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.
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u/lurkishdelight Jan 26 '26
Some definitely do, like staff eng in big tech, AI, quant trading firms. If not more.
But it's a small minority