Top Paying Tech Companies of 2018 (opens in new tab)

> Can't imagine how one could survive more so thrive with anything under $200k in the valley.

Is this serious or sarcasm? The bay area is expensive, but as long as you're okay living in an apartment, it's not that crazy expensive. Even 100k would be fine.

According to this, the median household income in SF is ~97k: https://www.businessinsider.de/weath-maps-cities-san-francis...

I figure with the numbers they are quoting, they are offering private stock with a certain valuation (409A), and including that in the number. I hear they are going public in 2019 too, so that might go up or down depending on how the IPO goes.

The numbers are listed as compensation, not base salary. I assume these are "all up" numbers including stock and bonus. 400k base seems steep, even for an L5 at Google or Netflix.

Pretty sure that they are all wrong. The levels, description, years and titles do not match.

Don't expect to go from new graduate to senior engineer in a glimpse.

It is a title inflation. I look around recently and see that most of my team-mates are now senior SDEs. Everyone of them has been working professionally 3 - 4 years max. When I joined the company 10 years ago, it would take a tremendous effort to get promoted to Sr. SDE. Now it seems that I have to aim to get to Staff SDE pretty soon because of the inflation.

My theory in the title inflation is because of the following causes (my speculation, may not be true): 1. Immigration laws have gotten tougher for H1-B. Companies now inflate the title to be able to justify the hire and extend visa for SDEs coming from other countries. I think it is pretty tough now to extend visa for Chinese/Indian nationals. Some of the SDE in my team went back to China to get visa and a couple of them got stuck there over a month for the visa to be approved. 2. Competition among bigger companies: if one big company inflats the title to Sr. SDE, it would get pretty tough for that SDE with only 3 - 4 years of professional experience to get the same title in another competitor. Effectively, the company satisfies the SDE with a slight raise and a newer title and also makes it harder for she/he to jump ship.

Senior Engineer is L5 at Google, not L4. They got all the levels wrong.

The people who filled this are either trying to inflate their titles or they were too gullible when HR sold the role.

It might well be similar. I'm at Google in Munich, and they seem to have a decent-sized compensation advantage over 'regular' local companies here.

Yup. If your priority is a big house, cheaper areas are definitely better. More expensive areas have their own advantages, though: better for paying off loans, saving for retirement (assuming you're okay eventually moving), or for non-CoL affected goods like travel or electronics or media.

I touched on geography in another comment, but another idea to show this data would be to normalize it somehow for region. E.g., divide salary by metro area median income.