you need to get hired directly into a GS-15 equivalent position. But it's doable, especially at an agency that does technical work (eg NASA, NOAA, DOE, parts of the DOD, etc.)
> then $1mil in stock for 4 years
Most FAANG engineers are NOT getting $1M stock grants.
That is the stock grant for Google L6-7, Amazon Principal SDE, and Microsoft L67.
These are engineering levels comparable to Director of Engineering or Engineering Manager and extremely rare.
> a Staff Engineer at an avg startup might get $250k base salary, in a HCOL area and maybe a 10-20% bonus
This is the norm at FAANG as well. Just add a $60-150k/yr stock grant, which is normal at other public companies in the Bay Area and Seattle tech scenes as well.
Look for organizations that have very large amounts of money, where software is critical to them continuing to make that money (or where their money was given to them to create something that in turn someone believes will be worth large amounts of money). Generally follow the money.
Can confirm the 500k+ jobs in HFT/crypto (well the latter might not be a life insurance). I saw a couple of these job postings mostly in the Cyprus/Switzerland area.
You could also make these amounts in adult/gambling marketing but that's another can of worms..
Don’t ignore the other aspects of compensation: raises, bonuses, vacation days, health insurance, etc.
It’s not just salary.
Start your own business & you COULD make way more than a FAANG salary!
If you're good at networking and making relationships and have technical skills you can go pretty far in a consulting firm. You have to treat the job like building a startup though, complete with finding the right people, marketing, skills/market fit etc. There's no real cap on how much money you can make in the consulting world, it all revolves around how much you can make for the firm. If you make the firm a ton of money and you tell them to give you your cut they will (or at least negotiate). It can be stressful though because, on the other hand, if you don't land good projects and keep your utilization up ( % of time you charge to clients ) then you're costing them money and there's not a lot of grace for that, or really anything besides billing hours, in the industry.
Be a consultant/contractor for a company who pimps you out to rich customers on a cost-plus basis. They don’t care if you bill them a million a year or more so long as the end customer is re-billed (at their agreed mark-up). High skill, niche, high pressure (although you can always quit and run a cafe if it gets too much).
There's the kind of job where you need security clearance and a full background check. Not all of those pay well (I assume the janitors at NSA are security cleared in some way), but some absolutely do. Especially when, like Snowden did, you leave the actual org after a bit and then get hired back as a private contractor.
I know this is a tangent, but, and I'm putting words in your mouth, is it so important to earn a FAANG salary? And yes, I know, it helps with negotiating salaries but that's circular.
Maybe that's just the state of the job market, no desirable jobs left, only thing we can hope for is a high salary?
If $250k base salary is "not enough", you should really step back and look at what you really want in life. Even in HCOL area, consider relocation and/or remote.
And to clarify, I'm not saying it's greedy or wrong, just that you'll be happier in life with clear goals beyond a salary number. I found that what I wanted was attainable with lower salary and not working for FAANG or living in Bay area
I see levels.fyi has a good list of "top paying companies"[1]. Is that helpful?
Side note: The difference at Staff Eng is slightly more wide. Eg. IBM Band 9 pays TC ~$250K while Meta E6 is ~$640K.
Side note 2: From what I understand, Big Tech often brings in Staff Eng from smaller companies to a Senior Eng role. Reverse is also true, Sr Eng at Big Tech are often able to join Staff roles at smaller companies.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/leaderboard/Software-Engineer/Entry-L...
The work that you do is also different. The level of engg at your avg startup never evolves beyond CRUD shit shovelling. At FAANG its a different story at virtually all levels.
For example at your avg startups you worry about which latest GraphQL technology to learn. As Staff at a FAANG you realize how the graphQL engines work and can pretty much critique the design choices made in each. A Staff at avg startup is more like L5 at Google or L6 at Amazon.
Having said that, relaize that if you become that good at the craft, its better to found a tech startup. Take the example of DGraph if you are looking for a blueprint. You have got founders advantage because of your deep expertise. And tbh, its in the Faang's interest to keep you on the payroll.
There's also the option of making 120k or so working remotely while living in a LCOL country. You end up with about the same purchasing power.
Bytedance, Nvidia, OpenAI, Stripe, Anthropic, Checkout.com, maybe parts of Shopify
Yes, I'm working in the UK for a medium size company and gets the same as my friend that works for Google(he does get slightly higher bonuses) But I work 35 hrs a week while he works 45 and fly abroad every two weeks.
I saw a 450k for a C++ dev in a HFT firm in Switzerland.
> For example, a Staff Engineer at an avg startup might get $250k base salary, in a HCOL area and maybe a 10-20% bonus.
I think you are taking it in the wrong way. A startup has lower mean income but can have a much higher return in the future. Most startups are also cash strained, so you won't get as much cash for your income. I'd suggest you look into the expected return of your startup instead, and the take into at least the following situations:
- Your peers. Do you get to build lasting relationship with truly amazing peers? With such peers, you won't regret it even if your startup fails as you will have great experience, let alone your career will likely take off in the near future.
- The problem space. Does the problem you solve inspire you?
- The potential of your startup. You get to to evaluate the potential continuously, as the situation of a startup changes constantly. The good news is that a startup is usually quite transparent. You get to know how your company performs easily and how the founders lead too.
- Know yourself. How much risk can you take? How optimistic are you? And etc
- Your expected income. Take your equity into consideration, but multiply the value with a probability of success in a given time frame.
Regular jack off mid western SWE, here. I come to these threads and cry.
I made $1.5 million last year selling online data engineering courses.
> $1mil in stock for 4 years
Those are just golden handcuffs! How many of the hired employees get to complete the vesting period?
It's even possible to work at FAANG without working there
I have made decent money working for a company that went public. (Remember to sell ASAP unless you are so confident in the stock that you purchase additional shares with your own $).
I do pretty well doing my own thing. But there was a ramp-up, and it wasn't overnight (much like some LI influencers would have you believe). Regarding the effort of creating your own thing, yes, there is a lot of non-sexy stuff that no one talks about because it is non-sexy.
An additional benefit for me is flexibility. Being able to go to my kid's school function or help coach a team is more important to me than professional accolades.
As far as the work. Yes, it is a lot of work. But theoretically, you are doing your own thing because you like it. My work is generally self-motivating. I can't say the same about when I worked for others.
Salary, absolutely; stock: much more difficult.
That said, some folks in consulting pull off those numbers and it is, theoretically, possible to exceed those numbers on a good year in presales (at a place where commissions are uncapped).
Story time: About 6 years ago a close friend with years of software experience was bored with her job and decided to look for another. She received plenty of solid job offers, all with excellent pay, but one of them stood out. It was a company that made back-end software for credit unions. Not sexy work, but what stood out to my friend was the how genuine the people she talked to during the "interview" process seemed. They asked about her life experience more than her work experience. When she met with execs they never even talked about actual work. She said they were very upfront about the fact that they couldn't compete with "the big guys" on pay, but they take their supportive company culture very seriously - the average length-of-employment was over 10 years. She said they offered her access to the office, where she could freely "interview" anyone rando she wanted about the company. She did, and everyone she talked to raved about working there.
She decided to accept the offer from the not-sexy credit union software company, knowing she could've earned at least 30% more elsewhere. She kept using the word "genuine" when she talked about the people she met during the "interview" process, and that's what attracted her.
Well, about 2 years after accepting the offer she was diagnosed with breast cancer. (tl;dr = dealing with cancer sucks. constant doctor appointments. chemo treatments. pain. vomiting. life/death uncertainty. and so on.) She said her company was unbelievable during her cancer battle. She didn't work for almost a year (her bosses wouldn't let her), and they never even talked about sick leave or FMLA or disability - nothing. They just kept her on the payroll like normal, for almost a full year! She said her bosses would call all the time, asking about the latest test results, how she was feeling, did she need anything, etc. And, to her surprise, after about 2 years of treatments, almost the entire company showed up to watch her ring the bell.
Moral of the story: Money is great, but it's really not everything.
AI/ML unicorns.
I'm a software engineer from China, my annual salary is only 5w USD (which is not a very low salary for software engineers in China), but I need to work more than 12h per day (so tired). This post is very useful for me, thanks a lot. If you want to earn ( correspondingly ) such a high income in China, you can basically only do so by joining a startup or starting your own business.
Foreign companies setup offices in the USA to attract ex-FANGA engineers, and thus are willing to compete on compensation, with the additional benefits of being publicly traded,.
50 comments so far and nobody has named a single company. You might as well not post if you’re just going to be vague and coy. “They exist, trust me bro” and “I work in a medium sized company that does…” are pretty much a zero-value comments. HN should have a higher bar.
Where are you getting those FAANG numbers?
I maxed out bonus/stock at MS as Senior my last year, still left for PeerDB. But MS pays much less in Canada I guess
In the UK, the tech industry is struggling because the US innovates, China replicates, the EU regulates, and the UK stagnates. As a result, no one in the UK tech sector is earning anywhere near the levels seen in these other regions.
This article may also be of interest to you if you hadn't seen it: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal-nature-o...
Reading the comments, I figured being a low level wizard really pays off in both satisfaction of curiosity and satisfaction of pocket.
I'd also argue that sometimes you get lower pay but in low cost places, with good benefits and work-life balance. It's more reasonable to take other things into the equation.
Tangential to this topic, but are there publicly traded companies that pay only in stocks? I'm curious to know if someone who gets paid only in stocks will come out ahead in terms of taxes they owe than someone getting a comparable base pay.
Yes, many AI startups pay more than FAANG for ML talent.
>-- Are there people outside of FAANG and Big Banks / HFT firms making those kinds of monies?
I'm very confident there are, but should there be?
>-- if So who are they? and what do they do?
A lot of times it will be things that are a lot less ethical than big tech or financial firms.
>Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?
As to the title question, stick around and you'll notice messages from people on the payroll of many of the biggest tech outfits who confirm that you can be quite gainfully employed there for years without having to do any real work at all ;)
Yes, the top cloud customers of the big three cloud providers are making similar, if not more. Startups in the cloud space are similar.
you answered your own question
> a similar base, and then $1mil in stock for 4 years.
so are there firms with similar market caps and/or growth?
Those salaries are inflated by RSUs
Maybe the thing to be focusing on is maximizing savings on the high average salaries that we all can command instead of trying to maximize earnings.
Controlling spending is something one can control to some extent once the necessities are paid for.
And then that’s the way to accrue and stay wealthy or become independently wealthy over time.
I made $4 million profit last financial year with my own software businesses.
overemployment in multiple 100k-150k year full remote jobs as a sr engineer
2 is easy to do, 3 is manageable. I've heard of people doing more than 3, but most I've personally seen someone do is 3.
Definitely there are. I got an email from Stubhub the other day advertising $500-700k for a staff iOS position. I'm pretty comfortable in my current setup, but it's nice knowing the option is there.
I have near-FAANG base plus bonus working as a manager/tech lead at non-FAANG in a series B tech startup focused on industrial production (keeping it vague). It is well funded by tech elites and pays more than a comparable company would pay, and I've been here for a few years. I don't have anywhere near FAANG equity potential.
The FAANG adjacent companies, e.g. Uber, Block?
> -- Are there people outside of FAANG and Big Banks / HFT firms making those kinds of monies?
Yes.
> -- if So who are they? and what do they do?
OpenAI, Anthropic and crypto bug bounty hunters.
Stock values can plummet.
Any company that has rsu as part of their comp basically in the same range.
build an indie saas product
Yes. I've seen a few in the last couple years: one hard science/tech company, one tech infrastructure company taking on a huge established player, one AI-ish company (but suddenly had a shakeup with senior exodus to hotter AI companies).
Non-AI, I got a written offer (for a key T-shaped hands-on technical role in a special unit of a financial institution), for which TC was (put very roughly) about halfway between Google L6 and where non-FAANG IC TC generally tops out.
Since you're asking about "non-FAANG", a few comments about that, using one offer as an example...
First, requirements: making a lot of money now is higher priority for me than it has been in the past (since I'd previously made money way too low of a priority, and now catching up to do), and FAANG-like TC is a solution, but aspects of culture and mission are still also very important.
Some ways that particular financial institution offer was more attractive than FAANG:
1. Every single person I talked with seemed genuine, honest, smart, and down-to-earth, and like they'd be great to work with, not mercenary/arrogant/oblivious like I've seen from some FAANG people.
2. The interview process was collegial and two-way. And some asked some very good questions, including questions that I think would never occur to Leetcode interviewers to ask, and the "correct answer" wasn't in the FAANG interview prep books for people to memorize/practice.
3. A higher executive themself met with me for a substantial meeting, was very smart and straight-talking about everything, and then also brought up growth opportunity they had in mind.
In hindsight, I probably should've accepted, but three of the main reasons at the time that I declined:
1. Leadership of my then-employer assured me that a showstopper organizational issue I raised would be fixed, and I felt an obligation to my colleagues to stay and help fix it. (That was my values-based choice, given the information I had at the time.)
2. The compensation was structured in a convoluted way (more complicated than FAANG TC), and the net effect was that there'd be almost no financial quality of life improvement for close to a year. So I'd be working like crazy, like at a startup (but without a startup lottery ticket), yet, although I'd be working for a big financial institution with a gazillion dollars, I wouldn't immediately have enough money and sense of income security to upgrade from a problematic early-startup-grade apartment in a VHCOLA. Buying a fleet of Brooks Brothers no-iron dress shirts would feel like an investment towards the future bonuses, and I'd just have to make sure my old radiator didn't burst and ruin everything in my closet again, until I could find a sufficiently low-risk way to upgrade lifestyle. :)
3. Once the offer was in writing, I got handed off to dealing directly with large corporate HR processes, which had a very different feel from the people I'd been talking with, and my spidey sense (battle scars) tingled. (Not potentially Kafkaesque bureaucracy for bad reasons, like some companies, but maybe the effect of decades of evolution of highly-regulated large business bureaucracy.) Not the kind of thing you want to see, right after you see that the TC structure still isn't going to make you feel financially comfortable anytime soon. This was intuition rather than hard information, but I hadn't yet gotten that disconcerting feeling from Google (where they'd grown up with a Summer Camp for Stanford Students focus on employee happiness, and where I imagine I might be able to find a progressive policy or person who is able help with a bureaucratic machine dilemma, if ever needed).
When asking about maximizing your TC, consider whether that's your only requirement, and what qualities of FAANG or FAANG-like-TC companies you have to accept to get that money.
Did you check levels.fyi? Companies like Databricks, Roblox, Rppling, Plaid, Airtable etc
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According to levels.fyi, FAANG only pays the most at the most experienced levels. I'm not sure if those are even hired for, they might be promoted into.
Of the rest, the top paying ones seem to be fintech and AI startups. Only Netflix still scores high in top salaries.
It would make sense too, as they have a lot of leverage. Lots of people joining are happy to take a cut just to have the FAANG name on their resume. And I saw someone mention the average tenure is about 1.7 years.
FANG envy and fomo. ladder climbing.
dont compare yourself with others. focus on your art. be a craftsman at whatever you do. eventually opportunities will beckon or not, and either is fine.
Using your own example, every "avg startup" engineer who is overemployed with only two gigs is matching FAANG money.
Are you counting the $1m in options as compensation? If so, plenty of startups will offer you that.
It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur, and will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business.
These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
If you aren't a shoo-in at FAANG and you want to make that kind of money, your best bet is to learn how to start and run a business. I don't mean try to launch a billion dollar social app that needs venture funding. I mean a SAAS that solves a boring problem for other businesses with money to spend.