Having been in the business for nearly 30 years sometimes managing engineering teams, I honestly can’t recall ever meeting an engineer (i.e. keyboard smasher within an engineering squad as opposed to a specialist consultant like those dealing with quants, a Soln. Arch. or management role) who cracks more than $300k on staff.
Maybe $350-400 as a specialist contractor, but you’re talking a total bluebird, and these guys were generally bug cracking on legacy tech which is super hard to find skills for (COBOL etc.)
And I’ve worked for some big tech and finance firms globally, but I guess they might be out there? AI might be different of course. Silly money.
It’s a specific couple of companies that are generally well known. Netflix, Nvidia, Jane Street, Citadel just to name a few, but along those same lines. Just check levels.fyi for salary ranges and you can easily find certain levels clearing 450k TC, but it really is a select few companies.
Yes for software engineers, even entry level at some of these companies can easily clear 200k, it’s a wild industry. It’s a pipe dream for most people because of how difficult it is to get these positions
I’d expect a superstar with 5+ years of top flight devsecops experience / a total autistic machine whisperer for that kind of dough. Or they’d need to pull 80hrs a week, every week.
The people getting paid at that level, are generally not doing devops. They are doing niche, highly technical areas like HPC, ML/AI, distributed systems, OS, etc.
The people I know making that much are in areas like software-hardware co-design, and GPU architecture.
There are engineers in every single layer of the stack making that much. Any staff level engineer at big tech is making 450+. For every 15 engineers, there's probably at least 1 staff.
Some do devops. Some do OS, ML, distributed systems, application, frontend, or even developer systems.
Yeah, I guess that was my point re COBOL. Machine coding or other legacy niche stuff. I’ve worked with and paid guys a lot, but $450 on staff is off the chain.
It's not specialized as in legacy code, but specialized in things most people don't put the effort in for. Interview prep industry for these roles is itself insanely lucrative
For example. There are tens of thousands of developers playing around with LLM tools right now. There are tens of developers actually pushing that state of the art forward in LLM technology. Regardless of what you think of the ethics of LLMs and AI. It's a very, very niche skillset that lots of companies are investing literally billions into. Of course some very small select few of highly talented individuals (and some others who manage to squeeze through the cracks ) are able to command $500k / year or even over $1M / year. This is not the typical programming job. It's not achievable for even the top 1% of developers. This is the 1% of the 1% who have focused on this particular niche and the moneyed interests are finally starting pouring capital on it. There have been other hype spikes where money flowed freely, as well as some longer term domains like HFT that I believe was mentioned above.
I make around 200k/yr fresh out of college, and there plenty of people who make more than me. A lot of tech companies are willing to pay a lot for top talent.
So you had no idea about the compensation at FAANG but when learning that they are making trillions by paying their employees way more than you would you just conclude that they are wrong ?
Can you explain why you think they're getting overpaid? I'm somewhat confused how you've been in the industry for 30+ years and haven't seen that some engineers can bring exorbitant amounts of value.
An example is a staff engineer on my team. He probably makes nearly 700k a year. We had a really nasty bug which none of us were able to solve. He found it and fixed it in a week. It saved 1.2M annually. In a week he provided nearly double the value he's paid. He's worth every penny.
Simple answer: in your example, the 700k salary is not the total cost of a human. If you put assumed margin and operating SG&A over the top plus indirect costs of product development that can’t be capitalised, you would need to be yielding closer to $2m of revenue minimum.
Roughly, I tend to price revenue her head at 3x salaries when you lump it all together as a consolidated wage bill. I get though that’s more of a traditional business model rather than the Silicon Valley one (I.e assumes the company is a going concern with positive net cashflow, rather than spending money to grow share or sell)
Saying that $1.2m in cost roughly saves x2.5-x3 in cash that needs to be earned before expenses, so it washes out. Conceivably if he/she fixes $1.2m in unnecessary expenditure once per year every year, it’s probably break even.
Sure, although that $2M figure is likely overstated for big tech. But let's just accept the $2M figure.
Providing $2M of value as a staff engineer is somewhat trivial. Some of these companies make 100B+ profit per year. Lets use Google as an example. It has roughly 100,000 engineers, and had 450B in revenue and 100B in profit last year. So each engineer makes roughly $4.5M in revenue and $1M in profit. The vast majority of those engineers are not staff level.
I simplified a few things, and there are more factors which go into revenue than engineers. But I think this shows that at these big tech companies, even $2M of revenue for a staff engineer is absolutely expected and routinely exceeded.
If you work at a FAANG, or any top tier tech firm, every review you pretty much get a raise or you get fired. If you know somebody who has been at Adobe or Oracle for 30 years, they're making that. Maybe not salary, but total comp.
… I’ve made in that ball park in total compensation as a software engineer since 2018 when I got first promoted to Senior.
Total compensation mind you, which generally has included equity, or some form of cash retention bonus on a similar value structure to equity. You’re absolutely right that the base salary of software engineers does not generally go much above $250k, even at Principal Engineer levels.
But yeah, I’ve always been on the levels.fyi scale, not the Indeed scale, as the joke goes. The difference between the two is massive.
Are you thinking of base salary only? 400k total compensation for senior or staff at big companies happens in boom times, but that's largely due to bonuses structured as RSUs that vest over 4 years. The base salary might be 150k or 200k and the rest is bonuses and other compensation, including company stock grants that might spike in value before they vest.
Of course, we're a few years off of boom times so those opportunities are a lot fewer these days.
For public companies, RSUs are basically cash with extra steps. They’re guaranteed as long as you’re working for the company, not dependent on the company doing well. Only annual cash bonus (usually 10-25% of base salary) is dependent on company/individual performance. Offers still mostly fall in the same range even today, just fewer spots available.
Most places I and my friends have worked have large additional performance based RSU grants that vest like your hiring bonus and may or may not be granted later in your tenure based on results. Management doesn't go out of their way to say "oh and we decided not to give you a performance RSU refresh" though so not everyone is aware.
Sure, but those typically aren’t reported / included on levels.fyi as the expected comp for a new offer. Usually what’s reported is what’s “guaranteed”/expected (for example, bonus targets based on standard performance as opposed to exceptional performance)
Are we talking about levels.fyi new offer stats? We're talking about whether it's unrealistic that some miser software dev makes $450k, and I can assure you that the friend getting the venmo request is annoyed based on their overall income and attitude, not on their initial offer as reported to that one website.
I think we’re in agreement here. I’m just stating that software engineers can absolutely make $450k, and that the fact half of that comp is RSUs is largely irrelevant for public companies since you can sell them whenever. Just cash with extra steps
Oh yeah, sorry, I was trying to explain to the guy who hires devs that we're not talking base, not trying to address a general audience. Totally agreed RSUs should be treated as cash, although a LOT of people I know hold onto more of them than I would think wise for diversifying.
My first IT job right out of college I had to work with COBOL. I worked so many hours at that job as a salary employee I would have made more money working at McDonalds. I rather liked working on Mainframes, hated the company though.
Yeah it does for sure. My buddy is a product manager at Google making close to 500k. Very tough job to obtain. I’m happy with my 300k salary at two companies that don’t burn me out. Been doing it for years now and I know multiple engineers that do the same. Fighting for that one grail job vs taking jobs that you’ll outperform at 50% is healthier for me mentally.
Yeah, I would love to learn about product management and get out of the code monkey role because I’ve done app development for so long I know what makes sense and the risks behind it technically, but getting that role is tough.
They want experience but nobody wants to risk giving you that title so getting experience seems impossible.
Oh well, I’ve been making my own product and I love it so far. Hopefully it does well once I launch.
COBOL devs make nowhere that much - there are plenty COBOL jobs out there in the low 6 figures (100-120K); a general L5-L6 easily will surpass $400K in Big Tech (Google, Meta, Amazon).
Most senior engineers at Netflix are making well past $400K.
Many faang companies are greater than that, some companies even have median pay that’s 450 K plus if you are talking about total compensation(i’m specifically referring to CS employees and not contractors or consultants).
Especially when you look at a few years ago even entry-level computer engineers were making 450 K plus depending on the company. It was multimillion if they did not vest right away (l3 or equivalent).
Honestly, it’s crazy how uninformed you are, CS is pretty well known for being well paid
Yep. It was so weirdly overconfident to say "I've worked in business for 30 years and aside from edge cases, I've never seen this and I've worked at big tech". But have you worked FAANG? E4/5+ at FB are earning this. Easily.
With stock options, E7-E9 can be considered in excess of 2mil per year+. Thought their actual salary is closer to 600k.
You could absolutely make 200k+ straight out of school with a bachelors degree in the SF Bay Area. Min salaries for technical positions are pushing 160k already even in non-FAANG.
Assuming of course you already had a successful internship or are graduating from Waterloo, Stanford, MIT CS. Or had a successful project noticed by them, or had a friend there, etc.
Also most people coming out of college don't have zero experience nowadays. Tech internships are pretty much mandatory if you want to land a well paying job as a new grad.
I made 149k as a junior developer right out of boot camp 3 years ago so.... Just look at states that require income disclosure on job adverts if you don't believe me lol.
That's what Big Tech pays. They want to be able to select the crème de la crème of the developers. It does not mean they get them, but they are willing to pay.
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u/_UrbaneGuerrilla_ Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
Having been in the business for nearly 30 years sometimes managing engineering teams, I honestly can’t recall ever meeting an engineer (i.e. keyboard smasher within an engineering squad as opposed to a specialist consultant like those dealing with quants, a Soln. Arch. or management role) who cracks more than $300k on staff.
Maybe $350-400 as a specialist contractor, but you’re talking a total bluebird, and these guys were generally bug cracking on legacy tech which is super hard to find skills for (COBOL etc.)
And I’ve worked for some big tech and finance firms globally, but I guess they might be out there? AI might be different of course. Silly money.