How much do senior software engineers make? What level are you? Do you work at Mountain View HQ, or elsewhere?
I don't have much to share, but I make $130K base at a Silicon Valley startup. Options aren't worth anything (yet), but from what I've read on HN, they probably won't be worth anything anyways. (-:
Thank you in advance for sharing!
This post was inspired by an earlier post by an Amazon Employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312984
Google gives fair increases on promo and even if initial salary was in the low end. Pretty common to get a high bump after a year if one negotiated badly.
I really hate this whole "total compensation" idea that has taken over the computer industry. Just pay me, or shut up, don't wave magic money in my face along with the real stuff and pretend it's all the same.
Startup stock is imaginary money.
I'm a 36 year old associate professor in Statistics at a top 20 international university and I also have extensive coding experience (10+ years professional experience).
I currently make around $100K salary + $80-100K consulting on side. I also bring in more than $100K a year in grant money that I use to pay RAs, etc.
Are there people with similar backgrounds that have made the leap? I'm keen to hear from them.
They have real statisticians at google, doing stats stuff, like analyzing different options and combinations and strategies for charging.
I have a phd in cs, and 20 years as a dev, including some leadership times. I made about 175-185 at google in one of those big cities, plus half that in stock each year. you get a fixed bonus of 15% of salary times a company bonus rate.
Because you have experience but you might be a specialty area, it's harder to say. I'd guess 150k plus 150k payable over 4 years in stock, maybe a hire on bonus of 25k. and the typical 15% bonus.
One that I know of is Matt Welsh:
The next year, I was promoted to level 4, and got a raise to $134k salary. I also got a $35000 year end bonus, and 5k of other bonuses.
This year, as a level 5 SWE, my gross income (unless Google's stock price changes significantly) will be $323k - 176k salary, my 42k year end bonus from 2015, and $105k of stock, most of which is vesting monthly.
SF and mountain view have the same compensation, I think.
In a nice neighborhood in sf, you're not going going to pay less than 1600 for a room in a shared apartment, or for half of a one bedroom place.
Female, mixed ethnicity, American/native English speaker
SWE II, L3, Mountain View
$110k base, ~$45k in stock, 15% target bonus ($172k total assuming stock price stays stable and I make said bonus)
Worth noting that I tried not to give my then-current pay to the recruiter during the hiring process and was (very politely) told that they'd cancel my application if I didn't give them a number. Also tried to negotiate this offer up (asked for $120k base) and again, got told to take it or leave it.
Step 1: wake up and walk to your manager's office on monday.
Step 2: Announce that you're "considering" leaving for personal reasons to "explore what's around"
Step 3: Invite your wife [girlfiend or whoever] to celebrate $20k boost in your salary by the end of the day.
The thread is extremely useful for people both inside and outside the company.
While it may come across as a bragging, having worked at Amazon in a non tech role I can say that there was extremely little transparency on what someone should be paid at their level. As a result, there was a lot of variability in salaries at any level for a given role. People could be paid as much as 10-20% more purely because they joined a team after some change in salary policy - everyone else in the team would be at a lower salary. MBAs with 2 years work experience would be paid more than people who climbed up the company with 6 years internal experience.
Threads like this level the playing field for employees and would-be employees as they can negotiate with HR and know definitively what they should be paid.
$165,000 Base
$25,000 Hiring Bonus
$300,000 Stock (25% 1st year, then quarterly for the remaining 75% over 3 years) ($300,000 at the time, now it's only about half that). 10% annual bonus.
Male. Native English Speaker.
I can also speak to a friend here all the stats are the same except he got a $35,000 moving stipend instead of a hiring bonus.
---------
To save people one click:
I spent 5 years at Google. My AGI (as measured by the IRS) during my time there went $130K, $200K, $280K, $280K, $300K, $356K (for my last 5 months there...it also includes unexercised stock options for the last 5 years, though). The bump to $280K was upon promotion to senior SWE; the one to $200K was largely because of a generous stock refresh grant.
posted by user: throwaway_goog
16 years of experience overall; 5 years with this firm
Male, H-1B from India
Title - Started out as Principal Engineer, now Sr. Engineering Manager
Current comp: 220K base, 150K/yr of (illiquid) stock
Some portion of the stock is in the form of options, some are RSUs. I took the price per share from the last funding round, deducted the strike price of the options and arrived at the dollar value.
SDEII. 7 Years of coding experience full time. Base: 110k Signing bonus: $0k cash, $6k in stocks.
On H1B visa so can't quit, but as soon as I get green card, I should definitely look around. Geez, you folks are making me feel really bad.
You can switch to another company on H-1B, but if you've already started the Green Card progress, it will get reset.
BTW, I was hired as an SDE I even with 6 years experience.
$150k base salary
$25k bonus this year
$90k/year in stock at current share price, vesting monthlyDo you enjoy long walks on the beach ?
150k base, 40k signing bonus, ~27k yearly bonus, ~130k yearly stock
8 years prior experience before Google
Salary rose to 160k on promo to L5 SWE, also got stock refreshers for 90k and 190k in years 2 and 3 (vests monthly over 4 years).
Salary jumped to 182k when I talked to manager at last appraisal that I am underpaid w.r.t. salary. Found out because I was TLMing a team of size 12, and the L5s reporting to me had higher salaries. Btw, Googlers, MRP at L5 is about 190k.
Going for promo to L6 now, and expecting a salary hike, and hopefully a good stock refresher as well.
Tenure so far: 2.5 years
Salary: $150K
Stock: purportedly .75% of company 4 years 1-year cliff, with small follow-on grant later, don't know what recent dilution is, though I think more recent funding has been "debt" at low interest with preference
Not a regular VC situation, company funded through other means.
Outlook -- real uncertain, market has definite need, execution so far has been very mixed, company willing to re-do things the right way
Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation (danluu.com) 730 points
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10758278
Also see PayScale:
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Google,_Inc./Sa...
Also the bonuses quoted here sound a lot higher than the standard 15%.
There's a very similar thread going for Amazon right now:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312984
It's a mix of salary sharing and salary negotiation advice that could be very relevant to your bigger question of "How much do senior software engineers make [at the big tech companies]?"
Also relevant is this Salary Negotiation For Developers workshop I did last week in Orlando: http://bit.ly/21zFG5q
As I said over there: I love these threads and I hope more of them get started. The more people know about what they're worth, the more tools they have to get paid what they're worth.
Thanks for starting this thread!
We went through both the Google and Amazon comp (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312984) threads, and we added it all to this Google Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11tyJW9KPcSiLZBBuf0Z1...
Feel free to share/add to this doc.
Here are the median comps by level for Amazon and Google, just based on the postings collected in the Google doc as of 3/22.
--Amazon -- New grad: $141K, SDE1: $146K, SDE2: $173K, SDE3: $250K, TPM3: $220K,
--Google-- Level 3: $170K, Level 4: $200K, Level 5: $312K, Level 6: $575K, T7: $640K, Tech Level 5: $660K
Just a few notes - Total comp includes bonus, signing bonus, relocation bonus, and stock. Bonuses and stock were all annualized straight-line. (I know this is not how Amazon stock comp is done, but we assumed this in our calcs.) Since we took postings from 2 different threads, it's possible that one person could have posted once in each thread, in which case that would show up twice in the Google doc. Also, there's a lot of variance particularly with bonuses which are lumped in, and some of the higher levels only have one data point, but you can look at the data in the Google doc if you want to dig in.
If it helps with comparison between Amazon and Google, here's how Amazon levels map to Google's (from Quora: https://www.quora.com/How-do-Amazons-engineering-levels-map-...) Amazon SDE 1 - roughly a Google T3 ("I") or T4 ("II"). Amazon SDE 2 - roughly a Google T4 ("III") Amazon SDE 3 - roughly a Google T5 ("Senior") or T6 ("Staff") Amazon Principal - roughly a Google T6 or T7 ("Senior Staff") Amazon Sr. Principal - roughly a Google T8 ("Principal") or T9 ("Distinguished").
Full disclosure - we're Step (http://www.step.com), and we're building a platform to help engineers and product managers anonymously crowdsource personalized salary and level estimates from decision makers and hiring experts at tech companies. This thread is especially interesting to us, because it shows the need/demand for more transparency around compensation and company feedback. Right now, we're working with ~10 NYC startups that will assign personalized salary/level estimates and other feedback to anonymous profiles, but our bigger vision is that as soon as someone signs up, they'll see how each and every company values them without having to interview/talk to recruiters.