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.
> instead of learning how to start and run a business
Because the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5.
Especially if you start hiring other people, your liability then increases 10 fold as now anything can happen with them (sick leave, absenteism, low performance, sabotage, etc) but you're still bound to the same deadlines you agreed with your customers or you'll get sued for damages by them.
As an employee you have some basic rights and protections from the state on the limits your employer can squeeze from you, more or less, depending on where you live. As a contractor or company however, you don't, and can be fully liable in court for your failures to deliver regardless of your personal circumstances. Unless you know what you're getting into and have the know-how, experience, or mentorship, it's not worth it in most cases.
My primary goal is to maximize my income with the least amount of stress possible, and FAANG hits that spot just right.
I guess you can say I could maximize further by switching to finance or starting my own business, but the amount of extra stress is just not worth it at the moment, personally.
Doesn't sound like you get it. You ask why people have an aversion to starting their own business and people are giving you reasons that you don't want to accept.
I've done both. Working FAANG is way easier than running your own business. Orders of magnitude less stress. That's why some people can "rest and vest" at FAANG.
It is not about stress. You are asking to pick between a) do same job at a different company for 2-3x income, or b) learn to do something different for a chance of smaller/same/or bigger income than in the previous case. First option requires passing somewhat stressful interviews and then it is all familiar territory. Second option has more unknowns.
> First option requires passing somewhat stressful interviews and then it is all familiar territory. Second option has more unknowns.
The most you'll ever make at a job is based on one conversation you had months or even years ago. Your income will only ever increase at steps every 6 - 12 months and, in the best case, linearly and in the worst case never increasing beyond inflation.
With a business, yes your income may be stagnant or slower, but your income isn't capped, can change rapidly, and can change on a dime rather than waiting on the next review cycle or whatever.
If you have the stomach for it, a business will long-term always give better returns for your work than a job.
Your liability is. Worst case scenario is you don't get hired, or you get hired, and then get fired. That the worst that can happen. FAANG isn't gonna come after you for damages if you accidentally brick something in production or are just lazy and incompetent. As a business, your customers might.
Let's watch how the Crowdstrike scenario unfolds in the coming months, when they'll probably get lawsuits up the ass for the damages they caused. Get your popcorn ready.
>And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.
Sure, but not everyone can get there, the same how not everyone can become a successful football player despite so many successful examples. There's too many variables. Usually, the right connections are your most valuable asset as one man company, and not everyone has them.
CrowdStrike is a publicly traded company; no one is coming after the founders or the CEO for money they have cashed out via stock sales, prior to the event. So it's not a great example.
A better example is simply having your business evaporate overnight while you have a building/offices to pay for, employees to pay, etc. Which happened to someone I know back in the early days of Windows NT: his servers and desktops that he built, worked under NT but then a service pack for NT 3.51 broke everything; overnight his contract with a large local hospital went away; that a few months later the next service pack fixed the issues, meant nothing to his former customers. He went from making the equivalent of $250K today to approximately zero.
Crowdstrike is essentially on the level of a FAANG, so I don't think this is remotely comparable to the type of business I mentioned.
The likelihood of a one-person SAAS getting sued into oblivion is pretty low, especially if you aren't providing something as fundamental as security services to banks and airlines.
If you are a tiny business, you just need an indemnity clause. If you have employees, you pay for E&O insurance.
Im not saying any of this is obvious, but if you are applying to work at a FAANG, I will assume you are both smart enough and ambitious enough to do a bit of research.
First, you don't really know whether that'll hold up in court until it happens.
Second, by the time you're done with the court case, you'll have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy. Not only is that stressful by itself, it's also a big distraction from running the business, and every day you are busy with the court case you'll wish you were spending time working your business. The smaller you are, the more impactful distractions are.
This ignores the fact that nothing is stopping someone from suing you personally today, small business owner or not.
There are two types of people who sue:
- rational actors who have acted in good faith, exhausted all avenues of recourse, and feel like the courts are their only hope for some sort of resolution.
- irrational actors who sue for weird personal reasons, can’t be reasoned with, refuse all attempts to come to a reasonable settlement, etc.
You definitely want the first type of person as a customer.
Again, nothing is stopping anyone from suing you personally right now.
Not everyone lives in a litigious society like the US. Here in Europe if you try to sue an employee for work related stuff you'll be dismissed pretty quickly on the grounds that you need to be suing the company instead.
It's totally understandable if you don't want to sell/market your business or you just don't want the unpredictability which is probably greater than with a larger company. But, oh no, I might be sued should almost certainly not be a major consideration relative to other factors.
> FAANG isn't gonna come after you for damages if you accidentally brick something in production or are just lazy and incompetent. As a business, your customers might.
So? Worst case, the business folds and you start it again.
This is like being worried about being fired, and people telling horror stories about so-and-so who got fired. They’re fine. You’ll be fine.
The whole point of an LLC is to prevent people from going after the corporation’s owner. They have to go after the corporation itself. It’s in the name: limited liability corporation. And sure, if you end up harming someone physically then they might have a case against you, but most of us don’t run into that problem.
> Because the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5.
Believe it or not you get over this. It’s kind of like the fear of going up on stage to give a presentation. Some people get an addictive rush, these are usually serial entrepreneurs who just love to be in charge because they have no problems with risk/stress tolerance (mostly). You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera. Hiring/firing is hard for people but you have no choice and certainly you’re not beholden to give people jobs. People are there to work, do their best at the moment, your job is to ensure them they’re looked after adequately and your door is always open to them if they have to talk to you.
Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig. Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well. The CEO will shit test you in almost everything you do and say and this is the grilling you will need, because they expect you to be capable of running things in their stead.
> these are usually serial entrepreneurs who just love to be in charge because they have no problems with risk/stress tolerance (mostly).
More accurately, they have made enough money from a successful venture that they can afford to fail and their risk/stress is lowered. I know serial entrepreneurs who failed several times in a row. Without some form of safety net along the way (an exit, taking money off the table in a later round, simply nice cashflows they were able to bank for a few years), they all seem to burn out.
I don’t see much evidence of actual experience in this comment. Maybe you have a lot of experience and aren’t very good at conveying it but honestly, it sounds like you have thoroughly drank the startup koolaid.
> Believe it or not you get over this.
This screams either a lack of experience or a lack of meaningful social relationships. Many people never get over this - it is incredibly risky and stressful being a solo founder.
> You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera.
Again, not true. Some people can do this and others can’t. Fundamentally, it depends on actually providing value, being aware of the value you provide and being able to quantify that. Those are three difficult skills and many people cannot acquire them.
> Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig.
Absolutely no. Many people should not attempt this. In fact, I’ve been doing this for around thirty years and I think the majority of people should avoid it. People with young families, credit card debt and spending problems have no business going out on their own.
> Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well.
No, people should strive to make a living, pay their bills and find something approaching happiness.
Not to mention the existence of society literally depends on massive large coordinated efforts. It would be completely impractical to operate a society where everyone was an independent small business owner. Imagine trying to operate the global logistics system, or plan, build and operate off-shore oil wells. Being part of a team is a valid and honorable thing.
As an entrepreneur, you can leave anytime you want, but of course, you can't leave the responsibility aside.
With an employer not offering remote, you can set your own rules around it. You can work from Bali, if you want and your customers are OK with it. But i agree , the small business route is certainly not for everyone.
I politely disagree. If you think “hours spent at desk” correlates with performance, I don’t really know what to tell you.
I do work late, and over my career have absolutely pulled all nighters and weekends and been on the redeye, but that’s when I stretch or flex, and it’s simply not sustainable.
Of course there are. In my 20 years of experience I've never worked in a place which would expect people to work overtime. (this wasn't in my selection criteria BTW)
Most of people I know work 37 hour weeks and use sone kind of flex system where hours above 37 per week are saved and spent at later time. The only person keeping track of your time is yourself.
You can get over it if you dig the day-to-day of running a business. But not everyone digs it.
Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig.
No they shouldn't because as an endeavor it just doesn't appeal to lots of people.
The "everyone should try and become good at the stuff I think is fun" tone of this response is just weird, and grossly out of touch with observations of human nature.
LLCs limit your financial liability, but you can still work thousands of hours on a business and end up making nothing. If you work the same thousands of hours as an employee, you will make money.
When you start up a business from scratch you quickly become familiar with bank requirements for a personal guarantee. The LLC will not protect you from personal financial exposure in the full amount of all your business credit facilities, loans, leases, etc.
Working for a big company in the US is massively underrated. Over time, most people working in these companies will be much better off financially and with less stress/health issues.
The silicon valley/tech bubble over-romanticizes entrepreneurship without realizing its NOT for everyone.
For every 1 success story you hear about entrepreneurship, there are 50-100 that fail. The stress and anxiety is not something everyone can or should take if they have the opportunity to coast at FAANG and make $500K+.
How many businesses make $500K in revenue in the US? Not many? [1]
I am paraphrasing here, but I really agree with how Scott Galloway put it: The US corporation is the greatest wealth creating vehicle in history. Way safer and easier to build wealth working at Google.
Giving "StArt a BusZineaSs BRO" as a blanket advice is very disingenuous.
Started a business doing 1M annual recurring. I have plenty of reasons why it’s more advantageous.
• When times get tough, cofounders playing chicken to see who can take the lowest salary
• Giving yourself the lowest pay to prevent income loss of your employees
• Always having to hunt for sales to maintain your survival (which is typically nebulous and subject to when they feel like signing)
• HR and always trying to figure out how to not get sued
• Losing big customers or big customers going out of business
For any one of those bullet points there’s a coulda woulda shoulda, but again, just taking your 400k from a well established company that isn’t fighting for its survival every day is not inherently inferior to the heroics and cortisol required to operate a business.
Just went through a lot of these, and can confidently say: way way more dangerous to own a company than be a part of one. Significantly less fun, however. I believe it comes down to personality type.
Startup guy who’s now at FAANG. I’m technical technical technical (IC track). I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a staffed project, then onto the next new thing.
Get to work with excellent SWEs, PMs, PgMs, etc.
In startup land I was doing so much, pitches, recruiting, coding, landing page design, dev ops, pretty much the full stack.
In FAANG land I can just focus on existence proofs and then there’s a whole support structure helping that happen and bringing the product to market.
You could argue that setting up this pipeline is the goal of a startup, but it’s a LOONG road. The opportunity cost is immense. It’s immensely difficult to recruit. You have to effectively pause your life. Scary to have children with startup level uncertainty.
At a certain $$ where you can live a comfortable life, enjoy 95% of what you do day to day, get to be in an environment with top notch colleagues, it’s a tough sell to start something from scratch with all that risk.
> I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a staffed project, then onto the next new thing.
How many products you have actually finished and worked on and polished over years if they produced something valuable in the end?
That defines the actual realised value of the business. Jumping from one product to another does not mean that all of them were constantly producing revenue or were success. It might look good in the CV but what was end result?
Hit and miss. It’s pretty equivalent to % of finding product market fit in startup land.
Mostly worked on internal products. One HUGE hit, a few moderate hits, and quite a few failures.
The calculus for projects at a large bigco are different from a startup though.
It’s not necessarily clear bottom line revenue, especially for innovation teams. Crypto, for example, bigco needs at least some folks working on it to build an understanding of the technology, market, pain points. Some of these projects are started with literally no intention of profitability, but as an explicit build-to-learn.
There’s a wide spectrum of SWE interest and capabilities. Some folks love the creativity of greenfield new product exploration. Others love the focus of crafting a perfectly scalable, maintainable system. These are really just points along a product lifecycle.
I understand myself enough and am unapologetic about getting “bored” easily, and need to be constantly working on creative things.
Others at the other end of the spectrum have a visceral reaction to that. They can’t do what I do, and I can’t do what they do.
> I mean a SAAS that solves a boring problem for other businesses with money to spend.
Profitable software-based ideas are increasingly difficult to find. Thousands of people are exploring every niche and trying to start startups in them, which is great, but competition is fierce and unexplored niches are shrinking.
And of course, it's still not straightforward even if you find a relatively unexplored niche. Most people I see who have attempted startups had extensive family support or personal wealth from exits as an employee of a company that had an IPO.
People say this but I don’t buy it at all. If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago. The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
I think there are probably several hundred HN readers who would be happy to tackle those problems. Boring is probably not the issue, but obscure is, assuming these problems exist. If they're difficult to discover that the problem exists, that's a challenge. Further, if the problems exist but are highly unique in each case, there may be a reason it's solved in a one-off way by Excel or scripts rather than a scalable product. The use of Excel isn't inherently ripe for disruption. There are plenty of problems to be solved that just can't be solved profitably. It would be no better than solving a problem that someone has but is unwilling to pay for.
Your comment reminded me of a cool little project I found a few years ago re: niche problems and smaller solutions - the target demo being soldiers who (very generally) have some disposable income to spend on a small app that can improve their professional QoL was kind of genius imo.
There was (still is, though the website is now dead) a really cool website/app that a fmr Air Force soldier made called AFI SWiM[0] that extracted 'Shall, Will and Must' references from Air Force publications which blew up in popularity among the target demo. The dev recently(ish) wrote a blog post[1] how it surprised him to see the app[2] had gotten around ~20k downloads, though I am unsure if the app was always priced at $1.99 (which would be just under $40k).
I like the idea of developing a problem solver for a niche market, though finding and monetizing it definitely is pretty tough.
Imagine if this app was B2B instead of B2C, or if it pivots to B2B in the future, or if it's acquired. Imagine also future passive income with little maintenance. And his project seemed like a side project written over a few months.
Still risky, but the expected value is comparable to a stint at a salaried job IMO, once you find a decent market opportunity. Not to mention the qualitative value of self-employment, and that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs.
We can play this game all day, but the fact is somebody put a ton of work into a project and made about what they could have made in a month at a FAANG.
Not really. FAANG people have to show up to get that salary. It's not apples to apples to compare this to salary because the app was built once then continued to make money without additional work.
Salary requires constant effort and work. I will take working 60 - 80 hours for a week to make $40k over working 320 hours to make the same.
Imagine investing the FAANG money into dividend ETFs and living off those in a few years.
> that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs
You aren’t seriously comparing the risk of self-employment to the risk of being layed off by one of the most stable companies of the world during a downturn after a 15 year bullrun, are you?
50% of those places are using excel and outdated tech because they have 0 budget to spend on tech no matter how good the replacement (in fact even if it is cheaper, approving the alternative is too painful a process), "their problem" is not that nobody had solved their actual problem but trying to convince someone upstairs to approve spend on an alternative solution.
Big sample size issue here. I don't know why anyone would want to share that they have a profitable one person business, as it only invites competition. The people actually doing that are almost certainly going to keep it a secret.
If you know of some boring, obscure market niches that are also likely to be profitable, meaning the cost of customer acquisition is easily less than the profit per customer, and is scalably solved with a software product, please either share with HN readers, or at least offer to sell them to us.
They say ideas are worth nothing, but not to me. If you really have some good ideas (see definition above), I would be interested in buying them at a reasonable price.
Here's one that I have dealt with personally: paying taxes as an American that lives abroad (and wants to use the foreign income exclusion) is a nightmare filled with misinformation and tedium.
I don't know if this is actually a market worth pursuing, but I do know that I paid some company $500 to fill in a form for me and help figure out the process. They probably spent an hour or two on my case.
With the increase of dual citizens, digital nomads, etc. this seems like a growing market to me.
I too used Greenback once. The truth is that if one has a relatively simple situation, e.g. salaried employee, then it is entirely realistic to do this oneself. With more complexity (other types of income like interest, capital gains,...) it can be more time consuming, but still doable.
I am not a professional, so seek and pay for professional advice, if that is what you need. I've been doing my own taxes as an American living abroad for ~a decade. If anyone is in a similar situation and has questions, feel free to pm me. Because financial/tax advice from strangers with no professional credentials on the Internet is always a good idea. :p
> If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago.
Which just proves the immense value of Excel and the relatively bad value proposition of custom-made software.
> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
1. Yes, which is why it’s increasingly hard to start a business as a pure software engineer. To put it harshly, most software engineers don’t know enough about the real world out there to solve its problems. Many choose to create software for other software engineers for this reason, and that market is fierce.
2. Another issue is that only those specific businesses might have those problems. Even if you know about them, solving them might not be a good business case. Solving them must be lucrative enough to allow for a small target audience, or the problem needs to be common enough to allow for economies of scale, which brings us to back to point 1.
I used to work in internal IT at a Fortune 500 working with different departments in the company to turn Excel spreadsheets and Access97 tools into web apps with real databases. The problem is that the companies/departments where this is the case all have their own workflows and business processes, and 99% of the time are completely unwilling to consider change. It'll be really challenging to develop software that can be sold to multiple companies even when they ostensibly do the same thing.
I’ll add to that: in many industries/domains the incumbents are benefiting from the status quo and have no interest in upending it, while others have accepted some of these as “hard facts”[0].
I’m working on one such problem in the healthcare space, as an outsider. In early stages, so we’ll see if it goes anywhere.
>their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
And the problems were so important that somebody, anybody, stepped up to the plate with a digital solution as soon as it was barely possible.
Sometimes you have to admire that effort to a greater degree than a more technically advanced alternative.
I'm sure some of these are ripe for transition to a truly more effective approach in every way but often there is no fooling them trying to provide anything less.
And disruption itself can be the enemy in some things like this.
There is limitless opportunity outside of the webtech/adtech bullshit bubble. Go create a hardware startup, it's never been easier. It's still harder than adtech bullshit was 10 years ago, but the turnkey manufacturing industry is faaaar better than all the "hardware is hard" weekly blogspam would lead you to believe.
Any hints on how to even begin looking into this? There's a plethora of content on starting SaaS projects but can't say I've ever come across any for hardware.
That's gonna depend on your skills and what you think is interesting to pursue. Generally speaking you'll want to learn how to, at a minimum, model stuff and 3d print it, and how to design PCBs. I strongly suggest FreeCAD and KiCad for those tasks respectively.
I like making hardware and SW that goes with it... I'm just not sure how you validate the market need for something like that and what hw more exactly to build. I feel there is already so much stuff...
I haven't read this elsewhere so it may be non-validated but you shouldn't imagine customers of a product as entirely captured nor cohesive. Inside of the customer pool are going to be people who are displeased with the product for sometimes disparate reasons but not enough to find a different product because this one is "good enough".
To make this example very simple, a product may produce orange widgets. It's good enough for most people but one group wishes it made a more yellow widget while another group wishes it made a more red widget. The orange widget isn't the ideal case, it's a compromise to serve the most people.
If someone came in and made a product that produces very yellow widgets and focuses on the yellow widget market, you could serve those people very well despite being having a smaller pool.
In other words, your product doesn't need to go toe-to-toe with the orange widget product that has a revenue of $1B, you only need to pick off the yellow widget people to get a revenue of, lets say, $10M and you are eating very well.
I also think the opportunity to build small but helpful gadgets is bigger than finding the perfect SaaS idea. But it’s still not exactly easy to come up with something new. Whenever I see an ingenius product I think to myself „This was obvious, why haven’t I thought of that?“, but oh well.
A comment, the one I am responding to, that would fit much better in the "hopeful" bucket than in the "realistic" one.
I, like many others, hold a white-collar job in a technology company, not FAANG, with a salary between 300 and 400K per year, with lunch breaks, paid vacation days, good health insurance, and the opportunity to work from home at least 75% of the time.
At the end of my workday, which I have not found to be stressful in at least 3 years, I am fresh, hydrated, and ready to spend late afternoons, evenings, and nights pursuing my interests, taking care of the kids, and maybe learning French at last.
I see guys running fairly successful local businesses, both physical and digital. Assuming you have a choice between the two paths, a brief look at the physical condition and a conversation with me and the business owner would quickly lead you to prefer one of the two paths.
I might be privileged, lucky, in an unusual situation. But the same is true for the successful local entrepreneur running a plumbing business with profits equivalent to those of experienced people working in tech.
As someone who has been self-employed for over 20 years, done the startup thing (including going through YC in the very early days), I totally understand why people would not want to.
There are real downsides to owning your own business. It’s probably been 15 years since I had a day where I didn’t check my email.
Most people are Indians, not chiefs, and I think that’s actually an evolutionary adaptation that’s built into us. Someone may want to be the best programmer they can be rather than the best at managing employees, setting business strategy, dealing with taxes and other paperwork, etc.
In general, one-person shops have real downsides for both owners and customers. As an employee, I've often been in situations where I simply haven't been reachable for extended periods of time which obviously isn't great for a customer either absent a fallback. Fallbacks of various sorts are available but probably not at "the SaaS is down" level.
> your best bet is to learn how to start and run a business
Startups are so hit and miss. It's really really hard to make $500k a year at a startup. There's many years of zero, near zero or sub-intern salary. After that there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.
Classic businesses can get a substantial salary sooner than a startup, but do have a ceiling. If you're selling a well known need (plumbing, consulting, etc), there's competition and a ceiling at hours worked.
Having done both, a FAANG job is infinitely less effort than running a company. Also lower stress, lower risk, and immediate rewards/pay. I still have more fun starting companies though!
That's a really informed comment from both sides of the exact fence.
>there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.
Tech or not I think it usually doesn't dwarf anything but if it comes close, a little bit low or high, that's a huge milestone above failure.
In that case it might allow you to maintain readiness for an incredible bonanza which might be within reach only from beyond that point, and that can be what dwarfs the "big payout".
IOW depending on the situation, occasional big payouts that really just even things out may not be very life-changing even if they are big, but it can give you more rolls of the dice at things that can't be approached any other way.
You make it sound so easy. I've ran small businesses for most of my career and I've never made more than a quarter of what I currently make working as a contractor (ironically, for a business I once started, now owned by someone else). And most of the time I earned 5-10% of that.
Good to get your message, I have some of the same experience.
I do better as a consultant/contractor for a client who is a previous customer from when I had my own facility. Fundamentally I used to provide the paperwork (the deliverable/invoiceable product) and supported everything needed to generate it, including any free advice which goes along to smooth the flow. Now I'm paid to help their paperwork achieve and maintain value with none of mine in the mix at all, but I'm basically doing a lot of the same stuff when I'm on site.
As a contractor aren't you now a small business operator of a different type, perhaps much smaller?
I would estimate in more of the exact same business in so many ways very few ever come close to that.
Maybe even doing some of the same things under different degrees of ownership and responsibility, and this could be a good example of way different compensation when the only difference is the underlying arrangement.
I'm not sure how I made it sound so easy, because presumably getting a 250k job at a FAANG isn't easy either. Which is what my point was - if you're going to deal with the time and stress to get one of the most desirable jobs, why not use that same time and effort to build a business?
Except, it kinda is for people that have the right background and are well suited to it. That is, the reason I think you're getting a lot of pushback is that many folks are just inherently risk averse. There are people who are smart, know how to work hard, and know that if they have a path laid out in front of them, they can succeed.
For entrepreneurs, there is simply much more variability. You can be smart, work hard, do everything right, and still fail in unexpected ways due to things outside of your control.
I don't think entrepreneurship is bad at all, but it's not surprising at all to me that people who want to go the FAANG route aren't well suited to starting their own business.
Getting a 250k job at FAANG is P hard. There is a finite set of tasks that you have to execute to get a job at one of those.
Starting a business is NP hard. At the end of the day, you have to convince people to give you money in some form and way, and that is not a guarantee. You could land on a lucrative idea, or you could do trial and error, failing every time.
Furthermore, once you have either, maintaining a FAANG job is much easier than maintaining a business.
Because it's a lot more predictable. Put in the necessary effort and you are almost guaranteed to get a FAANG job. And the best part, it's completely clear where that effort needs to be directed. Yes, you need to have the smarts, but for a business that pays as much you need to have a lot more than that, plus luck. I'm all for entrepreneurship and personally couldn't work for one of those companies, but with FAANG salaries being this high I don't think those people are making an irrational choice at all.
You have to find a business that makes sense for you (you know it, you want to put up with it, etc). You then have to execute. All the while hoping that you don't get struck by lightning (something kills your business), while also hoping to get struct by lightning (you become wildly successful). God forbid you need job security (family, health care, etc.).
Contrast this to going into a job, where what you do is laid out for you, you just have to execute. With insurance. With job security.
Even as someone who has run a startup and still has the itch, it's a no brainer.
Different skillsets involved. You will eventually have to give up programming and focus on developer sales/marketing/recruiting skills.
Very rare to see businesses where you're sole developer and salesperson unless you are the main SME on a niche field/technology you probably developed.
Also A LOT of FAANG is immigrants who can't start a business in the US or children of immigrants whose parents put strong pressure on them having an upper middle class job.
Yes. This is a bit reductive, but literally everything is out there for the taking -- you just have to go out and get it!
Anecdotally, I've noticed that a disproportionate amount of formally-educated people I've encountered in life are more allergic to this idea than the opposite.. I don't have any solid theories as to why, exactly, but it's curious nonetheless.
Because a lot of people don't want everything resting on them. Takes a special kind of person. I know I ain't one. My dad owned his own business with a 100 employees and it was miserable growing up
What sees you discount the obvious? That is, formally educated people end up in formal education because they have a proclivity towards not wanting to have to go out and get it. They want someone else to hand it to them. Which is, after all, what the "formal" part of formal education describes.
The problem is identifying what to go out and get. Because most people will go out and get the wrong thing and end up burning themselves out of future endeavors.
> so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee
It seems like you are vastly underestimating the effort (and risk) it takes to start a successful SaaS that brings its founder $500k+ annually.
You're right about everything if you can actually start and grow that business, but you're glossing over how difficult that actually is to do, and the fact that you have to start from $0 income.
> It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur
I like coding. I don't want to run a business, and these are very separate skills. This is like asking why an IC doesn't want to become a people manager.
Nothing interesting. No matter what people say, starting a business is incredibly difficult and takes a certain amount of luck. I've done 3. Failed at all 3. Made $0. Some people aren't cut out and are better off being employees.
Because I am happier as a great employee. I have a large family and have chosen base salary over stock when it comes up for example. I make a great salary and we can afford to have a lot of fun. We took four months and traveled in an RV. I have 7 lids and they all have a sport so we do lots of Soccer, Field Hockey, Softball, Baseball, etc. That is expensive and time consuming but I am at 99% of their games.
I can't do that as well while starting and running a company.
> There's plenty of CEOs (non-founders) who are billionaires.
Being a business owner doesn't necessarily mean being the founder.
No CEO is becoming a billionaire by collecting a paycheque. They might become a billionaire by accepting the right stock offer in lieu of wages, but that makes them the business owner again.
Did you go to all of the trouble of writing that comment because you wanted us to laugh at you? All of those people are clearly in that position because they are business owners.
Granted, Catz seems to have recently sold off a large stake of her ownership. But the cash proceeds of that sale still came from being the owner at one point, not from a salary. Nobody becomes a billionaire off a regular paycheque.
Hell, even FAANG software developer compensation is really only notable because the total package includes becoming an owner of the company. The wage portion isn't that much different than any other random tech company.
Absolutely. FAANG wages are certainly competitive, but not out of line from what you can make in any old Poducksville software company. It is the becoming an owner of FAANG that sets them apart financially.
While true, I'd suggest if someone's career choices are primarily motivated by a desire to become a billionaire, they are not making rational career choices anyway and are likely to be unswayed by, you know, evidence.
There is an opportunity cost to starting a new business. Depending on market and your experience it can take several years before you get anywhere close to earning the same level of income as a mid to senior level FAANG employee. There is also the time commitment to dealing with everything outside of being an IC (taxes, healthcare, finance, marketing, disputes, legal).
To anyone exploring starting a new business I would keep the day job and suffer until you get to a point where the business is on a good clip and you can dedicate all your time to it. Otherwise spending 20 years at FAANG and enjoying your life is really not a bad way to live, in fact its a dream to 99% of the planets population.
One is basically guaranteed, as long as you learn and play the game; the other, to put it simply, is not. It takes an order of magnitude more effort and savviness to make a successful business than grind Leetcode and work at FAANG for 30 years. And even then, the FAANG employee is likely to outearn you.
How do you get the startup capital to do this? At least in the area where I have know how it would cost at least a million to get the space, hardware, raw materials, and employees to start turning out products. Then you would need money for marketing and logistics.
Depending on where you are, you can often find gov support to start your business. (Here in Canada, this support can be grants, loans or event free experts time.)
When it's gov monetary support, you usually have to bring 50% of the total amount.
Otherwise, you can contact incubators like YC.
If they approve your idea and grant you money, you can then easily apply for loans at banks because you've been vetted by a well known company.
After all that energy spent, you will understand the quote :
> Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.
> will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business.
Being an employee is still running a business. The separation you are trying to draw isn't meaningful.
That particular line of business is one of the few businesses out there with a near-guaranteed customer base, though. That's a highly attractive trait for someone operating a business. With small risk comes small reward, of course, but it is no surprise that most businesses venture in that direction.
I don't think this works out well for most people anymore. I mean that was true a few years ago when things were booming even, but now you're almost guaranteed to have a very hard time. I know someone that is over-employed and has over half a dozen jobs (yes you read that right, and it's been verified); most of them are at entrepreneur owned companies and they are all struggling right now, hanging by a thread with a skeleton crew.
I agree with you, but I also understand that some just don’t know that entrepreneurship could also yield those salaries and more. Some can’t handle the uncertainty that of entrepreneurship. Some have been entrepreneurs and after an exit do decide to work for someone else.
As for myself, I can’t wait to free myself from these chains called salaried employment. (I don’t mean to offend anyone)
They're probably 2-3x the guy running a local plumbing business doing remarkably fewer hours. And of course it's more accessible. The average guy running a plumbing business is probably 30 something, while people can hit 300k at faang a year or two out of college with like one good promotion.
I worked with a guy who went to a public university - not a top 25 public university but in the ballpark. He was hard-working, smart and "got it", but he wasn't at the level of some super-geniuses I met coming out of school. He worked with us (Fortune 100, non-FAANG, non-tech, non-big metro) as a junior SWE for a year and did not get promoted as he desired. He jumped ship for a FAANG-adjacent company after a year working for us, and his TC jumped from <$100k to over $200k. Two years later he was promoted to senior and his TC is now over $300k.
He is smart but not a genius. He kind of knows what is going on though, he "gets it". Probably even more motivated than smart, but not insanely motivated. Motivated enough to learn how to get features done at a brisk pace, take ownership of his team's work, and to study for interviews. Didn't go to a top tier CS program, didn't come out of FAANG or FAANG adjacent, and probably took a detour working for us, but three years later his TC is over $300k. He also had the luck to jump ship before the FAANG layoffs of late 2022.
That wasn't the question, the question was a 500K faang job vs. a local plumbing business making a comparable amount of money.
I think it's very easy to start a failing plumbing business. I think it far less accessible to start a plumbing business that competes with a FAANG salary.
Put another way: how many people do you know who started their own consumer-facing, bootstrapped business, of any kind and who take home $3-500,000 as CEO? My answer is, like, two and they're both lawyers who didn't start making that kind of income until their mid thirties.
Edit: It would not, at all, surprise me if even in the trades the most common path to business ownership was to take over someone else's already existing business, which would I think cut even further into this point since it would mean the most common path to entrepreneurship is optimizing employment in a small business context.
I think getting a FAANG job is difficult, but for the median 30 year old (who has around $5,000 saved up and limited or no external safety nets), starting a business as your primary source of income is a really good way to bankrupt yourself and not much else, and valorizing that path is actively harmful.
I mean, that's what I'm trying to do (the business, not the monetary milestone), but something to be mindful of is that on Indie Hackers only 12 people out of 17,000 in the community got to $10k MRR.
Granted, this is Indie Hackers, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the general idea still applies. Getting to $10k a month, let alone making $250k a year (so ~$20k/month) is really hard, probably about as hard as making $250k a year as an employee, maybe even harder.
To me it's always been a matter of personality. As an introvert, I can't picture myself doing the kinds of social interactions required to sell a business on my own.
I feel like layoffs are easier to ride through with just a limited amount of money saved.
A barely new small business will have tougher time surviving a bad economy.
> but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business.
I know a guy who ran a successful plumbing business around Northern VA.
Took home around 300k per annum. I used to bang his daughter.
He worked hard, though, and had a couple of other guys working jobs independently under him, on top of his work. He was mostly corporate and construction work, but a couple of those guys under him also did residential, and he mostly supervised.
I'm far less than his TCO but also don't have to get elbow deep in shit and work remotely from my basement. Respect the hustle, but I think I'm winning in terms of work-life balance and QOL.
> It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur
It’s not like nobody wants that, the scarce thing is having a good business idea unless you want to go into consulting.
> And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
That’s kinda stretching it. Higher FAANG-level salaries are enough to reach financial independence, which is pretty much „unlimited“ territory for most normal people. On the other hand, most businesses are not hyper successful. It‘s not like becoming a millionaire entrepreneur can be taken for granted.
It’s interesting that you don’t seem to understand this. Survivorship bias or something else?
While running a small business can be incredibly fulfilling and teach you a ton of adjacent skills that you wouldn’t learn as a SwEng at a FAANG (sales, marketing, …), I find it infinitely more stressful than regular employment.
There’s just so much more responsibility resting on your shoulders. Holidays have never felt the same since I left employment in 2011.
No regrets here, just saying this path is not for everyone and not as accessible as you might think.
I don’t see why so many people try so hard to be a professional football player when they could just as easily start a business launching rockets into space.
The one has got nothing to do with the other. Running a small business is far more sales and marketing, and if you are lucky enough to get to the point where you need to hire someone, then HR, managing suppliers and fuck me don’t get me started on fucking customers.
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.
These threads always surprise me. I'm a director of software engineering in a medium sized company (~3k employees) not located in a big metro but with plenty of people working from competitive areas (I am in the Seattle area myself). My base is a bit over $200k with a 20% bonus and some stock options. I know I'm on the higher end compared to my peers, and I know what my direct and indirect reports make. My wife works for a huge aerospace company as a senior manager and makes about the same as I do. I have a bunch of other people I know what they make, including a very senior engineer at a FAANG company who with 600k this year (everything included) is the highest compensated person I know personally. It's amazing how people throw around 500K like it's nothing. I'm either doing things very wrong/ am clueless or there's some weird bias for crazily over-compensated people in threads here.
> 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)
That used to be the case where I live, just a few years ago. Now what used to be a starter home is over $400k.
[Edited to remove snark/barbs as per HN guidelines].
I am genuinely curious though - you seem like you've had a successful career and life. I typically assume people in your position are rather familiar with the basic math behind personal taxes, 401k's, HSA's, child tax credits, standard deductions vs. large charitable deductions, etc. I think I may have been grossly mischaracterizing a potentially large group of people and would love to hear about how you've handled your taxes since entering the workforce...and what you personally would attribute your misunderstanding of taxes to.
I think that would help me better understand and empathize with people who aren't like me.
It's a common misconception because there are plenty of situations where making more money actually decreases your take-home pay. It's just not via the bracket system, it's via other incentives in the tax code (and welfare benefits in certain cases).
There are a lot of things (IETC for example, or benefits, or health insurance) which have $ cutoffs. Or tax breaks (i.e. electric vehicle credit) that only apply below a certain income. Exceeding those fixed points can certainly make you make less money.
One thing I ran into recently was fiscal incentives for homeownership (though not directly related to taxes) - there is a cutoff at a certain income level where if you stay below it you get a $10K credit towards closing costs. The tax code is full of things like that (or getting your student loans forgiven if you make less than $X for Y years).
If you want to see how bad the welfare cliffs are, there are cases where a single mother is better off making $28,000 per year (and receiving all federal benefits), than making ~$70,000 per year (and qualifying for none of them).
Image of the welfare cliff effect, example in Pennsylvania:
Unfortunately, it also could be an intentionally false statement in order to push a specific political viewpoint. For example, flat tax rates without income brackets. I don’t think it’s wrong to correct falsehoods strongly in general.
It’s an arbitrary human rule, not fundamental knowledge. Quite understandable how someone may not have the interest or knowledge to know this nuance (perhaps to their own detriment). It’s somewhere along the spectrum of the knowledge of arcane laws, for example. The federal tax code perhaps isn’t ’arcane’ by popular consensus in educated circles, but it’s on the spectrum of arbitrary human knowledge that keeps changing and evolving.
Would you be shocked if a CPA knows more about this than a theoretical physicist?
Well, there is a grain of truth to his words. Over certain income, you are no longer qualified for food stamps, medicaid and section 8, so you are better off earning less.
It's a common misconception among people who haven't done even the slightest bit of research. Or done their taxes themselves. Confidently stating stuff that is obviously false SHOULD be ridiculed.
As someone who does his taxes manually every year, this probably wouldn't help. Most people would be under the threshold and just look up the value in a table and not see how it scales.
If you use any sort of tax software I expect it's even further obscured.
I hate to agree with the ridicule point, but honestly ridicule also deters other people from making a similar mistake.
I agree ridicule should be used cautiously, but in a case like this where someone speaks so confidently and boldly gives advice on a topic they clearly do not understand, I think ridicule is a good way not only to inform them, but also indicate to others that it's not okay to give people this kind of advice unless you have a basic understanding of the topic.
I have nothing to back this up but the reason I'm sensitive to ridicule as an initial reaction is that I believe it causes people to shy away and there's potential that they surround themselves with other ridiculed people and now you have a group that is intentionally dense and now powerful. Education should always be the first step.
I grew up in rural appalachia and the amount of grief than the uneducated get there for being uneducated causes them to become even more hostile and I really think that the Mr Rogers approach of education would eventually neuter any hostility they had towards the educated.
An educative reply is easier to ignore than a (or multiple) replies in which you're ridiculed.
Moreover, being thought about how you're wrong about X might not necessarily translate in the subject being more careful before confidently expressing themselves on a Y topic on which they don't know anything about. Hopefully, ridiculing might make the subject reconsider that part of their character.
That said, the HN policies recommend to "be kind"... I have no idea how to "ridicule someone's post in a kind way" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t think I see the same pile of downvotes that you’re seeing? My comment of ridicule got +10 votes in 15 minutes before I edited it, and now is down to +9 an hour after editing the ridicule out.
I see that “Calm down. It's a common misconception” did get downvoted.
Apparently this belief is far more common than I thought. I expected it to be closer to the percentage of Americans who think the Earth is flat (10%)[0]. Evidently 50% of Americans[1] believe you pay your highest marginal rate on all of your income. I'm blown away, and genuinely humbled. I don't understand how someone can get a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac home loan, raise children, have a long and successful career and not understand tax brackets -- I clearly am incredibly out of touch with how some people live their lives, and I have a lot to learn about other people.
There is a class of rich people in the US who really like that people believe this. It allows them to spread a lot of fear about higher tax rates for high incomes.
Not to mention the influence of companies like Intuit, which has been pushing against convenience in tax filing for decades because its entire business model relies on people being unwilling or unable to file by themselves: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
It seems to be advantageous to a significant portion of the political class that people hold this misconception - this type of misconception explains much of the widespread public support for tax breaks for the ultra-rich...
It was preached to me that this was how it worked since I started working in the mid-90s. I didn't learn better until an accountant friend clarified that when I got him to do my taxes when I started making real money in the mid-00s.
I dare say that it was probably the most common understanding until fairly recently. The internet has probably helped a lot with that. That is to say, if you're of a certain generation you probably think this way because that's what was generally understood.
I guess it's a fair assumption you never once attempted to calculate your own taxes in the first decade of filing taxes? Did you just drop some papers off to an accountant the first year that you reached adulthood?
I've used an accountant occasionally, but only when I had genuinely confusing tax issues involving international work or work across many states where I wasn't sure whether there existed a "nexus" that required me to pay taxes in State A or State B. Even then I did my best to double-check their work, and often caught errors/omissions. Most of my friends also do their own taxes (and have since 2006), regardless if they were line cooks or painters or engineers or MBB consultants. So I'm just not familiar with the lifestyles that lead to this.
I'd actually understand it more for people who've entered the workforce since 2005, because TurboTax/etc became much more popular. I did taxes with my dad in the mid-90's before most homes had internet, and back then it seemed far more likely that people would understand how taxes worked, because there wasn't super-easy software to do it for you.
If you're in the lowest tax bracket making just above the poverty line, as I was then (as well as most people around me), it was what we all understood to be.
I was in that tax bracket for half my adult life (often did not have enough money to eat chicken and rice at home and just went hungry). I had to do my own taxes because I couldn’t afford an accountant and TurboTax starting taking the piss on their dark pattern pricing schemes. All of my friends at the time were also very poor, it was a giant recession and we worked in restaurants that weren’t getting customers. We got paid $2.65/hr so if we actually had a “good week” our paychecks were $0 (actually negative, honestly, but paychecks bottom out at $0) due to taxes on tips.
Now I’m even more confused. Accountants were genuinely expensive and none of my peers in my economic class could afford one.
At the risk of repeating myself: how did you file taxes for the first decade of adulthood? If you were too poor pay an accountant like I was…how did you misunderstand how to calculate taxes owed for ten years, but still arrive at the correct amount to pay? Did the IRS often return money to you saying that you over-paid? Did anyone ever try to correct your misconception?
I’m trying to understand this in more detail than just “memorize the fact that 50% of Americans were lied to by (someone?) about taxes, and also just blindly accept that there is some magic unknown to me which allowed them to not be affected by that misunderstanding through most of their adult life”.
You were in poverty when you had this misunderstanding. This other commenter bought a house while they had the same misunderstanding. (So, “being poor” isn’t the experience you both had in common while holding this misconception and can’t explain it for both of you). I’m trying to understand how that misunderstanding never affected either of you. I’m trying to understand how neither of you ever had to read about how to calculate taxes owed.
When you're in that tax bracket, there are plenty of tax break/benefit cliffs that are more impactful than tax rates. And they can certainly make your take-home pay go down if you accept a raise. See:
But that still doesn't explain the common denominator between a person living comfortably and a person in poverty both not understanding how tax brackets work or ever having to consider the most basic parts of how their own taxes are calculated, for so, so many years of their lives.
Well around 40% of households don't pay federal taxes at all, and presumably a large chunk of those who do are in the lowest tax bracket so they might not ever need to know how it actually works.
I have never heard of one. I believe that in the UK, because of caps on childcare benefits, a wage increase can actually decrease your take-home but generally marginal tax rates operate on marginal income.
They likely don’t know every country’s tax code and instead of confidently spreading misinformation like the above commenter, this commenter is being careful to only state facts they actually do know.
Your marginal dollars are taxed at the rate they fall into. So even if you get paid another $200k on top of what you already earn, that additional $200K is taxed on top of your unchanging lower tax rates.
Suppose your salary is X and the level that 32% starts is M
You get taxed on your first $X earnings at the lower rates. Then only the amount above the 32% mark ie X-M is taken at 32%. Thus everyone in the 32% band gets more money than those only in in the 24%.
That's not how tax brackets work, but it is a common misconception. If you salary goes up, your take-home goes up, full stop.
If you are making $191,950/year (the very top end of the 24% bracket for 2024) you will pay $39,110.50 in federal income tax, (before any deductions) for a net of $152,839.50. (You may notice that this is less than 24%) If you make an additional $1,000/year: $192,950, only the additional $1,000 is taxed at the 32% rate. Which makes your total federal income tax bill $320 more, and improving your net take-home to $153,519.50
Edit to add: I'm disappointed that sibling comments to mine are so degrading. We all had to learn this at some point.
There are cases where if your salary goes up, your take-home goes down, especially for lower income levels. It’s just not on the basis of tax brackets. There are means-tested benefits that you can lose if you cross certain income levels where an increase in income of $5 can cost you thousands of dollars.
I'm not disappointed. This is a classic case of someone who knows nothing about a topic making confident statements that will undoubtedly spread. People who do this should absolutely be ridiculed to discourage spreading total nonsense.
And to be clear we're not talking about some esoteric subject -- this is the most basic part of how your salary is taxed by the US government.
You don't understand how tax brackets work. You never make less money by moving up a bracket. The bracket rate only applies to income within the bracket.
The more correct statement is "you never pay more in taxes by moving up a bracket" - though even that is not correct in all cases.
There are a lot of things (IETC for example, or benefits, or health insurance) which have $ cutoffs. Or tax breaks (i.e. electric vehicle credit) that only apply below a certain income. Exceeding those fixed points can certainly make you make less money.
One thing I ran into recently was fiscal incentives for homeownership (though not directly related to taxes) - there is a cutoff at a certain income level where if you stay below it you get a $10K credit towards closing costs. The tax code is full of things like that.
Taking into account only the federal income tax brackets, this is true. But tax cliffs exist, e.g. see: https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/tax-cliff so accounting for all taxes and other factors, there could be a situation where you earn more pre-tax, but end up with less after all is accounted for. For most high-earners it's less relevant as they are past of the most cliffs anyway, but sometimes things like losing access to IRA deductions may be a factor too.
It's pretty hard to get into these IME. I'm considered a top-performer at the deep tech company I currently work at, and interviewed at a hedge fund awhile back. The process was way less intense than what I would expect a big tech co. interview to be. I made it to the top three candidates, but didn't get it. In hindsight, the role wouldn't have been a good fit, it was "higher up in the stack" than I prefer to be, which is also what they said.
I think you need to be a pretty unique individual to succeed in environments like that. Most people I know break down under intense pressure when shit hits the fan, even if they're wildly competent. I can only assume it's that much more intense when tons of money is at stake.
I'm not sure it's enough to experience something once and then assume it looks like that across the industry, it's very context-dependent.
While I've done zero attempts to work at any hedge fund, I know plenty of people who both had success when wanting to join one (even though some of them were under-qualified) and people who failed (some who were over-qualified).
Oh most certainly. But that industry has a reputation for a reason, no? I would expect every place to have different culture, interview processes, etc.
Alot of getting hired into these roles depends on your upbringing/perceived social class by the people at the fund, the school you went to, how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, etc. The technical pieces are pretty far behind.
> Alot of getting hired into these roles depends on your upbringing/perceived social class by the people at the fund, the school you went to, how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, etc. The technical pieces are pretty far behind.
I'd disagree about your perceived upbringing mattering at all.
I don't know of any fund that hires technical staff like that. I mean we're here to make money, if someone can do that, no one cares what their social upbringing is, I mean like at all.
Now the school you went to matters, though it matters about as much as it would at a FAANG company.
And as to "how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, "
I would hope that all companies hire based on how someone presents themselves and would we want to work with them. Everyone should base hiring on how the candidate acts and presents themselves, that seems like an incredibly positive step, no?
> The technical pieces are pretty far behind.
Which specific fund are you referring to here. This seems very uninformed from my experience, but i'm willing to look at your evidence that hedge funds don't really value technical ability.
These are for very under the radar hedge funds that chip their programmers 500-2 Million for just writing basic software. I'm not talking about sweat shops like citadel. I'm talking about places that hire very rarely. The fund manager makes 25-150 million. Rest of the employees are in the low millions. Their employees are always a reflection of the firm, and to their outside investors. Its about more than technical ability. Jobs are never posted online, minialist linkedin profiles, no public footprint
I've done a fair amount of technical hiring at hedge funds, my experience doesn't support this comment. There is some amount of credentialism/elitism in hedge fund hiring, but I see that more on the fundamental investment side, and much less for technical roles. There are a lot more hedge funds than FAANG companies, and different funds can have very different cultures.
I'm talking about traditional small long short funds, private equity, and under the radar very elite hedge funds. Its different for quant shops like citadel or two sigma. Those treat you like a commidity programmer that they pay a 20% premium on over FAANG
Yup. There's a lot of credentialism and in-group stuff. I work with a ton of PhD physicists currently and it's one of those things that you can never quite forget in an environment like this as someone with "only" a bachelor's degree from a no-name college.
YMMV but the one hedge fund offer I got required putting 50% of the bonus into the fund itself, which then vests out over 4 years. I was told this is industry standard, so it's analogous to the 4 year RSU vesting you'd get at FAANG.
and probably no where to hide if you want to just rest and vest.
"Rest and vest". What a luxury. Some of us are trying to tread water with an anvil chained to the waist. That's what I get for choosing to work for something I'm passionate about. What a world
if you refuse a higher paying job because you would like to work for something you're passionate about, you are explicitly valuing your passion at at least the delta between the job offers.
> That's what I get for choosing to work for something I'm passionate about.
Are you passionate about working for your current employer or passionate about your career?
I’m passionate about my career (programming/software development): I love reading the classic tech books out there (TAOCP, DDIA, etc.), I love working on side projects, sometimes I contribute to open source, etc.
On the other hand, I couldn’t care less about my employer. Not because they are bad, but I just don’t care about most of the tech companies out there. I do what I need to do to get paid, but i’m not passionate about deadlines, conversations with other engineers about subjective topics, daily standups, on call, etc.
Yeah I work in an FFRDC, pushing the frontier of our exploration of space. I'm quite passionate both about the employer and (most of the time) my work. If I didn't care about my employer at that level I woulda been out the door after two years. I think to myself sometimes about the other side of that though, like if I didn't care for them but the money was good.
My home hobbies resemble work within my area, but not my current job function, but I'm keenly aware my employer may try to take advantage of my other talents and do I guess the only thing that saves having an alternative hobby is that I'm so diversified that whatever my work task is I can work on an orthogonal hobby at home. It's kinda nice, I've got both really.
In my mind if I "sell out" (in terms of trading in for that sense of purpose in my work), and just work for the paycheck, then I would go for max. Work an HFT quant firm as a senior or principal engineer or research analyst. $$$. Or some other juicy gig. But I would hate myself if that became a slog and I had no time for my interests at home.
> And generally the money will be locked up for less time than the 4 year vesting that these companies often follow.
Err...4-year vesting doesn't mean the money is literally locked away until you hit 4 years' tenure. A $1m stock grant vesting over 4 years might pay $250-350k every year, depending on the vesting schedule and stock performance.
If a hedge fund pays $1m every 2 years then they're just paying more period. It's not the vesting schedule which causes the difference in comp.
> Err...4-year vesting doesn't mean the money is literally locked away until you hit 4 years' tenure
No one said it did:)
My point was that a typical bonus is about 2/3's employees at the moment its granted and 1/3 held back for a year sometimes two, so you get money faster than a typical 4 year vesting schedule.
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).
A lot of people who are very good at what they do have a hard time selling it. A lot of people who are good at selling it are not actually accomplishing much. So there is often a gap between perception of high performers and actual high performers.
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.
Assembly would be a good start. But to really make use of that you need to learn the internal intricacies of processor architectures and operating systems. If you want to be employable, there's just a gigantic amount of seemingly boring details to learn before you can even start to build something interesting. With high level languages you can jump into the job market almost immediately, so the cost of entry vs. potential reward is better for most people. If you don't have fun when spending years of your life banging your head while digging down incredibly complex rabbit holes, it's probably not worth it.
There's nothing too terribly special about low level wizardry, other than you really _do_ need to understand how the hardware works, and how your language works. Oddball skills you really need to know (and can easily pick up if you have a mind to) include: a) Reading processor/part data books. These are your API docs. Most of your answers are in there if you care to look. b) Reading schematics. You don't need to be able to write/design hardware, but you need to be able to figure out what each CPU pin is wired to and how you're expected to access peripherals. Again, not hard to figure out if you put your mind to it. Very handy to know: How to use a multimeter/oscilloscope/JTAG programmer/logic analyzer. There are your debuggers. You don't need them often, but when you need them, you NEED them.
This sounds like a typical embedded software engineer and I frequently see people around here complaining about the low salaries for these roles.
What am I missing?
Multiclassing is hard, but some get by as a making a divine pact and taking Eldritch Blast and Prestidigitation as cantrips. When all you have is sledgehammer, even smaller hammers are nails.
Server rez on a low level wiz build? That's way high level thoughts and prayers to the Top 500 (also a cleric build) or lim. "request" to the Blackrock genie over in Budapest. Besides, 7th? Pff, call "company of choice" to fight for you, save or die server vileness!, and of course "peon:cleanse everything? peon:what do mean everything? cleric:EVERYTHING."
Frankly you probably want a PRC, and at those admin levels much, much save or die. Probably got so many server pokes per minute you're gonna be furiously holy wording your file system all day long. Team members? Rez? Please. You solo that.
Low level wiz? "Welcome to name brand, and lack of female desirability, here's your special hat..." "Why aren't the lights on?" [1] "Help, I lit my own hands on fire!" [2] "Ah, every threat one hits me!" [3] "Man they target me bad at conferences, how'd I draw DARPA as agro..." [4] "Holy s*t there's a lot of documentation to write!" [5]
High level wiz? "Computation hates all magical ideas and their very implication!" "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal of my trust, our own company is secretly controlled by Orcus and seeks the death and slavery of all life on Earth" [6] "Join me in the bag within bag abyss together and we shall quest to Jubilex for glory and honor across the eternal battlefields of tomorrow!" [7] ITGETSOEPIC::THEYWONTLETULEAVE::ALREADYATWARP::AUTOLADDEREJECTED::HOWDIDRAWULTRONASAGRO::MIDASTOUCHISHORRIFYING::AHHHHHHH [8]
Aren't you just indirectly working at FAANG then? In most cases you end up being hired by a 'talent' agency that finds work for you at these major companies.
If I understood the top-level post correctly, no. They are very much not working for a FAANG, nor for a talent agency that works for a FAANG. They're working for a company that supplies software tools to high-frequency traders or something similar. Very, very different.
(Of course, the original question was "not FAANG or HFT", so this still may not be what they were looking for...)
I’m not going to name them because for some reason these comments have chosen not to mention them by name, but they’re not a secret company - they’ve had a lot of posts on here on HN… they do cool shit and are super smart, but I guess the biggest reason people don’t like to talk about them is they’re a secret weapon and you don’t want others to have your advantage (even though everyone knows about them lol)
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 have heard/read of these people but people I know who work at hospitals doing MUMPS get paid very little. Same for COBOL programmers. There are some mythical people who make bank but most COBOL guys make way less than the typical JS guy.
Are they the original employees who started decades ago? If so, that’s no surprise. My aunt was in the same position years ago, despite my attempts to update her on modern salaries.
Those awesome salaries tend to be paid to mercenaries and not the lifers.
And only to a very small subset of the mercenaries. Most institutions that hire COBOL or MUMPS people can't fathom paying a lowly "IT" guy that much money. They prefer to hire some cheap offshore guys.
You are right! Though I do have immense respect for those languages - not love, but respect. The way one respects a grouchy aging tiger. Not extinct, its ilk will be around forever, and I don’t want to be the one caring for it.
As a 30-something "full stack web developer" who has also spent the last 3-4 years learning about IBM i (aka AS/400) servers and the CL and RPG programming languages... I have a glimmer of hope that I might move into a gig like that in my twilight years of employment :)
I highly doubt that those gigs will exist in the future, or will become even rare than they are. The big banks and financial companies are making a decent effort to get rid of those legacy systems (but are on decade + time scales). They also are weary to even hire new people in those stacks, and are increasingly relying on contractors through places like TCS that will put people through bootcamps. I know several places that have the policy of no new cobol code, only maintenance. These people with the ludicrous salaries, I assume are consultants, or have even more niche specific and rare skills beyond just COBOL and JCL and RPG or whatever, probably with specific, ancient implementations on ancient machines.
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.
What in the world... I'm a FAANG employee - I think I'm around 18 years of experience now (I stopped counting) - with a great resume (or so I'm told), and I can't even get 100K jobs to respond to me let alone FAANG jobs. I'm talking about the initial step too; I've had zero interviews or screenings.
That sounds odd. With that much experience you should at least be getting offers in the 200k range easily. Are you cold applying or using referrals? I found these days CVs get screened by software that's very sensitive to keywords, and it's very easy to get auto-rejected.
I documented my process of getting job offers here, you can check it out in case it helps
Online applications are a black hole. I was a staff SWE at Google at the end of 2021 and my online applications ever got a response. I networked a bit and ended up with two strong offers.
Another data point from a couple months ago -- I have about 15 years of experience including FAANG, went on the job market (fully remote only; I'm not in SF) and ended up with two offers. Senior SWE at a small but public tech company everyone has heard of, and Staff at a late-stage startup on track to IPO ~next year. Both offers were about $500k (the startup a little more but paper money); I took the former one.
I've also spent large parts of my career as an independent consultant -- similar compensation most years.
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
Same. I'm 40, and I have a wife and child. I will absolutely give up those rock star salaries if it means having the time to spend with them, and not taking ulcer medication.
Really interesting how this is viewed in different countries.
How far does this go? Does this include Gacha game devs? How about people working on loot boxes in gaming (like finance/marketing people who come up with new boxes)?
Or NFTs or crypto in general?
I wouldn't even thought to think about people coming from gambling companies differently.
I live close to a city with a bunch of gambling companies and yeah, devs at those companies are definitely judged for their choices, similar to people who work for crypto / NFT companies. It has a reputational risk similar to working for porn companies (but less severe).
Capitalist societies where the alternative to employment is destitution can force people into working at huge online gambling companies due to the need for employment and their responsibility (kids, aging parents, etc)
While I agree in an ideal world, individuals should all stand up against unethical employment options, I am also mature enough to know not to penalise someone who might be otherwise meritorious based on what could be situational.
We should take a stand against predatory companies that attack the vulnerable, but this should be done at a government level, not an individual employee level, because it’s a much more efficient utilisation of resources for a large organisation with teeth to be subdued by another large organisation with teeth.
I would hire someone who used to be in gambling (if they were a good fit culturally and technically of course) because that would take a skilled developer OUT of the gambling industry, implying that you shouldn’t hire someone who used to work in gambling is a sure way to make sure that predatory industry keeps enough developers to keep shirking the poor
People can absolutely be forced into working immoral jobs by muh capitalism, but some of you are way too enthusiastic about it. Someone doing blue team work for MGM after getting laid off in 2022 is one thing, a Staff Addiction Engineer looking to try a new industry in 2019 is another completely. Secondly, I agree that we should be hiring good people out of these industries, but there are a lot of people who just aren't going to be comfortable with that.
> but there are a lot of people who just aren't going to be comfortable with that.
Actual LOL - who? I’ve worked at enormous orgs, Google, to medium sized orgs, to startups over my 20 year career, as a senior dev, engineering lead, CTO and now founder, I have hired and mentored hundreds, maybe close to 1000 engineers, hiring managers, project managers, and this has never ever been an issue, in one case we hired 20 engineers from Betsson, a huge (~400M/y) gambling company in Malta into a much larger organisation (non-gambling), and nobody from senior management, middle management or engineers ever even raised this point.
I think you are uncomfortable with it, and are projecting that starry-eyed wishful and naive thinking onto others by saying “a lot of people aren’t going to be comfortable with that”
I have 20 years experience working in 9 different countries, all with very different cultures, that says otherwise, nobody has ever mentioned it.
I've seen it on HN (phpnode said as much just in this same thread), I've heard people say it in person at meetups and cons, and I've had other interviewers discuss it after interviews. Maybe people aren't willing to discuss concerns like that with you.
I would be worried about organized crime. All sorts of sketchy things go on. The only sports event at my Uni where I wasn't able to photograph was college tennis because they have a problem with people past-posting on college tennis:
On one level I can understand the thrill of having some money riding on a game but I am baffled by the prop bets. Fixing a whole game is not so easy and rather risky, but influencing the silly little events some people bet on looks easy and hard to stop. It's particularly crazy that people bet on decisions by individuals and small groups as opposed to the outcome of a contest.
Gambling itself is sketchy but legally hired employees especially developer-level have to be somehow protected from the decisions of the business, no?
Unless you're worried about the crime itself (as in somebody might threaten you personally and send you to a hospital kind of thing) and not prosecution.
Crime, criminals. Mostly organized crime, but the occasional whack jobs who “just need an edge”. Doesn’t matter where you are in the organizational hierarchy, I’d argue the most at risk are the lowest level employees.
Then what is? I know the higher ups / owners have to deal with some straight up mafia shit or money laundering but a gambling company doesn't really look bad on a CV the way porn industry or even a government job (at least here in Poland) does.
Maybe it's a country thing but here in Poland no one would care.
Various forms of gambling are legal under supervision of authorities so legal companies exist around that.
Unlike porn it wouldn't really be an embarrassing topic on an interview.
Lots of interesting technical stuff to deal with in such a job.
I would be equally embarrassed if either of those were on my resume. I'd have similar levels of embarrassment with alcohol, firearms, cannabis or politics. You don't want your resume to suggest you are controversial in anyway. Maybe 80% of the people you run across will be cool with it, but it only takes one person in a company to veto your resume and there are usually 3+ people that look at a resume with veto power. It'll close doors for sure.
Interesting topic because I wouldn't want to work with those 20% who reject people based on n-th level relationship to anything controversial.
I get not wanting to deal with people who run these things but employees?
Those "anti-political" places typically mean a specific side (depending on your country that may anti-right in western countries and anti-left in eastern).
When I worked in the office before 2019 we had all kinds of people there. It was kind of beautiful in a way. Straight up communists discussing stuff with conservatives without any heat. Isolation breeds extremism.
It's true that it would close doors but man until the market takes that choice away from me I don't want to open those, and I say that as a guy who never worked with any of this even indirectly.
And to be fair - not having experience with those things also closes doors, just different ones.
You asked why that would be a problem, not that we agree. I like your point of view but I think in general society is less diverse than our personal experience. At least in my country, which is a mix of very liberal and very conservative (Brazil), most recruiters would discriminate against gambling and porn, not by the other tech people but from the other areas of the company. Less likely to happen in a full tech company.
There's also the issue of money. If you are turned down for a job that would have paid 20% more because of working in a controversial industry that can have a big impact on your life. I'd prefer to be able to have civil discussions about politics with coworkers, but I don't care enough to sacrifice even 1% of my salary. This entire Ask HN is about income maximizing after all. I think getting into vice or anything controversial is a bad long term move, even if it includes a sizable temporary bump in compensation.
If you don’t take a job that would pay more you are also hurting your income opportunities. Turning a job down because of some hypothetical problem at some future date isn’t rational imo.
If you genuinely believe certain industries would hurt your future job prospects, you need to quantify the risk. And I have a hard time believing the particular industry would matter at all to an employer. If you can build CRUD apps for a gambling company you can build CRUD apps for a pediatric cancer charity.
Funny I worked for a place that, before I was there, was a major vendor of search engines for the porn industry despite the owner being a conservative mutual fund manager. (e.g. I had a poster for an ETN I liked on the wall of my office and it got taken down before he visited)
I know things went bad and I had something in my contract that I'd be immediately dismissed if I was found to have pornography on my laptop or any other computer belonging to the company.
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.)
Just going to jot down some thoughts about this, as it's something I'm very familiar with.
GS-15s aren't particularly common (fedscope data says 3.1% of federal employees are GS-15) and overwhelmingly they are supervisory positions (or more commonly supervisor-of-supervisors). Even if you do find a non-supervisor GS-15, the federal government mostly contracts development, so it's exceptionally rare to find a federal engineering position that does something other than contract oversight (generically called acquisition). I'm not saying those positions don't exist, they are just rare, and typically reserved for promotions from within the agency or federal government. Also, since GS-15 is so senior in the federal government, even if the position is technical it will start to be political.
Pay is pretty low for new grads and experienced engineers, but decent when you're in the ~3-8 year range of experience. Most agencies are hiring new grads at GS-7 or GS-9 (in SF that's $61k to $75k to start) which is a joke. So even if you can get on at a federal agency as a GS-14 or GS-15 level, you'll have an exceptionally hard time hiring new engineers. Pay at the high end, especially in HCOL areas, very quickly hits the congressional limit and makes it pointless to seek promotion (Look at the SF are GS-14 table: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... ). You can theorhetically bonus up to 20-25%, and I've heard that some intelligence agencies just do that across the board, but most agencies are probably giving a 2-3% bonuses each year.
This is a sad and interesting factoid: Long ago congress passed a law saying they need to track federal vs private sector pay and adjust the pay to federal employees to match that. Of course, there is an exception that allows the president to disband this requirement in case of national emergency. So now every year the president literally writes a letter declaring a national emergency and manually decides what the pay increase will be, which is always significantly lower than what is recommended. Here are the national emergency letters from 2023 and 2022, but they have been issued by every president for decades now:
Benefits are good, but not amazing. Yes, there is a pension and a wide variety of health insurance options, but they're mediocre compared to what a lot of high-paying tech jobs offer. TSP is basically vanguard with lower fees and a 4% match. You can look at the healthcare options here: https://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/plan-inf...
The 40-hour work week it completely true. If you're trying to work overtime, you'll actively be discouraged and told to stop it and go home. There is generally support for telework, but it's very political, and who knows if it will get killed in the future.
Lots of agencies, especially the agencies that need a lot of technical work, will require you get a security clearance and that comes with it's own considerations. Drug use and foreign contacts are a big problem and makes recruiting even more difficult.
It's possible to find a job at some agencies working on stuff that feels very rewarding and very important, but you will always constantly feel like the bureaucracy is constantly fighting you.
"Most agencies are hiring new grads at GS-7 or GS-9 (in SF that's $61k to $75k to start) which is a joke."
This has not been my experience, my agency hires new PhDs at the GS-13 level and BS/MS graduates at the GS-12 level. But YMMV.
"It's possible to find a job at some agencies working on stuff that feels very rewarding and very important, but you will always constantly feel like the bureaucracy is constantly fighting you."
Concur.
Of course, government jobs are very stable, which can be an advantage or not depending on what you want out of life. We find that most of the engineers we are able to recruit have been to industry or academia and found the instability and poor life balance to be incompatible with having a family. So my "new" recruits tend to be a little older, married, with a child or two. On the other hand, many of my actual younger hires eventually get headhunted and leave for industry to make 2x more than I can pay them. Then they find out that on an hourly basis they're making roughly the same amount, because their new jobs expect 20-40 hours of unpaid overtime.
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.
This is incorrect information. Check out levels.fyi. The average stock grant for Meta E6 is well over $1M/4years. Just one example. Plenty of data on other companies offers there.
Companies give the option to either go Management Track (Manager, Director VP) or Technical Track (Principal/E6, Fellow, Distinguished Engineer)
In public companies, most Engineers will peak at the L5/L64/SDE3/E5 level by their 30s.
> Plenty of data on other companies offers there
Plenty of companies offer that kind of compensation, but the competition is intense as the number of roles paying that much are limited, and WLB is atrocious as it's basically a Architect/Team Lead role.
If anyone thinks they deserve a L6/L7 role with less than a decade of experience at peer companies they need to adjust their expectations or remain unemployed
> If anyone thinks they deserve a L6/L7 role with less than a decade of experience at peer companies they need to adjust their expectations or remain unemployed
I think a lot of HN commenters simply assume that every role at these companies is L6/L7+ and pays $1M/yr or whatever the meme is currently. Like it's the default for "Software Engineer" at these companies. In reality, these roles are exceedingly rare. You won't even often see them publicly posted, simply because there are just not many of them.
People see one example of this kind of compensation and declare, "See, it is possible to make this money at a FAANG." which is true, but in the same sense that it is technically possible to get struck by lightning. Your median FAANG employee is probably L4 and not making $1M/yr in compensation. They're probably not even making $150K, depending on their location.
> Your median FAANG employee is probably L4 and not making $1M/yr in compensation. They're probably not even making $150K, depending on their location
While OP overestimates salaries, you are doing the opposite and underestimating salaries for most mid-career SWEs working a Software companies in the US.
Most L4/5 equivalent engineers across the US will end up earning around $150-250k Base, 10-20% Bonus, and around $50-150k/yr in stocks assuming they are working for a Software Company as a SWE (eg. Salesforce in Indianapolis or VMWare/Broadcom in RTP or Denver - let alone the Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, and NYC scene).
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.
> "..where software is critical to them continuing to make that money.."
Having worked in the finance world, where the wheels are made out of software at this point, I never got the feeling that the old guard that still ran the place fully understood how crucial software was to their business, and how much it saved in labour costs.
The software department was generally seen as a cost center, with the salaries and outsourcing of projects reflecting that.
So I agree with the sentiment, just saying it doesn't always hold up.
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..
The "not just salary" bit is very often used as a mirage intended to fool employees to take a lower compensation than what they can get, and then tag a bunch of conditions that can't possibly or realistically be met.
There is certainly a balance to be struck. Being in a meat grinder that pays well is not super fun, and a lot of people would gladly take 70-80% of that in exchange for work/life balance and strong PTO.
TBH that's one of the reasons I chose the company I'm at now. I had other options, but having a team that I love and very healthy PTO won me over. To each their own!
> For people with family, I believe a good insurance plan and flexibility in hours also mean a lot.
Healthcare is one of those things that's a perk in the US, but is not such a big deal in most western countries. Hopefully the US will be able to benefit from that someday.
Healthcare isn't much of a differentiator in the kinds of jobs being discussed here. Pretty much all of them will have good healthcare plans that are as close to free for the employee as the IRS and insurers will allow.
You still have to interact with the insanity of the American healthcare system, but you're not being financially ruined by it.
When I was a consultant, I could not find a health insurance plan that was even vaguely the equal of my current job's health insurance. Not too expensive, but simply not offered.
That's not to say that job insurance is automatically good -- the job I had before being a consultant had worse health insurance that was a little worse than the plans I had as a consultant.
My plan next time I'm doing any kind of c2c type work will be to setup with trinet or another similar company to handle payroll benefits, even if it is just me.
Good luck with that... I don't know what your definition of "good" is, but in looking around when my cobra policy ran out, there were definitely limited options, none of which came close to what most of the worker policies offered, and none covered my retina doctor. The eye injections I get would be more out of pocket than my net income right now... and after 7 months out of work, I was seriously considering jobs paying roughly half of where I'd been the past few years just to maintain a good insurance plan.
I had about 12 months of buffer, but several unplanned home and auto repairs ate into that.
Members of my family have serious health problems, and the company’s PPO plans cover medical treatments with world-class providers. It would probably be prohibitively expensive for us to purchase such a plan on the open market.
Instead of being indentured by spending company scrip at the company store you're staying because of health insurance that would otherwise be unaffordable to you.
When I was younger, the salary definitely would have been the top deciding factor. These days I'd willingly give up $50K for an extra 4 weeks of PTO. And none of that "unlimited PTO" bullshit either.
I am part of the group that misses unlimited PTO. I was averaging 8-9 weeks of time off under the unlimited model while I am capped at 5 weeks at a company with actual PTO.
The only difference is that I get paid out any remaining PTO, should I leave, whereas with unlimited, there was no expectation that it will be paid out on departure.
I also came from a place with unlimited and I loved it. Makes me wonder if the people that regurgitate the notion that it's a trap actually have worked in places with unlimited.
Agreed. I was skeptical at first, but I've worked at several companies with unlimited PTO and they all specifically encouraged people to take time off. One place was explicit that the reason they switched to unlimited was to get people to take vacations: "PTO is not meant to be a bonus when you leave the company. We want you to rest and recharge."
My current company recently made a rule that you have to apply for time off through the HR software. Not make it harder to take PTO—all requests are auto-approved-just so HR can track it. At the next all-hands the CEO said something like "You guys work really hard... we're, uh, worried." My manager has been bugging me to take a proper vacation instead of my usual day off here and there.
There are certainly awful, exploitative workplaces out there. But there are also great companies run by good people.
There are three situations from what I've seen, one is toxic workplaces where PTO is closely tracked and people who use it are punished (socially or otherwise). That happens more often in unlimited PTO places, but absolutely happens in places with traditional PTO plans too. Second you have the more common situation where without a use-it-or-lose-it resource people end up taking less PTO than they would normally, this happens naturally A LOT. Third are people who have never worked somewhere with unlimited PTO who are justifying to themselves and others why it's bad :)
I've only heard bad things about unlimited PTO, but I've only experienced good things. I've worked at two places with unlimited PTO, and at both, I typically took ~5 weeks and nobody had an issue.
At one place I worked at, they only gave 3 weeks, but with the option to "buy" a 4th week with a slight salary reduction that effectively made that 4th week unpaid, but with the loss of pay spread out over the year. It was nice, though I actually wish I could have taken more, especially since the company did a shutdown between Christmas and New Years and forced you to burn a week of PTO at that time, which meant that you really only got 2 or 3 weeks throughout the year to do what you wanted.
Depends on the work culture certainly. Unlimited is, if course, not really unlimited. But whether (for a good performer) it's culturally 2 weeks or 6 weeks matters a lot. Even in an old-fashioned regular PTO company, I had people--though not my managers--incredulous that I would take 4 weeks of out-of-contact time.
More recently, someone I know who worked at a well-known unlimited PTO company told me that a newly hired head of corporate communications quit in short order because the CEO would actually go radio silence on vacation and they couldn't deal with that.
I've heard from friends who worked at an "unlimited" place who said there was a soft threshold at 4 weeks. If you took more than that your boss would very quickly give you a call to discuss it.
FWIW, no I have not worked in a place with unlimited PTO. Heard a lot of negatives though and that's what scares me off it. The peer pressure to not take PTO would make it difficult for me to actually relax. Everyone is different though and I'm sure there are places where it works. But it's hard to determine that during the interview process. So I'd rather have the guarantee of x number of weeks of PTO where x>5.
It is fairly common, it has been my experience and that of others I talked to, that unlimited in many companies means that you can take 3/4 weeks per year of time off, but you need the authorization of your manager or HR for any additional day. Which is not unlimited, but that's the word these companies use.
I believe it's not intended to be a trap; it's not to encourage taking more or less than a typical amount. Rather, it's done to avoid paying out on termination in places that require doing so as mentioned earlier.
Yeah, when you're young, salary being top factor makes sense. You want to build up a savings, put a down payment on a house, buy a nice car.
10 years later, the car is paid off, you've got a sizable savings, and your increased salary over the years means your mortgage payment represents a much smaller portion of your salary, and you're already capping out the 401(k) contribution limit. At that point, you're ready to start relaxing a bit. You'd rather have the PTO. Alternatively, your savings account is now a decent safety net and you're ready to take a job that has a lower salary in favor of more stock, or even play the startup lottery.
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.
> the kind of job where you need security clearance and a full background check
That's like saying "a tech job". Most jobs that require those things pay poorly. Big defense contractors like Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, etc. pay worse than most tech companies. I have over a dozen friends in defense (I used to work for a defense contractor) and none earn comparably to big tech. It's not a matter of clearance, to be clear - most of those dozen have TS/SCI and had to go through a full polygraph.
Unless you meant working directly for the government, not a contractor. That would put you on the GS payscale, which does not have carveouts for SWEs, meaning it won't pay as well as any private developer role.
Yes I’ve read this is a huge problem for these agencies. They invest in training people, getting them clearances, etc and then the people leave for the private sector because they make 5x as an ex-NSA cybersecurity expert etc.
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?
More money now means less/no work later, whether its something more flexible or just earlier retirement.
With the way compounding works, highly paid years when you're young and can invest much of it sets you up for financial independence and much less money stress for the rest of your entire life, no matter what you want to do. I don't worry about getting fired or laid off or the stress of finding the next job because there is no financial stress about it.
Plus in my career so far, the best paying jobs have also been the best culture and WLB. People incorrectly think these big tech jobs are a constant long hours grind. IME, the absolute worst working hours and culture have been in startups and small businesses, with lower comp and equity lottery tickets with an EV of 0.
I'm not a maximize comp at all costs robot, but it's a big big factor. I'm selling my time and labor and I want to get a good value for it while I can. There's no guarantees these 300k+ years will continue. Get it while the gettin's good.
if one lives in a HCOL area and does not have family to pay for their living situation, the choice can be move to another state or get a FAANG salary.
Getting rent raises that are 1000% higher than annual salary raises, childcare costing like renting another apartment each month, per child, has become the norm
Spend enough time in a major US metropolin and you figure its about 50/50 people with very high income, and people who's family is funding their lifestyle
For me, it’s knowing that with a little hard work and a bit more luck in the stock market, I can FIRE after 5 years and actually enjoy my life while I’m still young…
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 think most would agree $250k is a comfortable lifestyle, but if your neighbor is making $1M/year in the same profession just because he works at a different company, a bit of bitterness and or desire for more is hard to combat. Your neighbor can retire at 45 with $10M+, why should you be content with the low end of upper middle class and working until 60 for a more average retirement?
I don't disagree, just to your point about early retirement, be aware of what you really want vs just chasing comp. If it's comp, then it also begs the question of why not FAANG then.
This is exactly it. Chasing high salaries for many of us isn't about buying more expensive things. It's about obtaining freedom in your life as early as possible. Add in a family, and the only way to do it in your mid 40s when your body is still capable of doing anything, is to make numbers like what you mentioned.
A common retort is "stop working for FAANGs, then maybe you won't be in such a rush to get out". I completely disagree. I don't care who I'm working for, even if it's myself, it's the fact that my time is controlled by some outside force that I'm trying to escape.
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.
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.
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'm under the impression that Google/Microsoft etc get paid far less in the UK than in the US though, would you say that's correct? I've been working in the UK since the late 90s. Started in banking and banking contracts are still probably the primary source of big cash in the UK as there aren't many startup and much less FANG. I moved away from banking pretty quickly as I didn't really want to stay in London much longer and found the work fairly boring. Maybe I just don't like money :-( .
Yeah the employers side of hiring someone in UK/Ireland is far more expensive than in the US, plus we have incredibly strong workers rights and mandatory 23 day paid leave + 11 other bank holidays/national holidays a year. Not to mention redundancy pay. Downsizing ain't a knee-jerk thing here, it's a costly process.
In France its basically like they don't want a tech sector. Employee's rights are skewed so far to the left that Employers are often hamstrung and startup-culture is completely stagnant. Even running a Cafe you can end up paying an employee for a year or two who literally can't or won't show up for work.
In short though, Ireland/UK/Belgium are the highest paying areas for tech in Europe outside of a few select Financial/Banking enclaves in Geneva and Zurich, with the majority of non-FAANG Seniors capping out at €120k or thereabouts without going into the niche areas like SRE or Algo or Cloud Architect.
IME it feels like companies/managers haven't realised the power this gives them. Some are still using formal probation periods - remember, a probation can't remove legal rights, only delay additional rights - and undergoing normal redundancies rather than cheaply cutting the newer employees.
For sure, less than 104 week's service means no entitlement to statutory redundancy payments. However, the redundancy process affords other protections.
The major one is an unfair dismissal claim against the company on the basis that the redundancy is not a genuine one - you can't just re-hire for the same or an equivalent but differently named position.
The other ones relate to fair procedures and fair selection. The Twitter Exec in Ireland who got an injunction is a good one;
Or the Wix developer who was paid out €35,000 compensation when she was fired after she labelled Israel a “terrorist state” on social media, because the manner in which Wix had dismissed her had been “procedurally unfair.”
Apart from the fact that the only truth comes from the W2 tax document or equivalent, FAANGs jobs are, in general and in the grand scheme of things, fairly accessible, while some very high-paying jobs people are talking about here are the equivalent of "I saw someone making 5 million USD per year playing soccer".
> 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.
For example, I've never been a big risk taker, but I've made peace with it. Instead, I picked the top (or I thought so) late-stage startups in a category that I like, and I picked the startups that built the products that I used daily. Also, I focus on the startups that have potential scales to build my technical and product chops, as I'm interested in build general abstractions and systems, and am not patient or excited to deal with nitty-gritty details of a customer-facing product. I didn't become filthy rich of course, but my life has been exceedingly comfortable so far with me almost always focusing on building the things I like.
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.
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.
A lot of european companies are like this (in the wealthier countries at least). Even offices of multinationals tend to be like this. Work/Life balance is taken very seriously.
> how can you recognize companies such as your friend's
The signs I've picked up so far:
- Privately owned by the founders (engineers)
- A sense of carefulness when hiring
- Few employees quit the company at all
- Either entirely engineer-run or a few soft-skilled workers with high EQ and social status
When the founders are a family, things get a little weird, because the family weirdo gets tolerated.
- The people you speak with have been at the company for a long time
- The fairness and quality of the interview process (especially w.r.t. the tech screen)
If multiple people you speak with have been with the company for more than 10 years, it's a great sign. And if the interview is really high quality and fair (such that it is an accurate representation of your skills), it's a really great sign for company quality in the intangibles.
The company I just joined is like this, and I can totally understand why people don't leave to try to continue up the total comp pyramid elsewhere.
I’m Danish so this might not apply to an American context, or even a non-Danish context. I’ve been on the hiring side of things a few times, and I’ve worked in a lot of different organisations, and what I personally look for these days is companies which let you interview them as much as they interview you. This shows that they are looking for someone to be the right fit and that they know this process goes two ways.
I had an offer recently where it was online, it had gone through one of those ridiculous LinkedIn recruiters and it had been completely “missold” (not sure what the English word for misleading a “sale” is) to me. I figured this out after about 5 minutes of me asking them questions about their place and the work they wanted me to do, at which point I flat out said something along the lines of “I think I’m the wrong fit” to which they agreed, but they wanted to offer me another type of job in architecture and management. I didn’t want that, but the process of them being very open to me interviewing them helped us both out immensely in not picking each other.
It’s obviously only something you can really engage in if you don’t “need-need” a job.
This would be pretty normal in Europe, my dad went through the same and his job was never a concern. And treatment was fully covered by the public health system. Salaries reflect that of course, can't have it all.
30% less a year for 3 years is about %100 of two years. You get the bonus of getting the money upfront and you would probably get 3 month sick leave at 100% place.
> [heartwarming story of how money isn't everything and when life hits you hard and death is staring you in the face, you realize it's about the personal connections and love in your life that matters most]
> "yeah, but person could have made a more money-optimal deal elsewhere."
I mean, this entire post is about how to maximize money so I shouldn't be surprised, but this response just made me shake my head in sadness. Hope you're able to find joy and feel you have enough with your choices.
I got sick a few years ago and they were great for 6 months but the constant checking in and anxiety around adds up. Then they went out of business 6 months later.
I would rather have the money upfront. And it shouldn't bring you sadness, it's a reality that sadly many of us had to face.
The problem with those is that they have to raise at very high valuations because their capital costs are huge.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pretty good because they offer huge comp packages, but many of the others are mediocre because there's limited upside to their stock (rather than raising at a $50m valuation, they might raise at a $1B valuation. A $4B exit is much more life changing when you own 20x as much of the company. And they're very risky.)
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,.
Which foreign companies are paying FAANG rates? Outside of Chinese ones I can't see that happening much.
Why pay easily 50-200% more for US talent when they can often get solid talent in Japan / Europe / China / etc. Outside of a small business and localization team, why bother?
Really? Why? If anything I'd expect the opposite, non-American companies to eschew hiring engineers from the US because they'd cost more than equivalents in lower cost countries where those companies presumably are / can access more easily.
Anecdotally I've heard that the larger chinese tech companies love exFAANG, because 'American engineers are better'. Maybe the Silicon Valley Mythos is another export?
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.
It's all about as trustworthy as the mythical high salaries for retired mainframe developers. I've never seen a single job posting nor any other proof that this is indeed true, in fact I've saw evidence to the contrary.
Most of these jobs would never get posted in the first place, you need to already be a known entity with these groups/be trusted before they let you close to the mainframe. Have a friend in one of these roles currently, ~10hrs/wk, remote, 6 figures.
People in these roles don't want to draw attention on their sweet comp packages which is why you won't see them crow about who/where they work.
Those do exist, but as far as I'm aware the most common structure currently is that it's mainframe consulting companies and their consultants that command those salaries. Anyone in an actual employee position I've never heard of making above 100k/year.
I have a friend who went from being the form to the latter and immediately doubled his salary, despite the consulting firm making it clear that he was at the bottom of the totem pole, despite his being 5 years or so into mainframe work.
I work in a network (like in computer networking, not setting up events) company where I get paid 75% of the FAANG salary for an equivalent role, working one-third of the hours expected from the median FAANG worker. My company has been freezing hiring for the past 3 years. There is no risk of competition.
But why should I risk being identified by mentioning the company's name for no gain other than the fleeting thought of appreciation from a random anonymous HN user?
I come to the conclusion that this is a terrible place to discuss anything money and job related because it’s either people who live in some bubble that has nothing to do with the rest of the world or people who, like you said, are in “trust me bro” mode.
It pays dramatically lower than actual FAANG-type companies and has a lower hiring bar to compensate. Senior positions are around half the TC you'd get at Meta.
They're not in the FAANG but you'd better believe they still pay well.
levels.fyi has most of these rough TCO numbers, for big orgs. SF firms pay the most but you're also paying $5900/month for an apartment with a reasonable commute in the Bay Area, and greater Seattle ain't that crazy yet.
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.
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.
Actually yes, but you won’t find engineers compensated that way. Usually it’s the CEO. They will take a symbolic base salary (often they will say $1 but HR forces it to be minimum wage behind the scenes) and get paid with stock.
The trick is that it’s not RSUs, so not regular income. Instead it’s some form of option (I am not a tax attorney so I hesitate to state the type of option, there’s a variety of them that are used with different limitations). I believe they exercise 83(b) style to avoid AMT as well.
As usual, you need to already have a lot of money to make this work. Tax avoidance is amazingly accessible once you have enough money. One trick I could do, but don’t — my bank gives me a line of credit based on assets they manage for me. I could quit my job and easily live for years just using the LoC and report zero income other than passive income from rebalancing trades (which are very minimal).
I don’t see how it would be any different for US taxes. When publicly traded stock vests you are taxed on value of the stock at that time as income. So, it is treated the same as if you received it as cash compensation for tax purposes.
I think FAANG-like big IC offers right now are flying around for technical people familiar with the current hot "AI" methods. A lot of hype, a lot of situational ethics around copyright, and some investment scams, but some of the tech is ready for legitimate things people want to do, at acceptable quality levels for the application.
Also, one thing that happened early in the dotcom gold rush is that a ton of people swarmed in, all suddenly acting like experts and professionals, with little/no prior experience. Meanwhile, Internet people who were also prolific programmers were, like, who are all these people, and why do many of them have fashionable eyeglasses like nerds would never try to pull off. I don't know how much we'll see something like that this time.
agree 100% with this nice comment from a fellow dot-com crash observer.
Many HackerNews readers are young'uns who are seduced by FANG salaries, and the latest AI/ML bandwagon. They dont have the perspective one gets having seeing the highs and the lows.
I can bet there will be another rude awakening around the corner which will wipe out the "pretenders". After the dot-com bust, many pretenders left the silicon valley with anecdotes of leased BMWs abandoned at SFO airport.
After the AI/ML hype deflates, there is likely to be a similar separation. Folks in it for real will be separated from the folks who came in for the riches.
And for the history-buffs this rhymes with the CA gold-rush circa late 1800s - some found it, most didnt, levis profited selling denims to them.
>-- 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 ;)
RSUs are income and the expected value must be factored in when discussing the total compensation offered. Those are not the options that LLM-wrapper companies sling around like candy at Halloween.
yes, that is true. My target comp is around $370k. My actual comp this year will be ~470k due to stock increase of my initial grant.
Eventually it will normalize closer to the lower end as my large initial grant is replaced by refreshers, unless the stock continues to go up dramatically, which is unlikely.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted - this is literally what two of the people I know do. They actually make more than what I make at a FAANG. The real kicker? One of their jobs is a contractual position and so they opened up a business for it and hiring family members as employees to save on taxes. So the take home pay is actually higher than me.
Doing so however carries a lot of risk and one needs to have a certain mentality to be able to actually do it (I certainly don't have that).
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.
Interviewed and was given a "huge" offer from them. 50-70% of the comp is non-liquid equity at the valuation of their choosing (ok, technically a 'third party' decides this, but I call partial shenanigans and it fluctuates wildly anyway such that a ton of their employees hired a few years ago at a ridiculous valuation are getting shafted - check blind)
I look forward to watching the chips fall. I accepted an offer elsewhere for less money on paper and more in my bank account and I think I made a great decision. Not to mention the Stubhub culture, which upon interviewing them, I felt was toxic.
This really means very little though. Every private startup will tell you they’re 2 years out from IPO if you interview. And it’s common for employee equity to get massively diluted on the path to acquisition/IPO.
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.
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.
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.
Levels.fyi is to be trusted. 100% accurate for Google SWE ladder at least.
Can be an apples-to-oranges comparison for some other companies with large stock appreciation (e.g. Meta), where a lot of the comp number are vested TC rather than granted TC.
The numbers accurately reflect longer term employees W2s, but not the offer you’d get if you joined today.
It's odd because top level salaries are a tool to hire the best. If someone is paying a good salary, it makes good sense to broadcast them. Otherwise, what's the point? Who's going to go after invisible carrots? All you can do is spread rumors or expect that people act on delayed rumors.
There's the argument that salaries are opaque so someone within wouldn't feel bad about getting a lower salary, but this is only really the case is someone is paying a L6 differently in US vs UAE vs India or something. But they know what market they're in.
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.
The unspoken assumption about salaries are that we picture earning that amount for the rest of our careers. $500k at one job feels much more secure and mortgage-able than $500k dependent on maintaining an illusion and level of work that will lead to burnout.
To each their own. Comparing startup options to mature company RSUs is apples to oranges, and a retelling of the basic trade off between risk and reward. Upside, downside, taxes et. al. combine to inform individual decisions. Both paths have merit. Suggesting startup options are somehow inferior to RSU is simply disingenuous — I would have done much more poorly with RSU than options.
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.
> instead of learning how to start and run a business
Because the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5.
Especially if you start hiring other people, your liability then increases 10 fold as now anything can happen with them (sick leave, absenteism, low performance, sabotage, etc) but you're still bound to the same deadlines you agreed with your customers or you'll get sued for damages by them.
As an employee you have some basic rights and protections from the state on the limits your employer can squeeze from you, more or less, depending on where you live. As a contractor or company however, you don't, and can be fully liable in court for your failures to deliver regardless of your personal circumstances. Unless you know what you're getting into and have the know-how, experience, or mentorship, it's not worth it in most cases.
I get that, but if you’re trying to get a job at one of the best paying companies in the world, is the stress level actually that different?
And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.
Im doing both and yes its very different. The stress at the big companies is nothing.
Sure, I get that. But are the people trying to maximize income as an employee really looking for the low stress route in the first place?
I suppose I should have qualified my comment by saying it's if your primary aim is to maximize income.
Stress level has very unclear correlation with compensation. My very personal experience was that higher the compensation, less stressful the job was.
At my compensation my only stress is what happens if I get laid off and can't find new work in this market.
My primary goal is to maximize my income with the least amount of stress possible, and FAANG hits that spot just right.
I guess you can say I could maximize further by switching to finance or starting my own business, but the amount of extra stress is just not worth it at the moment, personally.
I've done both. Working FAANG is way easier than running your own business. Orders of magnitude less stress. That's why some people can "rest and vest" at FAANG.
It is not about stress. You are asking to pick between a) do same job at a different company for 2-3x income, or b) learn to do something different for a chance of smaller/same/or bigger income than in the previous case. First option requires passing somewhat stressful interviews and then it is all familiar territory. Second option has more unknowns.
> First option requires passing somewhat stressful interviews and then it is all familiar territory. Second option has more unknowns.
The most you'll ever make at a job is based on one conversation you had months or even years ago. Your income will only ever increase at steps every 6 - 12 months and, in the best case, linearly and in the worst case never increasing beyond inflation.
With a business, yes your income may be stagnant or slower, but your income isn't capped, can change rapidly, and can change on a dime rather than waiting on the next review cycle or whatever.
If you have the stomach for it, a business will long-term always give better returns for your work than a job.
> is the stress level actually that different?
Your liability is. Worst case scenario is you don't get hired, or you get hired, and then get fired. That the worst that can happen. FAANG isn't gonna come after you for damages if you accidentally brick something in production or are just lazy and incompetent. As a business, your customers might.
Let's watch how the Crowdstrike scenario unfolds in the coming months, when they'll probably get lawsuits up the ass for the damages they caused. Get your popcorn ready.
>And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.
Sure, but not everyone can get there, the same how not everyone can become a successful football player despite so many successful examples. There's too many variables. Usually, the right connections are your most valuable asset as one man company, and not everyone has them.
CrowdStrike is a publicly traded company; no one is coming after the founders or the CEO for money they have cashed out via stock sales, prior to the event. So it's not a great example.
A better example is simply having your business evaporate overnight while you have a building/offices to pay for, employees to pay, etc. Which happened to someone I know back in the early days of Windows NT: his servers and desktops that he built, worked under NT but then a service pack for NT 3.51 broke everything; overnight his contract with a large local hospital went away; that a few months later the next service pack fixed the issues, meant nothing to his former customers. He went from making the equivalent of $250K today to approximately zero.
Crowdstrike is essentially on the level of a FAANG, so I don't think this is remotely comparable to the type of business I mentioned.
The likelihood of a one-person SAAS getting sued into oblivion is pretty low, especially if you aren't providing something as fundamental as security services to banks and airlines.
If you are a tiny business, you just need an indemnity clause. If you have employees, you pay for E&O insurance.
Im not saying any of this is obvious, but if you are applying to work at a FAANG, I will assume you are both smart enough and ambitious enough to do a bit of research.
"Just" an indemnity clause.
First, you don't really know whether that'll hold up in court until it happens.
Second, by the time you're done with the court case, you'll have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy. Not only is that stressful by itself, it's also a big distraction from running the business, and every day you are busy with the court case you'll wish you were spending time working your business. The smaller you are, the more impactful distractions are.
This ignores the fact that nothing is stopping someone from suing you personally today, small business owner or not.
There are two types of people who sue:
- rational actors who have acted in good faith, exhausted all avenues of recourse, and feel like the courts are their only hope for some sort of resolution.
- irrational actors who sue for weird personal reasons, can’t be reasoned with, refuse all attempts to come to a reasonable settlement, etc.
You definitely want the first type of person as a customer.
Again, nothing is stopping anyone from suing you personally right now.
Not everyone lives in a litigious society like the US. Here in Europe if you try to sue an employee for work related stuff you'll be dismissed pretty quickly on the grounds that you need to be suing the company instead.
It's totally understandable if you don't want to sell/market your business or you just don't want the unpredictability which is probably greater than with a larger company. But, oh no, I might be sued should almost certainly not be a major consideration relative to other factors.
> FAANG isn't gonna come after you for damages if you accidentally brick something in production or are just lazy and incompetent. As a business, your customers might.
So? Worst case, the business folds and you start it again.
This is like being worried about being fired, and people telling horror stories about so-and-so who got fired. They’re fine. You’ll be fine.
The whole point of an LLC is to prevent people from going after the corporation’s owner. They have to go after the corporation itself. It’s in the name: limited liability corporation. And sure, if you end up harming someone physically then they might have a case against you, but most of us don’t run into that problem.
> So? Worst case, the business folds and you start it again.
Must be great having infinite ideas and capital.
Nobody but scammers is this chill about their company going bankrupt.
Remind me the % of startups that fail pls
There are not so plenty examples of one person businesses making that one person rich.
> the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5.
Precisely.
Add to that that as a regular 9-5 worker you have one role.
As a solo business owner you have several roles (engineer, marketer, customer service, designer, etc...).
> Because the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5.
Believe it or not you get over this. It’s kind of like the fear of going up on stage to give a presentation. Some people get an addictive rush, these are usually serial entrepreneurs who just love to be in charge because they have no problems with risk/stress tolerance (mostly). You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera. Hiring/firing is hard for people but you have no choice and certainly you’re not beholden to give people jobs. People are there to work, do their best at the moment, your job is to ensure them they’re looked after adequately and your door is always open to them if they have to talk to you.
Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig. Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well. The CEO will shit test you in almost everything you do and say and this is the grilling you will need, because they expect you to be capable of running things in their stead.
> You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with
Some people, but not many people...
> Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig
Why?
> Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company
Why?
Why take time out of your day to tiger parent strangers on HN when you can just have your own children and damage them instead?
I am not the GP of course, but I kinda enjoyed being tiger-parented here, it's at least entertaining and might even be good for my career.
I agree with your first 3 sentences. But let's try to keep the guidelines in mind:
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You are right. I'd edit if I could.
>just have your own children and damage them instead
> these are usually serial entrepreneurs who just love to be in charge because they have no problems with risk/stress tolerance (mostly).
More accurately, they have made enough money from a successful venture that they can afford to fail and their risk/stress is lowered. I know serial entrepreneurs who failed several times in a row. Without some form of safety net along the way (an exit, taking money off the table in a later round, simply nice cashflows they were able to bank for a few years), they all seem to burn out.
I don’t see much evidence of actual experience in this comment. Maybe you have a lot of experience and aren’t very good at conveying it but honestly, it sounds like you have thoroughly drank the startup koolaid.
> Believe it or not you get over this.
This screams either a lack of experience or a lack of meaningful social relationships. Many people never get over this - it is incredibly risky and stressful being a solo founder.
> You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera.
Again, not true. Some people can do this and others can’t. Fundamentally, it depends on actually providing value, being aware of the value you provide and being able to quantify that. Those are three difficult skills and many people cannot acquire them.
> Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig.
Absolutely no. Many people should not attempt this. In fact, I’ve been doing this for around thirty years and I think the majority of people should avoid it. People with young families, credit card debt and spending problems have no business going out on their own.
> Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well.
No, people should strive to make a living, pay their bills and find something approaching happiness.
>Believe it or not you get over this.
If your business succeeds. But if your business doesn't, you either enter zombie mode or you find yourself in the bread line.
> Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig. Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite
Utter horse shit. I want to earn enough to live without too many worries, and spend time with friends and family.
Being able to leave at 5 is irreplaceable
Not to mention the existence of society literally depends on massive large coordinated efforts. It would be completely impractical to operate a society where everyone was an independent small business owner. Imagine trying to operate the global logistics system, or plan, build and operate off-shore oil wells. Being part of a team is a valid and honorable thing.
As an entrepreneur, you can leave anytime you want, but of course, you can't leave the responsibility aside.
With an employer not offering remote, you can set your own rules around it. You can work from Bali, if you want and your customers are OK with it. But i agree , the small business route is certainly not for everyone.
I don't think there are many places in tech where an employee can leave at 5 and expect to keep their job.
I politely disagree. If you think “hours spent at desk” correlates with performance, I don’t really know what to tell you.
I do work late, and over my career have absolutely pulled all nighters and weekends and been on the redeye, but that’s when I stretch or flex, and it’s simply not sustainable.
Of course there are. In my 20 years of experience I've never worked in a place which would expect people to work overtime. (this wasn't in my selection criteria BTW)
Ironically, it's only junior engineers that haven't learned how to say "no" that I've seen hold this opinion.
There absolutely are, but they aren't startups.
I've always been somewhat flexible, especially when traveling, but I've pretty much never worked super-long days as a routine.
You've been brainwashed.
Most of people I know work 37 hour weeks and use sone kind of flex system where hours above 37 per week are saved and spent at later time. The only person keeping track of your time is yourself.
Isn't socialism great?
I don't work for free and neither should you.
Not true at all.
Believe it or not you get over this.
You can get over it if you dig the day-to-day of running a business. But not everyone digs it.
Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig.
No they shouldn't because as an endeavor it just doesn't appeal to lots of people.
The "everyone should try and become good at the stuff I think is fun" tone of this response is just weird, and grossly out of touch with observations of human nature.
No. Speak for yourself.
You have a strange notion of „everyone should“.
isnt this the purpose of LLCs?
LLCs limit your financial liability, but you can still work thousands of hours on a business and end up making nothing. If you work the same thousands of hours as an employee, you will make money.
When you start up a business from scratch you quickly become familiar with bank requirements for a personal guarantee. The LLC will not protect you from personal financial exposure in the full amount of all your business credit facilities, loans, leases, etc.
This.
Working for a big company in the US is massively underrated. Over time, most people working in these companies will be much better off financially and with less stress/health issues.
The silicon valley/tech bubble over-romanticizes entrepreneurship without realizing its NOT for everyone.
For every 1 success story you hear about entrepreneurship, there are 50-100 that fail. The stress and anxiety is not something everyone can or should take if they have the opportunity to coast at FAANG and make $500K+.
How many businesses make $500K in revenue in the US? Not many? [1]
I am paraphrasing here, but I really agree with how Scott Galloway put it: The US corporation is the greatest wealth creating vehicle in history. Way safer and easier to build wealth working at Google.
Giving "StArt a BusZineaSs BRO" as a blanket advice is very disingenuous.
[1] In 2018, 9% of small businesses made more than $1 million. https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/small-business...
Note: Many statistics online say the number is actually fewer than 5%!
https://jmduke.com/posts/essays/two-years/
Guy running an email SaaS clearly says working full time would make him more money.
Started a business doing 1M annual recurring. I have plenty of reasons why it’s more advantageous.
• When times get tough, cofounders playing chicken to see who can take the lowest salary
• Giving yourself the lowest pay to prevent income loss of your employees
• Always having to hunt for sales to maintain your survival (which is typically nebulous and subject to when they feel like signing)
• HR and always trying to figure out how to not get sued
• Losing big customers or big customers going out of business
For any one of those bullet points there’s a coulda woulda shoulda, but again, just taking your 400k from a well established company that isn’t fighting for its survival every day is not inherently inferior to the heroics and cortisol required to operate a business.
Just went through a lot of these, and can confidently say: way way more dangerous to own a company than be a part of one. Significantly less fun, however. I believe it comes down to personality type.
Startup guy who’s now at FAANG. I’m technical technical technical (IC track). I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a staffed project, then onto the next new thing.
Get to work with excellent SWEs, PMs, PgMs, etc.
In startup land I was doing so much, pitches, recruiting, coding, landing page design, dev ops, pretty much the full stack.
In FAANG land I can just focus on existence proofs and then there’s a whole support structure helping that happen and bringing the product to market.
You could argue that setting up this pipeline is the goal of a startup, but it’s a LOONG road. The opportunity cost is immense. It’s immensely difficult to recruit. You have to effectively pause your life. Scary to have children with startup level uncertainty.
At a certain $$ where you can live a comfortable life, enjoy 95% of what you do day to day, get to be in an environment with top notch colleagues, it’s a tough sell to start something from scratch with all that risk.
> I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a staffed project, then onto the next new thing.
How many products you have actually finished and worked on and polished over years if they produced something valuable in the end?
That defines the actual realised value of the business. Jumping from one product to another does not mean that all of them were constantly producing revenue or were success. It might look good in the CV but what was end result?
Hit and miss. It’s pretty equivalent to % of finding product market fit in startup land.
Mostly worked on internal products. One HUGE hit, a few moderate hits, and quite a few failures.
The calculus for projects at a large bigco are different from a startup though.
It’s not necessarily clear bottom line revenue, especially for innovation teams. Crypto, for example, bigco needs at least some folks working on it to build an understanding of the technology, market, pain points. Some of these projects are started with literally no intention of profitability, but as an explicit build-to-learn.
There’s a wide spectrum of SWE interest and capabilities. Some folks love the creativity of greenfield new product exploration. Others love the focus of crafting a perfectly scalable, maintainable system. These are really just points along a product lifecycle.
I understand myself enough and am unapologetic about getting “bored” easily, and need to be constantly working on creative things.
Others at the other end of the spectrum have a visceral reaction to that. They can’t do what I do, and I can’t do what they do.
> I mean a SAAS that solves a boring problem for other businesses with money to spend.
Profitable software-based ideas are increasingly difficult to find. Thousands of people are exploring every niche and trying to start startups in them, which is great, but competition is fierce and unexplored niches are shrinking.
And of course, it's still not straightforward even if you find a relatively unexplored niche. Most people I see who have attempted startups had extensive family support or personal wealth from exits as an employee of a company that had an IPO.
People say this but I don’t buy it at all. If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago. The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
I think there are probably several hundred HN readers who would be happy to tackle those problems. Boring is probably not the issue, but obscure is, assuming these problems exist. If they're difficult to discover that the problem exists, that's a challenge. Further, if the problems exist but are highly unique in each case, there may be a reason it's solved in a one-off way by Excel or scripts rather than a scalable product. The use of Excel isn't inherently ripe for disruption. There are plenty of problems to be solved that just can't be solved profitably. It would be no better than solving a problem that someone has but is unwilling to pay for.
Your comment reminded me of a cool little project I found a few years ago re: niche problems and smaller solutions - the target demo being soldiers who (very generally) have some disposable income to spend on a small app that can improve their professional QoL was kind of genius imo.
There was (still is, though the website is now dead) a really cool website/app that a fmr Air Force soldier made called AFI SWiM[0] that extracted 'Shall, Will and Must' references from Air Force publications which blew up in popularity among the target demo. The dev recently(ish) wrote a blog post[1] how it surprised him to see the app[2] had gotten around ~20k downloads, though I am unsure if the app was always priced at $1.99 (which would be just under $40k).
I like the idea of developing a problem solver for a niche market, though finding and monetizing it definitely is pretty tough.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220601160702/https://swim.afie...
[1] https://willswire.com/blog/chat-afi/
[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/afi-explorer/id1564964107
the github repo: https://github.com/willswire/afi-swim
Your story supports the position that it's safer to take the FAANG job.
This guy found an underserved market opportunity, built something, got some success marketing it, and made a whopping total of $40k.
Meanwhile the FAANG guys are making that every two months, without all the risk.
Imagine if this app was B2B instead of B2C, or if it pivots to B2B in the future, or if it's acquired. Imagine also future passive income with little maintenance. And his project seemed like a side project written over a few months.
Still risky, but the expected value is comparable to a stint at a salaried job IMO, once you find a decent market opportunity. Not to mention the qualitative value of self-employment, and that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs.
> imagine if
We can play this game all day, but the fact is somebody put a ton of work into a project and made about what they could have made in a month at a FAANG.
Pretty crappy trade off.
> Pretty crappy trade off.
Not really. FAANG people have to show up to get that salary. It's not apples to apples to compare this to salary because the app was built once then continued to make money without additional work.
Salary requires constant effort and work. I will take working 60 - 80 hours for a week to make $40k over working 320 hours to make the same.
Imagine investing the FAANG money into dividend ETFs and living off those in a few years.
> that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs
You aren’t seriously comparing the risk of self-employment to the risk of being layed off by one of the most stable companies of the world during a downturn after a 15 year bullrun, are you?
50% of those places are using excel and outdated tech because they have 0 budget to spend on tech no matter how good the replacement (in fact even if it is cheaper, approving the alternative is too painful a process), "their problem" is not that nobody had solved their actual problem but trying to convince someone upstairs to approve spend on an alternative solution.
Just check out the number of posts you see on HN where you have people that started "successful" small (< 10 people) SaaS businesses.
In basically all instances:
1. These stories get a ton of upvotes because they're actually quite rare.
2. The total income to the founder is still considerably (like way considerably) less that a senior dev at a FAANG.
Big sample size issue here. I don't know why anyone would want to share that they have a profitable one person business, as it only invites competition. The people actually doing that are almost certainly going to keep it a secret.
If you know of some boring, obscure market niches that are also likely to be profitable, meaning the cost of customer acquisition is easily less than the profit per customer, and is scalably solved with a software product, please either share with HN readers, or at least offer to sell them to us.
They say ideas are worth nothing, but not to me. If you really have some good ideas (see definition above), I would be interested in buying them at a reasonable price.
Here's another one I remember coming across on Reddit or somewhere: this guy is ex-military and sells teddy bears to military spouses/kids/etc.:
https://zzzbears.com
Pretty niche but IIRC he is doing well for himself.
Here's one that I have dealt with personally: paying taxes as an American that lives abroad (and wants to use the foreign income exclusion) is a nightmare filled with misinformation and tedium.
I don't know if this is actually a market worth pursuing, but I do know that I paid some company $500 to fill in a form for me and help figure out the process. They probably spent an hour or two on my case.
With the increase of dual citizens, digital nomads, etc. this seems like a growing market to me.
I too used Greenback once. The truth is that if one has a relatively simple situation, e.g. salaried employee, then it is entirely realistic to do this oneself. With more complexity (other types of income like interest, capital gains,...) it can be more time consuming, but still doable.
I am not a professional, so seek and pay for professional advice, if that is what you need. I've been doing my own taxes as an American living abroad for ~a decade. If anyone is in a similar situation and has questions, feel free to pm me. Because financial/tax advice from strangers with no professional credentials on the Internet is always a good idea. :p
Which country did you do this in? I will need a similar service soon
I used a company called Greenback.
> If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago.
Which just proves the immense value of Excel and the relatively bad value proposition of custom-made software.
> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
1. Yes, which is why it’s increasingly hard to start a business as a pure software engineer. To put it harshly, most software engineers don’t know enough about the real world out there to solve its problems. Many choose to create software for other software engineers for this reason, and that market is fierce.
2. Another issue is that only those specific businesses might have those problems. Even if you know about them, solving them might not be a good business case. Solving them must be lucrative enough to allow for a small target audience, or the problem needs to be common enough to allow for economies of scale, which brings us to back to point 1.
I used to work in internal IT at a Fortune 500 working with different departments in the company to turn Excel spreadsheets and Access97 tools into web apps with real databases. The problem is that the companies/departments where this is the case all have their own workflows and business processes, and 99% of the time are completely unwilling to consider change. It'll be really challenging to develop software that can be sold to multiple companies even when they ostensibly do the same thing.
And you’re going to hit the ever-present concern at companies, namely “it’s working perfectly fine, why would I spend any money on it?“
I’ll add to that: in many industries/domains the incumbents are benefiting from the status quo and have no interest in upending it, while others have accepted some of these as “hard facts”[0].
I’m working on one such problem in the healthcare space, as an outsider. In early stages, so we’ll see if it goes anywhere.
[0] https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pmf-framework/
>their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
And the problems were so important that somebody, anybody, stepped up to the plate with a digital solution as soon as it was barely possible.
Sometimes you have to admire that effort to a greater degree than a more technically advanced alternative.
I'm sure some of these are ripe for transition to a truly more effective approach in every way but often there is no fooling them trying to provide anything less.
And disruption itself can be the enemy in some things like this.
One word. Hardware.
There is limitless opportunity outside of the webtech/adtech bullshit bubble. Go create a hardware startup, it's never been easier. It's still harder than adtech bullshit was 10 years ago, but the turnkey manufacturing industry is faaaar better than all the "hardware is hard" weekly blogspam would lead you to believe.
Any hints on how to even begin looking into this? There's a plethora of content on starting SaaS projects but can't say I've ever come across any for hardware.
That's gonna depend on your skills and what you think is interesting to pursue. Generally speaking you'll want to learn how to, at a minimum, model stuff and 3d print it, and how to design PCBs. I strongly suggest FreeCAD and KiCad for those tasks respectively.
I like making hardware and SW that goes with it... I'm just not sure how you validate the market need for something like that and what hw more exactly to build. I feel there is already so much stuff...
> I feel there is already so much stuff...
I haven't read this elsewhere so it may be non-validated but you shouldn't imagine customers of a product as entirely captured nor cohesive. Inside of the customer pool are going to be people who are displeased with the product for sometimes disparate reasons but not enough to find a different product because this one is "good enough".
To make this example very simple, a product may produce orange widgets. It's good enough for most people but one group wishes it made a more yellow widget while another group wishes it made a more red widget. The orange widget isn't the ideal case, it's a compromise to serve the most people.
If someone came in and made a product that produces very yellow widgets and focuses on the yellow widget market, you could serve those people very well despite being having a smaller pool.
In other words, your product doesn't need to go toe-to-toe with the orange widget product that has a revenue of $1B, you only need to pick off the yellow widget people to get a revenue of, lets say, $10M and you are eating very well.
I also think the opportunity to build small but helpful gadgets is bigger than finding the perfect SaaS idea. But it’s still not exactly easy to come up with something new. Whenever I see an ingenius product I think to myself „This was obvious, why haven’t I thought of that?“, but oh well.
A comment, the one I am responding to, that would fit much better in the "hopeful" bucket than in the "realistic" one.
I, like many others, hold a white-collar job in a technology company, not FAANG, with a salary between 300 and 400K per year, with lunch breaks, paid vacation days, good health insurance, and the opportunity to work from home at least 75% of the time.
At the end of my workday, which I have not found to be stressful in at least 3 years, I am fresh, hydrated, and ready to spend late afternoons, evenings, and nights pursuing my interests, taking care of the kids, and maybe learning French at last. I see guys running fairly successful local businesses, both physical and digital. Assuming you have a choice between the two paths, a brief look at the physical condition and a conversation with me and the business owner would quickly lead you to prefer one of the two paths.
I might be privileged, lucky, in an unusual situation. But the same is true for the successful local entrepreneur running a plumbing business with profits equivalent to those of experienced people working in tech.
As someone who has been self-employed for over 20 years, done the startup thing (including going through YC in the very early days), I totally understand why people would not want to.
There are real downsides to owning your own business. It’s probably been 15 years since I had a day where I didn’t check my email.
Most people are Indians, not chiefs, and I think that’s actually an evolutionary adaptation that’s built into us. Someone may want to be the best programmer they can be rather than the best at managing employees, setting business strategy, dealing with taxes and other paperwork, etc.
Totally get it.
In general, one-person shops have real downsides for both owners and customers. As an employee, I've often been in situations where I simply haven't been reachable for extended periods of time which obviously isn't great for a customer either absent a fallback. Fallbacks of various sorts are available but probably not at "the SaaS is down" level.
> your best bet is to learn how to start and run a business
Startups are so hit and miss. It's really really hard to make $500k a year at a startup. There's many years of zero, near zero or sub-intern salary. After that there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.
Classic businesses can get a substantial salary sooner than a startup, but do have a ceiling. If you're selling a well known need (plumbing, consulting, etc), there's competition and a ceiling at hours worked.
Having done both, a FAANG job is infinitely less effort than running a company. Also lower stress, lower risk, and immediate rewards/pay. I still have more fun starting companies though!
That's a really informed comment from both sides of the exact fence.
>there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.
Tech or not I think it usually doesn't dwarf anything but if it comes close, a little bit low or high, that's a huge milestone above failure.
In that case it might allow you to maintain readiness for an incredible bonanza which might be within reach only from beyond that point, and that can be what dwarfs the "big payout".
IOW depending on the situation, occasional big payouts that really just even things out may not be very life-changing even if they are big, but it can give you more rolls of the dice at things that can't be approached any other way.
You make it sound so easy. I've ran small businesses for most of my career and I've never made more than a quarter of what I currently make working as a contractor (ironically, for a business I once started, now owned by someone else). And most of the time I earned 5-10% of that.
Good to get your message, I have some of the same experience.
I do better as a consultant/contractor for a client who is a previous customer from when I had my own facility. Fundamentally I used to provide the paperwork (the deliverable/invoiceable product) and supported everything needed to generate it, including any free advice which goes along to smooth the flow. Now I'm paid to help their paperwork achieve and maintain value with none of mine in the mix at all, but I'm basically doing a lot of the same stuff when I'm on site.
As a contractor aren't you now a small business operator of a different type, perhaps much smaller?
I would estimate in more of the exact same business in so many ways very few ever come close to that.
Maybe even doing some of the same things under different degrees of ownership and responsibility, and this could be a good example of way different compensation when the only difference is the underlying arrangement.
Looks like ironc can be good :)
I'm not sure how I made it sound so easy, because presumably getting a 250k job at a FAANG isn't easy either. Which is what my point was - if you're going to deal with the time and stress to get one of the most desirable jobs, why not use that same time and effort to build a business?
> getting a 250k job at a FAANG isn't easy either
Except, it kinda is for people that have the right background and are well suited to it. That is, the reason I think you're getting a lot of pushback is that many folks are just inherently risk averse. There are people who are smart, know how to work hard, and know that if they have a path laid out in front of them, they can succeed.
For entrepreneurs, there is simply much more variability. You can be smart, work hard, do everything right, and still fail in unexpected ways due to things outside of your control.
I don't think entrepreneurship is bad at all, but it's not surprising at all to me that people who want to go the FAANG route aren't well suited to starting their own business.
Getting a 250k job at FAANG is P hard. There is a finite set of tasks that you have to execute to get a job at one of those.
Starting a business is NP hard. At the end of the day, you have to convince people to give you money in some form and way, and that is not a guarantee. You could land on a lucrative idea, or you could do trial and error, failing every time.
Furthermore, once you have either, maintaining a FAANG job is much easier than maintaining a business.
Because it's a lot more predictable. Put in the necessary effort and you are almost guaranteed to get a FAANG job. And the best part, it's completely clear where that effort needs to be directed. Yes, you need to have the smarts, but for a business that pays as much you need to have a lot more than that, plus luck. I'm all for entrepreneurship and personally couldn't work for one of those companies, but with FAANG salaries being this high I don't think those people are making an irrational choice at all.
It's not as simple as "start a business".
You have to find a business that makes sense for you (you know it, you want to put up with it, etc). You then have to execute. All the while hoping that you don't get struck by lightning (something kills your business), while also hoping to get struct by lightning (you become wildly successful). God forbid you need job security (family, health care, etc.).
Contrast this to going into a job, where what you do is laid out for you, you just have to execute. With insurance. With job security.
Even as someone who has run a startup and still has the itch, it's a no brainer.
Different skillsets involved. You will eventually have to give up programming and focus on developer sales/marketing/recruiting skills.
Very rare to see businesses where you're sole developer and salesperson unless you are the main SME on a niche field/technology you probably developed.
Also A LOT of FAANG is immigrants who can't start a business in the US or children of immigrants whose parents put strong pressure on them having an upper middle class job.
Yes. This is a bit reductive, but literally everything is out there for the taking -- you just have to go out and get it!
Anecdotally, I've noticed that a disproportionate amount of formally-educated people I've encountered in life are more allergic to this idea than the opposite.. I don't have any solid theories as to why, exactly, but it's curious nonetheless.
Because a lot of people don't want everything resting on them. Takes a special kind of person. I know I ain't one. My dad owned his own business with a 100 employees and it was miserable growing up
> I don't have any solid theories as to why
What sees you discount the obvious? That is, formally educated people end up in formal education because they have a proclivity towards not wanting to have to go out and get it. They want someone else to hand it to them. Which is, after all, what the "formal" part of formal education describes.
Have look at Nassim Taleb’s Skin In The Game. He explores this topic at length.
The problem is identifying what to go out and get. Because most people will go out and get the wrong thing and end up burning themselves out of future endeavors.
> so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee
It seems like you are vastly underestimating the effort (and risk) it takes to start a successful SaaS that brings its founder $500k+ annually.
You're right about everything if you can actually start and grow that business, but you're glossing over how difficult that actually is to do, and the fact that you have to start from $0 income.
> And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
It's also unlimited as a gambler. That doesn't mean everyone should start buying lotto tickets.
> It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur
I like coding. I don't want to run a business, and these are very separate skills. This is like asking why an IC doesn't want to become a people manager.
Nothing interesting. No matter what people say, starting a business is incredibly difficult and takes a certain amount of luck. I've done 3. Failed at all 3. Made $0. Some people aren't cut out and are better off being employees.
Because I am happier as a great employee. I have a large family and have chosen base salary over stock when it comes up for example. I make a great salary and we can afford to have a lot of fun. We took four months and traveled in an RV. I have 7 lids and they all have a sport so we do lots of Soccer, Field Hockey, Softball, Baseball, etc. That is expensive and time consuming but I am at 99% of their games.
I can't do that as well while starting and running a company.
That's a lot of lids.
> instead of learning how to start and run a business.
Maybe people want to be developers, and not managers/CEOs/business owner/entrepreneurs?
They're completely different jobs. Why would you expect everyone to aspire to the same thing?
We don't look at nurses and say "its funny how so many nurses have an aversion to become a multinational pharmaceutical CEO"
Statistically, you'll make more money working for someone else than working for yourself (and have a better work/life balance as well).
And you might say, "well - you'll never become a billionaire working for someone else".
That's not true.
There's plenty of CEOs (non-founders) who are billionaires.
And the chances of you running your own company and becoming a billionaire, is about the same probability as you becoming a CEO at a Fortune 500.
> There's plenty of CEOs (non-founders) who are billionaires.
Being a business owner doesn't necessarily mean being the founder.
No CEO is becoming a billionaire by collecting a paycheque. They might become a billionaire by accepting the right stock offer in lieu of wages, but that makes them the business owner again.
> No CEO is becoming a billionaire by collecting a paycheque.
Yes, they can and do.
and many more (Andy Jassy, Tim Cook, Satyna Nadella, ...)https://www.forbes.com/profile/safra-catz/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/18/how-shery....
https://www.businessinsider.com/jamie-dimon-career
Did you go to all of the trouble of writing that comment because you wanted us to laugh at you? All of those people are clearly in that position because they are business owners.
Granted, Catz seems to have recently sold off a large stake of her ownership. But the cash proceeds of that sale still came from being the owner at one point, not from a salary. Nobody becomes a billionaire off a regular paycheque.
Hell, even FAANG software developer compensation is really only notable because the total package includes becoming an owner of the company. The wage portion isn't that much different than any other random tech company.
With that logic, most (every?) SWE working at faang is a business owner since they all get stock options/rsu
Absolutely. FAANG wages are certainly competitive, but not out of line from what you can make in any old Poducksville software company. It is the becoming an owner of FAANG that sets them apart financially.
While true, I'd suggest if someone's career choices are primarily motivated by a desire to become a billionaire, they are not making rational career choices anyway and are likely to be unswayed by, you know, evidence.
There is an opportunity cost to starting a new business. Depending on market and your experience it can take several years before you get anywhere close to earning the same level of income as a mid to senior level FAANG employee. There is also the time commitment to dealing with everything outside of being an IC (taxes, healthcare, finance, marketing, disputes, legal).
To anyone exploring starting a new business I would keep the day job and suffer until you get to a point where the business is on a good clip and you can dedicate all your time to it. Otherwise spending 20 years at FAANG and enjoying your life is really not a bad way to live, in fact its a dream to 99% of the planets population.
One is basically guaranteed, as long as you learn and play the game; the other, to put it simply, is not. It takes an order of magnitude more effort and savviness to make a successful business than grind Leetcode and work at FAANG for 30 years. And even then, the FAANG employee is likely to outearn you.
How do you get the startup capital to do this? At least in the area where I have know how it would cost at least a million to get the space, hardware, raw materials, and employees to start turning out products. Then you would need money for marketing and logistics.
Depending on where you are, you can often find gov support to start your business. (Here in Canada, this support can be grants, loans or event free experts time.) When it's gov monetary support, you usually have to bring 50% of the total amount.
Otherwise, you can contact incubators like YC. If they approve your idea and grant you money, you can then easily apply for loans at banks because you've been vetted by a well known company.
After all that energy spent, you will understand the quote :
> Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.
Running a business is so much more work and most businesses fail. This is terrible advice.
> will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business.
Being an employee is still running a business. The separation you are trying to draw isn't meaningful.
That particular line of business is one of the few businesses out there with a near-guaranteed customer base, though. That's a highly attractive trait for someone operating a business. With small risk comes small reward, of course, but it is no surprise that most businesses venture in that direction.
I don't think this works out well for most people anymore. I mean that was true a few years ago when things were booming even, but now you're almost guaranteed to have a very hard time. I know someone that is over-employed and has over half a dozen jobs (yes you read that right, and it's been verified); most of them are at entrepreneur owned companies and they are all struggling right now, hanging by a thread with a skeleton crew.
I agree with you, but I also understand that some just don’t know that entrepreneurship could also yield those salaries and more. Some can’t handle the uncertainty that of entrepreneurship. Some have been entrepreneurs and after an exit do decide to work for someone else.
As for myself, I can’t wait to free myself from these chains called salaried employment. (I don’t mean to offend anyone)
They're probably 2-3x the guy running a local plumbing business doing remarkably fewer hours. And of course it's more accessible. The average guy running a plumbing business is probably 30 something, while people can hit 300k at faang a year or two out of college with like one good promotion.
I worked with a guy who went to a public university - not a top 25 public university but in the ballpark. He was hard-working, smart and "got it", but he wasn't at the level of some super-geniuses I met coming out of school. He worked with us (Fortune 100, non-FAANG, non-tech, non-big metro) as a junior SWE for a year and did not get promoted as he desired. He jumped ship for a FAANG-adjacent company after a year working for us, and his TC jumped from <$100k to over $200k. Two years later he was promoted to senior and his TC is now over $300k.
He is smart but not a genius. He kind of knows what is going on though, he "gets it". Probably even more motivated than smart, but not insanely motivated. Motivated enough to learn how to get features done at a brisk pace, take ownership of his team's work, and to study for interviews. Didn't go to a top tier CS program, didn't come out of FAANG or FAANG adjacent, and probably took a detour working for us, but three years later his TC is over $300k. He also had the luck to jump ship before the FAANG layoffs of late 2022.
That’s basically what I did, it’s not particular unusual.
In what universe is getting a 300k FAANG job more accessible than starting a local plumbing business?
That wasn't the question, the question was a 500K faang job vs. a local plumbing business making a comparable amount of money.
I think it's very easy to start a failing plumbing business. I think it far less accessible to start a plumbing business that competes with a FAANG salary.
Put another way: how many people do you know who started their own consumer-facing, bootstrapped business, of any kind and who take home $3-500,000 as CEO? My answer is, like, two and they're both lawyers who didn't start making that kind of income until their mid thirties.
Edit: It would not, at all, surprise me if even in the trades the most common path to business ownership was to take over someone else's already existing business, which would I think cut even further into this point since it would mean the most common path to entrepreneurship is optimizing employment in a small business context.
I think getting a FAANG job is difficult, but for the median 30 year old (who has around $5,000 saved up and limited or no external safety nets), starting a business as your primary source of income is a really good way to bankrupt yourself and not much else, and valorizing that path is actively harmful.
I mean, that's what I'm trying to do (the business, not the monetary milestone), but something to be mindful of is that on Indie Hackers only 12 people out of 17,000 in the community got to $10k MRR.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/holy-heck-this-is-hard-8eb...
Granted, this is Indie Hackers, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the general idea still applies. Getting to $10k a month, let alone making $250k a year (so ~$20k/month) is really hard, probably about as hard as making $250k a year as an employee, maybe even harder.
When you say taking this with a grain of salt, do you mean the success rate would be better outside of Indie Hackers?
I want to rest and vest. I've gotten to final stage interviews with FAANG. I want the get the job, put in my 9-5 and go home.
Plus running a business takes a lot of money and luck...
> These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business
What about all the guys running unsuccessful local plumbing businesses?
And how, exactly, does one "learn" that?
To me it's always been a matter of personality. As an introvert, I can't picture myself doing the kinds of social interactions required to sell a business on my own.
Everyone is a genius for taking the safe employee path until we have a bad economy and the layoffs come.
It’s been a LONG time since that’s happened.
Just remember that.
I feel like layoffs are easier to ride through with just a limited amount of money saved. A barely new small business will have tougher time surviving a bad economy.
> but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business.
I know a guy who ran a successful plumbing business around Northern VA.
Took home around 300k per annum. I used to bang his daughter.
He worked hard, though, and had a couple of other guys working jobs independently under him, on top of his work. He was mostly corporate and construction work, but a couple of those guys under him also did residential, and he mostly supervised.
I'm far less than his TCO but also don't have to get elbow deep in shit and work remotely from my basement. Respect the hustle, but I think I'm winning in terms of work-life balance and QOL.
Some people want to do cool technical stuff while getting paid well, and not interested in managing a business. Most researchers are like that.
Bird in the hand
> It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur
It’s not like nobody wants that, the scarce thing is having a good business idea unless you want to go into consulting.
> And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
That’s kinda stretching it. Higher FAANG-level salaries are enough to reach financial independence, which is pretty much „unlimited“ territory for most normal people. On the other hand, most businesses are not hyper successful. It‘s not like becoming a millionaire entrepreneur can be taken for granted.
It’s interesting that you don’t seem to understand this. Survivorship bias or something else?
Building a business is really hard.
Especially a business that will get you the same revenue as a FAANG job.
While running a small business can be incredibly fulfilling and teach you a ton of adjacent skills that you wouldn’t learn as a SwEng at a FAANG (sales, marketing, …), I find it infinitely more stressful than regular employment.
There’s just so much more responsibility resting on your shoulders. Holidays have never felt the same since I left employment in 2011.
No regrets here, just saying this path is not for everyone and not as accessible as you might think.
Would you be open to mentoring someone curious about doing so?
What type of SaaS? Any ideas?
everybody saying this is a bad idea, which gives me hope that it might work out.
I don’t see why so many people try so hard to be a professional football player when they could just as easily start a business launching rockets into space.
The one has got nothing to do with the other. Running a small business is far more sales and marketing, and if you are lucky enough to get to the point where you need to hire someone, then HR, managing suppliers and fuck me don’t get me started on fucking customers.
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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.
These threads always surprise me. I'm a director of software engineering in a medium sized company (~3k employees) not located in a big metro but with plenty of people working from competitive areas (I am in the Seattle area myself). My base is a bit over $200k with a 20% bonus and some stock options. I know I'm on the higher end compared to my peers, and I know what my direct and indirect reports make. My wife works for a huge aerospace company as a senior manager and makes about the same as I do. I have a bunch of other people I know what they make, including a very senior engineer at a FAANG company who with 600k this year (everything included) is the highest compensated person I know personally. It's amazing how people throw around 500K like it's nothing. I'm either doing things very wrong/ am clueless or there's some weird bias for crazily over-compensated people in threads here.
Yeah me too, I'm having hard time going above 100K. Yes, I don't live in the US. But damn...
> 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)
That used to be the case where I live, just a few years ago. Now what used to be a starter home is over $400k.
Thanks for a comment from outside of the bubble
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[Edited to remove snark/barbs as per HN guidelines].
I am genuinely curious though - you seem like you've had a successful career and life. I typically assume people in your position are rather familiar with the basic math behind personal taxes, 401k's, HSA's, child tax credits, standard deductions vs. large charitable deductions, etc. I think I may have been grossly mischaracterizing a potentially large group of people and would love to hear about how you've handled your taxes since entering the workforce...and what you personally would attribute your misunderstanding of taxes to.
I think that would help me better understand and empathize with people who aren't like me.
It's a common misconception because there are plenty of situations where making more money actually decreases your take-home pay. It's just not via the bracket system, it's via other incentives in the tax code (and welfare benefits in certain cases).
There are a lot of things (IETC for example, or benefits, or health insurance) which have $ cutoffs. Or tax breaks (i.e. electric vehicle credit) that only apply below a certain income. Exceeding those fixed points can certainly make you make less money.
One thing I ran into recently was fiscal incentives for homeownership (though not directly related to taxes) - there is a cutoff at a certain income level where if you stay below it you get a $10K credit towards closing costs. The tax code is full of things like that (or getting your student loans forgiven if you make less than $X for Y years).
If you want to see how bad the welfare cliffs are, there are cases where a single mother is better off making $28,000 per year (and receiving all federal benefits), than making ~$70,000 per year (and qualifying for none of them).
Image of the welfare cliff effect, example in Pennsylvania:
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7de186ce44f6a86805609...
Unfortunately, it also could be an intentionally false statement in order to push a specific political viewpoint. For example, flat tax rates without income brackets. I don’t think it’s wrong to correct falsehoods strongly in general.
It’s an arbitrary human rule, not fundamental knowledge. Quite understandable how someone may not have the interest or knowledge to know this nuance (perhaps to their own detriment). It’s somewhere along the spectrum of the knowledge of arcane laws, for example. The federal tax code perhaps isn’t ’arcane’ by popular consensus in educated circles, but it’s on the spectrum of arbitrary human knowledge that keeps changing and evolving.
Would you be shocked if a CPA knows more about this than a theoretical physicist?
Well, there is a grain of truth to his words. Over certain income, you are no longer qualified for food stamps, medicaid and section 8, so you are better off earning less.
this line of discussion is amusingly charitable for a person replying to a conversation about earning $150k - $300k/yr
they're not eligible for any welfare and are above the best phaseouts
poor things:)
~Calm down. It's a common misconception.~
It's a common misconception among people who haven't done even the slightest bit of research. Or done their taxes themselves. Confidently stating stuff that is obviously false SHOULD be ridiculed.
> Or done their taxes themselves.
As someone who does his taxes manually every year, this probably wouldn't help. Most people would be under the threshold and just look up the value in a table and not see how it scales.
If you use any sort of tax software I expect it's even further obscured.
Seems strange that ridicule should be your instinct rather than simple education
I hate to agree with the ridicule point, but honestly ridicule also deters other people from making a similar mistake.
I agree ridicule should be used cautiously, but in a case like this where someone speaks so confidently and boldly gives advice on a topic they clearly do not understand, I think ridicule is a good way not only to inform them, but also indicate to others that it's not okay to give people this kind of advice unless you have a basic understanding of the topic.
I have nothing to back this up but the reason I'm sensitive to ridicule as an initial reaction is that I believe it causes people to shy away and there's potential that they surround themselves with other ridiculed people and now you have a group that is intentionally dense and now powerful. Education should always be the first step.
I grew up in rural appalachia and the amount of grief than the uneducated get there for being uneducated causes them to become even more hostile and I really think that the Mr Rogers approach of education would eventually neuter any hostility they had towards the educated.
* edit: changed education to educated
That is an excellent and profound point and one I can admire. Thanks for sharing it.
An educative reply is easier to ignore than a (or multiple) replies in which you're ridiculed.
Moreover, being thought about how you're wrong about X might not necessarily translate in the subject being more careful before confidently expressing themselves on a Y topic on which they don't know anything about. Hopefully, ridiculing might make the subject reconsider that part of their character.
That said, the HN policies recommend to "be kind"... I have no idea how to "ridicule someone's post in a kind way" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The pile of downvotes drives the point home. No need to ridicule, education is better.
If you can't educate the poster, at least you educate other readers who also didn’t know, without the unnecessary noise of ridicule.
I don’t think I see the same pile of downvotes that you’re seeing? My comment of ridicule got +10 votes in 15 minutes before I edited it, and now is down to +9 an hour after editing the ridicule out.
I see that “Calm down. It's a common misconception” did get downvoted.
I mean the original comment that misunderstood marginal tax rates. That one looks very gray to me.
(And I think your comment is better without the ridicule! The sources you found for your follow-up comment are interesting and I learned from it.)
Agreed - and thank you for updating.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No, they shouldn't.
Apparently this belief is far more common than I thought. I expected it to be closer to the percentage of Americans who think the Earth is flat (10%)[0]. Evidently 50% of Americans[1] believe you pay your highest marginal rate on all of your income. I'm blown away, and genuinely humbled. I don't understand how someone can get a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac home loan, raise children, have a long and successful career and not understand tax brackets -- I clearly am incredibly out of touch with how some people live their lives, and I have a lot to learn about other people.
0: https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/conspiracy-vs-science-sur...
1: https://www.aei.org/economics/survey-confirms-that-many-amer...
There is a class of rich people in the US who really like that people believe this. It allows them to spread a lot of fear about higher tax rates for high incomes.
Not to mention the influence of companies like Intuit, which has been pushing against convenience in tax filing for decades because its entire business model relies on people being unwilling or unable to file by themselves: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
It seems to be advantageous to a significant portion of the political class that people hold this misconception - this type of misconception explains much of the widespread public support for tax breaks for the ultra-rich...
It was preached to me that this was how it worked since I started working in the mid-90s. I didn't learn better until an accountant friend clarified that when I got him to do my taxes when I started making real money in the mid-00s.
I dare say that it was probably the most common understanding until fairly recently. The internet has probably helped a lot with that. That is to say, if you're of a certain generation you probably think this way because that's what was generally understood.
I guess it's a fair assumption you never once attempted to calculate your own taxes in the first decade of filing taxes? Did you just drop some papers off to an accountant the first year that you reached adulthood?
I've used an accountant occasionally, but only when I had genuinely confusing tax issues involving international work or work across many states where I wasn't sure whether there existed a "nexus" that required me to pay taxes in State A or State B. Even then I did my best to double-check their work, and often caught errors/omissions. Most of my friends also do their own taxes (and have since 2006), regardless if they were line cooks or painters or engineers or MBB consultants. So I'm just not familiar with the lifestyles that lead to this.
I'd actually understand it more for people who've entered the workforce since 2005, because TurboTax/etc became much more popular. I did taxes with my dad in the mid-90's before most homes had internet, and back then it seemed far more likely that people would understand how taxes worked, because there wasn't super-easy software to do it for you.
If you're in the lowest tax bracket making just above the poverty line, as I was then (as well as most people around me), it was what we all understood to be.
I was in that tax bracket for half my adult life (often did not have enough money to eat chicken and rice at home and just went hungry). I had to do my own taxes because I couldn’t afford an accountant and TurboTax starting taking the piss on their dark pattern pricing schemes. All of my friends at the time were also very poor, it was a giant recession and we worked in restaurants that weren’t getting customers. We got paid $2.65/hr so if we actually had a “good week” our paychecks were $0 (actually negative, honestly, but paychecks bottom out at $0) due to taxes on tips.
Now I’m even more confused. Accountants were genuinely expensive and none of my peers in my economic class could afford one.
At the risk of repeating myself: how did you file taxes for the first decade of adulthood? If you were too poor pay an accountant like I was…how did you misunderstand how to calculate taxes owed for ten years, but still arrive at the correct amount to pay? Did the IRS often return money to you saying that you over-paid? Did anyone ever try to correct your misconception?
I’m trying to understand this in more detail than just “memorize the fact that 50% of Americans were lied to by (someone?) about taxes, and also just blindly accept that there is some magic unknown to me which allowed them to not be affected by that misunderstanding through most of their adult life”.
You were in poverty when you had this misunderstanding. This other commenter bought a house while they had the same misunderstanding. (So, “being poor” isn’t the experience you both had in common while holding this misconception and can’t explain it for both of you). I’m trying to understand how that misunderstanding never affected either of you. I’m trying to understand how neither of you ever had to read about how to calculate taxes owed.
When you're in that tax bracket, there are plenty of tax break/benefit cliffs that are more impactful than tax rates. And they can certainly make your take-home pay go down if you accept a raise. See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41048205
But that still doesn't explain the common denominator between a person living comfortably and a person in poverty both not understanding how tax brackets work or ever having to consider the most basic parts of how their own taxes are calculated, for so, so many years of their lives.
Who was preaching it to you?
Well around 40% of households don't pay federal taxes at all, and presumably a large chunk of those who do are in the lowest tax bracket so they might not ever need to know how it actually works.
Wait til you learn how many people can't do simple percentages like 10% of 150 or how many people can't do basic arithmetic like 19+15.
That's just not how taxes work: https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...
In the USA this is not how tax brackets work. You are taxed on your income in each bracket at that rate, not overall
Out of curiosity, since you said "In the USA" specifically, is there any tax regime in these times where tax brackets don't work like this?
I have never heard of one. I believe that in the UK, because of caps on childcare benefits, a wage increase can actually decrease your take-home but generally marginal tax rates operate on marginal income.
They likely don’t know every country’s tax code and instead of confidently spreading misinformation like the above commenter, this commenter is being careful to only state facts they actually do know.
Yes! Just didn’t want to assume every country in the world operated like the USA
Your marginal dollars are taxed at the rate they fall into. So even if you get paid another $200k on top of what you already earn, that additional $200K is taxed on top of your unchanging lower tax rates.
Tax rates are marginal, this is wrong.
You actually get a tax break after $168,600. After that you no longer get taxed for Social Security.
That tax limit should be removed IMO.
Rubbish.
Suppose your salary is X and the level that 32% starts is M
You get taxed on your first $X earnings at the lower rates. Then only the amount above the 32% mark ie X-M is taken at 32%. Thus everyone in the 32% band gets more money than those only in in the 24%.
This is a completely incorrect understanding of tax brackets. If you make $1 more than your 'old' bracket, you only get taxed 32% on that $1.
That's not how tax brackets work, but it is a common misconception. If you salary goes up, your take-home goes up, full stop.
If you are making $191,950/year (the very top end of the 24% bracket for 2024) you will pay $39,110.50 in federal income tax, (before any deductions) for a net of $152,839.50. (You may notice that this is less than 24%) If you make an additional $1,000/year: $192,950, only the additional $1,000 is taxed at the 32% rate. Which makes your total federal income tax bill $320 more, and improving your net take-home to $153,519.50
Edit to add: I'm disappointed that sibling comments to mine are so degrading. We all had to learn this at some point.
There are cases where if your salary goes up, your take-home goes down, especially for lower income levels. It’s just not on the basis of tax brackets. There are means-tested benefits that you can lose if you cross certain income levels where an increase in income of $5 can cost you thousands of dollars.
Yup. Most are for lower income levels but some affect middle class & up as well
(electric vehicle credits, financial aid for university, first time homeowner credits, or affordable homeownership breaks... etc)
I'm not disappointed. This is a classic case of someone who knows nothing about a topic making confident statements that will undoubtedly spread. People who do this should absolutely be ridiculed to discourage spreading total nonsense.
And to be clear we're not talking about some esoteric subject -- this is the most basic part of how your salary is taxed by the US government.
That's not how that works. At all. It's marginal. jfc how are we still parroting this falsehood
You don't understand how tax brackets work. You never make less money by moving up a bracket. The bracket rate only applies to income within the bracket.
The more correct statement is "you never pay more in taxes by moving up a bracket" - though even that is not correct in all cases.
There are a lot of things (IETC for example, or benefits, or health insurance) which have $ cutoffs. Or tax breaks (i.e. electric vehicle credit) that only apply below a certain income. Exceeding those fixed points can certainly make you make less money.
One thing I ran into recently was fiscal incentives for homeownership (though not directly related to taxes) - there is a cutoff at a certain income level where if you stay below it you get a $10K credit towards closing costs. The tax code is full of things like that.
*EITC (nit)
Taking into account only the federal income tax brackets, this is true. But tax cliffs exist, e.g. see: https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/tax-cliff so accounting for all taxes and other factors, there could be a situation where you earn more pre-tax, but end up with less after all is accounted for. For most high-earners it's less relevant as they are past of the most cliffs anyway, but sometimes things like losing access to IRA deductions may be a factor too.
[flagged]
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: this has been a problem for a long time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36668235 (July 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35416652 (April 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33118260 (Oct 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29289394 (Nov 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863165 (April 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22837452 (April 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22570732 (March 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22543673 (March 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22543657 (March 2020)
That's not cool. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this for good, we'd appreciate it.
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.
It's pretty hard to get into these IME. I'm considered a top-performer at the deep tech company I currently work at, and interviewed at a hedge fund awhile back. The process was way less intense than what I would expect a big tech co. interview to be. I made it to the top three candidates, but didn't get it. In hindsight, the role wouldn't have been a good fit, it was "higher up in the stack" than I prefer to be, which is also what they said.
I think you need to be a pretty unique individual to succeed in environments like that. Most people I know break down under intense pressure when shit hits the fan, even if they're wildly competent. I can only assume it's that much more intense when tons of money is at stake.
I'm not sure it's enough to experience something once and then assume it looks like that across the industry, it's very context-dependent.
While I've done zero attempts to work at any hedge fund, I know plenty of people who both had success when wanting to join one (even though some of them were under-qualified) and people who failed (some who were over-qualified).
Oh most certainly. But that industry has a reputation for a reason, no? I would expect every place to have different culture, interview processes, etc.
Alot of getting hired into these roles depends on your upbringing/perceived social class by the people at the fund, the school you went to, how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, etc. The technical pieces are pretty far behind.
> Alot of getting hired into these roles depends on your upbringing/perceived social class by the people at the fund, the school you went to, how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, etc. The technical pieces are pretty far behind.
I'd disagree about your perceived upbringing mattering at all.
I don't know of any fund that hires technical staff like that. I mean we're here to make money, if someone can do that, no one cares what their social upbringing is, I mean like at all.
Now the school you went to matters, though it matters about as much as it would at a FAANG company.
And as to "how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, "
I would hope that all companies hire based on how someone presents themselves and would we want to work with them. Everyone should base hiring on how the candidate acts and presents themselves, that seems like an incredibly positive step, no?
> The technical pieces are pretty far behind.
Which specific fund are you referring to here. This seems very uninformed from my experience, but i'm willing to look at your evidence that hedge funds don't really value technical ability.
These are for very under the radar hedge funds that chip their programmers 500-2 Million for just writing basic software. I'm not talking about sweat shops like citadel. I'm talking about places that hire very rarely. The fund manager makes 25-150 million. Rest of the employees are in the low millions. Their employees are always a reflection of the firm, and to their outside investors. Its about more than technical ability. Jobs are never posted online, minialist linkedin profiles, no public footprint
Well I guess because you've presented no evidence to back up your claim we've got no where to go with this conversation.
Perhaps if you could name those funds, we could have a talk since I know the industry very well.
I've done a fair amount of technical hiring at hedge funds, my experience doesn't support this comment. There is some amount of credentialism/elitism in hedge fund hiring, but I see that more on the fundamental investment side, and much less for technical roles. There are a lot more hedge funds than FAANG companies, and different funds can have very different cultures.
I'm talking about traditional small long short funds, private equity, and under the radar very elite hedge funds. Its different for quant shops like citadel or two sigma. Those treat you like a commidity programmer that they pay a 20% premium on over FAANG
Yup. There's a lot of credentialism and in-group stuff. I work with a ton of PhD physicists currently and it's one of those things that you can never quite forget in an environment like this as someone with "only" a bachelor's degree from a no-name college.
YMMV but the one hedge fund offer I got required putting 50% of the bonus into the fund itself, which then vests out over 4 years. I was told this is industry standard, so it's analogous to the 4 year RSU vesting you'd get at FAANG.
Usually the deferred bonus is paid out to you if you leave, so it's a little bit different than an RSU grant.
and probably no where to hide if you want to just rest and vest.
"Rest and vest". What a luxury. Some of us are trying to tread water with an anvil chained to the waist. That's what I get for choosing to work for something I'm passionate about. What a world
if you refuse a higher paying job because you would like to work for something you're passionate about, you are explicitly valuing your passion at at least the delta between the job offers.
> That's what I get for choosing to work for something I'm passionate about.
Are you passionate about working for your current employer or passionate about your career?
I’m passionate about my career (programming/software development): I love reading the classic tech books out there (TAOCP, DDIA, etc.), I love working on side projects, sometimes I contribute to open source, etc.
On the other hand, I couldn’t care less about my employer. Not because they are bad, but I just don’t care about most of the tech companies out there. I do what I need to do to get paid, but i’m not passionate about deadlines, conversations with other engineers about subjective topics, daily standups, on call, etc.
Yeah I work in an FFRDC, pushing the frontier of our exploration of space. I'm quite passionate both about the employer and (most of the time) my work. If I didn't care about my employer at that level I woulda been out the door after two years. I think to myself sometimes about the other side of that though, like if I didn't care for them but the money was good.
My home hobbies resemble work within my area, but not my current job function, but I'm keenly aware my employer may try to take advantage of my other talents and do I guess the only thing that saves having an alternative hobby is that I'm so diversified that whatever my work task is I can work on an orthogonal hobby at home. It's kinda nice, I've got both really.
In my mind if I "sell out" (in terms of trading in for that sense of purpose in my work), and just work for the paycheck, then I would go for max. Work an HFT quant firm as a senior or principal engineer or research analyst. $$$. Or some other juicy gig. But I would hate myself if that became a slog and I had no time for my interests at home.
> And generally the money will be locked up for less time than the 4 year vesting that these companies often follow.
Err...4-year vesting doesn't mean the money is literally locked away until you hit 4 years' tenure. A $1m stock grant vesting over 4 years might pay $250-350k every year, depending on the vesting schedule and stock performance.
If a hedge fund pays $1m every 2 years then they're just paying more period. It's not the vesting schedule which causes the difference in comp.
> Err...4-year vesting doesn't mean the money is literally locked away until you hit 4 years' tenure
No one said it did:)
My point was that a typical bonus is about 2/3's employees at the moment its granted and 1/3 held back for a year sometimes two, so you get money faster than a typical 4 year vesting schedule.
Does that clear things up?
See my second sentence. That means the hedge fund flat out pays much more than FAANG. It's got nothing to do with vesting schedules.
(BTW FAANG pays bonuses too. They're 100% the employee's when they're paid)
>One other nice thing is that instead of restricted stock you get actual money.
Stock at FAANG is basically equivalent to cash. You can sell it as soon as you get it.
The other downside is that it is harder to break into because there are less roles.
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).
Even if you're uniquely good at what you do, a lot of companies won't reward it. You do still have to look hard for those opportunities.
A lot of people who are very good at what they do have a hard time selling it. A lot of people who are good at selling it are not actually accomplishing much. So there is often a gap between perception of high performers and actual high performers.
Solution: partner with a sales/biz person and start a consultancy.
If you are actually that good, opportunities will tend to appear. You may not realize or pursue them, but they often do.
I appreciate the sentiment, but I'll add that it is possible for difficult and obscure work to be quite pleasant, if you have the right skill set.
That wasn't meant as a logical and. Each of these things alone can lead to opportunities.
3) Be first at something new. See the AI girlfriend project a while ago, which was pulling in 1m/mo.
Independent consulting is entrepreneurship, with all the negatives.
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 used to work at such a place. Contracts with places large as BAML and other places you e never heard of…
Unless you’re the low level wizard you’re just going to make an industry standard salary, maybe a bump but nothing special.
What does a low level wizard need to know more specifically?
Assembly would be a good start. But to really make use of that you need to learn the internal intricacies of processor architectures and operating systems. If you want to be employable, there's just a gigantic amount of seemingly boring details to learn before you can even start to build something interesting. With high level languages you can jump into the job market almost immediately, so the cost of entry vs. potential reward is better for most people. If you don't have fun when spending years of your life banging your head while digging down incredibly complex rabbit holes, it's probably not worth it.
There's nothing too terribly special about low level wizardry, other than you really _do_ need to understand how the hardware works, and how your language works. Oddball skills you really need to know (and can easily pick up if you have a mind to) include: a) Reading processor/part data books. These are your API docs. Most of your answers are in there if you care to look. b) Reading schematics. You don't need to be able to write/design hardware, but you need to be able to figure out what each CPU pin is wired to and how you're expected to access peripherals. Again, not hard to figure out if you put your mind to it. Very handy to know: How to use a multimeter/oscilloscope/JTAG programmer/logic analyzer. There are your debuggers. You don't need them often, but when you need them, you NEED them.
This sounds like a typical embedded software engineer and I frequently see people around here complaining about the low salaries for these roles. What am I missing?
Like everything else, salaries vary widely, even in a fixed geographic area. Pay isn't bad if you can find a place that appreciates the work.
HFT
Magic missile, garbage collection enchantment, server resurrection.
Multiclassing is hard, but some get by as a making a divine pact and taking Eldritch Blast and Prestidigitation as cantrips. When all you have is sledgehammer, even smaller hammers are nails.
Server rez on a low level wiz build? That's way high level thoughts and prayers to the Top 500 (also a cleric build) or lim. "request" to the Blackrock genie over in Budapest. Besides, 7th? Pff, call "company of choice" to fight for you, save or die server vileness!, and of course "peon:cleanse everything? peon:what do mean everything? cleric:EVERYTHING."
Frankly you probably want a PRC, and at those admin levels much, much save or die. Probably got so many server pokes per minute you're gonna be furiously holy wording your file system all day long. Team members? Rez? Please. You solo that.
Low level wiz? "Welcome to name brand, and lack of female desirability, here's your special hat..." "Why aren't the lights on?" [1] "Help, I lit my own hands on fire!" [2] "Ah, every threat one hits me!" [3] "Man they target me bad at conferences, how'd I draw DARPA as agro..." [4] "Holy s*t there's a lot of documentation to write!" [5]
High level wiz? "Computation hates all magical ideas and their very implication!" "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal of my trust, our own company is secretly controlled by Orcus and seeks the death and slavery of all life on Earth" [6] "Join me in the bag within bag abyss together and we shall quest to Jubilex for glory and honor across the eternal battlefields of tomorrow!" [7] ITGETSOEPIC::THEYWONTLETULEAVE::ALREADYATWARP::AUTOLADDEREJECTED::HOWDIDRAWULTRONASAGRO::MIDASTOUCHISHORRIFYING::AHHHHHHH [8]
[1] https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/light.htm
[2] https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/burningHands.htm
[3] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SquishyWizard
[4] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShootTheMageFirs...
[5] https://www.d20srd.org/srd/feats.htm#scribeScroll
[6] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FaceHeelTurn
[7] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-...
[8] https://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1355
BAML?
Possibly BofA Securities formerly Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BofA_Securities
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Now BofA
Aren't you just indirectly working at FAANG then? In most cases you end up being hired by a 'talent' agency that finds work for you at these major companies.
If I understood the top-level post correctly, no. They are very much not working for a FAANG, nor for a talent agency that works for a FAANG. They're working for a company that supplies software tools to high-frequency traders or something similar. Very, very different.
(Of course, the original question was "not FAANG or HFT", so this still may not be what they were looking for...)
Do you have a name for said company?
Note that the two accounts responding in this chain were made only a few days ago, and that this entire thread might be some kind of phishing/advert
It might be, though it also sounds like where I work, which is a company that has been mentioned a couple of times on HN (to a mixed reception).
Yep can confirm - if you know who this is, then it’s obvious who they are talking about.
Is that the company which shall not be named?
I’m not going to name them because for some reason these comments have chosen not to mention them by name, but they’re not a secret company - they’ve had a lot of posts on here on HN… they do cool shit and are super smart, but I guess the biggest reason people don’t like to talk about them is they’re a secret weapon and you don’t want others to have your advantage (even though everyone knows about them lol)
who is it?
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 have heard/read of these people but people I know who work at hospitals doing MUMPS get paid very little. Same for COBOL programmers. There are some mythical people who make bank but most COBOL guys make way less than the typical JS guy.
Are they the original employees who started decades ago? If so, that’s no surprise. My aunt was in the same position years ago, despite my attempts to update her on modern salaries.
Those awesome salaries tend to be paid to mercenaries and not the lifers.
And only to a very small subset of the mercenaries. Most institutions that hire COBOL or MUMPS people can't fathom paying a lowly "IT" guy that much money. They prefer to hire some cheap offshore guys.
> respectfully
I think you mean "respectively"
You are right! Though I do have immense respect for those languages - not love, but respect. The way one respects a grouchy aging tiger. Not extinct, its ilk will be around forever, and I don’t want to be the one caring for it.
Your comment reminded me of a certain other tiger that one might want to be careful around..! https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/05/26
As a 30-something "full stack web developer" who has also spent the last 3-4 years learning about IBM i (aka AS/400) servers and the CL and RPG programming languages... I have a glimmer of hope that I might move into a gig like that in my twilight years of employment :)
I highly doubt that those gigs will exist in the future, or will become even rare than they are. The big banks and financial companies are making a decent effort to get rid of those legacy systems (but are on decade + time scales). They also are weary to even hire new people in those stacks, and are increasingly relying on contractors through places like TCS that will put people through bootcamps. I know several places that have the policy of no new cobol code, only maintenance. These people with the ludicrous salaries, I assume are consultants, or have even more niche specific and rare skills beyond just COBOL and JCL and RPG or whatever, probably with specific, ancient implementations on ancient machines.
Multiple airlines do this as well.
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.
What in the world... I'm a FAANG employee - I think I'm around 18 years of experience now (I stopped counting) - with a great resume (or so I'm told), and I can't even get 100K jobs to respond to me let alone FAANG jobs. I'm talking about the initial step too; I've had zero interviews or screenings.
That sounds odd. With that much experience you should at least be getting offers in the 200k range easily. Are you cold applying or using referrals? I found these days CVs get screened by software that's very sensitive to keywords, and it's very easy to get auto-rejected.
I documented my process of getting job offers here, you can check it out in case it helps
https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-experience-getting-offers-...
This is a pro Blind post and I appreciate that you took the time to write it up in such detail :)
Online applications are a black hole. I was a staff SWE at Google at the end of 2021 and my online applications ever got a response. I networked a bit and ended up with two strong offers.
Another data point from a couple months ago -- I have about 15 years of experience including FAANG, went on the job market (fully remote only; I'm not in SF) and ended up with two offers. Senior SWE at a small but public tech company everyone has heard of, and Staff at a late-stage startup on track to IPO ~next year. Both offers were about $500k (the startup a little more but paper money); I took the former one.
I've also spent large parts of my career as an independent consultant -- similar compensation most years.
Similar. Tier 2, maybe, you've heard of them but definitely not in the FAANG range. They are public and about $8B revenue.
Staff PM, around $250k base, 20% bonus, and $150k RSUs per year so pretty much on the money with yours, $450k TC.
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
High risk stuff pays well but I take my decent salary making crud web apps over it, along with work life balance and no stress.
Same. I'm 40, and I have a wife and child. I will absolutely give up those rock star salaries if it means having the time to spend with them, and not taking ulcer medication.
Why would gambling be high risk for employees? Unless you compare it to some cushy govt job it isn't really more "layoff-prone" than others.
The risk is that if you ever want to leave the gambling industry you'll be the candidate who made their living swindling vulnerable people.
Really interesting how this is viewed in different countries. How far does this go? Does this include Gacha game devs? How about people working on loot boxes in gaming (like finance/marketing people who come up with new boxes)? Or NFTs or crypto in general?
I wouldn't even thought to think about people coming from gambling companies differently.
I live close to a city with a bunch of gambling companies and yeah, devs at those companies are definitely judged for their choices, similar to people who work for crypto / NFT companies. It has a reputational risk similar to working for porn companies (but less severe).
Capitalist societies where the alternative to employment is destitution can force people into working at huge online gambling companies due to the need for employment and their responsibility (kids, aging parents, etc)
While I agree in an ideal world, individuals should all stand up against unethical employment options, I am also mature enough to know not to penalise someone who might be otherwise meritorious based on what could be situational.
We should take a stand against predatory companies that attack the vulnerable, but this should be done at a government level, not an individual employee level, because it’s a much more efficient utilisation of resources for a large organisation with teeth to be subdued by another large organisation with teeth.
I would hire someone who used to be in gambling (if they were a good fit culturally and technically of course) because that would take a skilled developer OUT of the gambling industry, implying that you shouldn’t hire someone who used to work in gambling is a sure way to make sure that predatory industry keeps enough developers to keep shirking the poor
People can absolutely be forced into working immoral jobs by muh capitalism, but some of you are way too enthusiastic about it. Someone doing blue team work for MGM after getting laid off in 2022 is one thing, a Staff Addiction Engineer looking to try a new industry in 2019 is another completely. Secondly, I agree that we should be hiring good people out of these industries, but there are a lot of people who just aren't going to be comfortable with that.
> but there are a lot of people who just aren't going to be comfortable with that.
Actual LOL - who? I’ve worked at enormous orgs, Google, to medium sized orgs, to startups over my 20 year career, as a senior dev, engineering lead, CTO and now founder, I have hired and mentored hundreds, maybe close to 1000 engineers, hiring managers, project managers, and this has never ever been an issue, in one case we hired 20 engineers from Betsson, a huge (~400M/y) gambling company in Malta into a much larger organisation (non-gambling), and nobody from senior management, middle management or engineers ever even raised this point.
I think you are uncomfortable with it, and are projecting that starry-eyed wishful and naive thinking onto others by saying “a lot of people aren’t going to be comfortable with that”
I have 20 years experience working in 9 different countries, all with very different cultures, that says otherwise, nobody has ever mentioned it.
I've seen it on HN (phpnode said as much just in this same thread), I've heard people say it in person at meetups and cons, and I've had other interviewers discuss it after interviews. Maybe people aren't willing to discuss concerns like that with you.
Layoffs are not the primary risk of being an employee at a gambling company.
I would be worried about organized crime. All sorts of sketchy things go on. The only sports event at my Uni where I wasn't able to photograph was college tennis because they have a problem with people past-posting on college tennis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_betting
On one level I can understand the thrill of having some money riding on a game but I am baffled by the prop bets. Fixing a whole game is not so easy and rather risky, but influencing the silly little events some people bet on looks easy and hard to stop. It's particularly crazy that people bet on decisions by individuals and small groups as opposed to the outcome of a contest.
Gambling itself is sketchy but legally hired employees especially developer-level have to be somehow protected from the decisions of the business, no? Unless you're worried about the crime itself (as in somebody might threaten you personally and send you to a hospital kind of thing) and not prosecution.
You’ve piqued my curiosity. What would you say is the primary risk of being an employee at a gambling company?
Possibly reputation risk. Future employers may pass over applicants that worked at gambling companies if they consider it unsavory.
Crime, criminals. Mostly organized crime, but the occasional whack jobs who “just need an edge”. Doesn’t matter where you are in the organizational hierarchy, I’d argue the most at risk are the lowest level employees.
I have no expertise here but I'd guess changes in legislation torpedo'ing the business model is probably a big risk.
All startups are probably way more risky. Law works against gambling. Entire market works against startups.
Then what is? I know the higher ups / owners have to deal with some straight up mafia shit or money laundering but a gambling company doesn't really look bad on a CV the way porn industry or even a government job (at least here in Poland) does.
You might not easily find another job after
Maybe it's a country thing but here in Poland no one would care. Various forms of gambling are legal under supervision of authorities so legal companies exist around that.
Unlike porn it wouldn't really be an embarrassing topic on an interview. Lots of interesting technical stuff to deal with in such a job.
I would be equally embarrassed if either of those were on my resume. I'd have similar levels of embarrassment with alcohol, firearms, cannabis or politics. You don't want your resume to suggest you are controversial in anyway. Maybe 80% of the people you run across will be cool with it, but it only takes one person in a company to veto your resume and there are usually 3+ people that look at a resume with veto power. It'll close doors for sure.
Interesting topic because I wouldn't want to work with those 20% who reject people based on n-th level relationship to anything controversial. I get not wanting to deal with people who run these things but employees? Those "anti-political" places typically mean a specific side (depending on your country that may anti-right in western countries and anti-left in eastern).
When I worked in the office before 2019 we had all kinds of people there. It was kind of beautiful in a way. Straight up communists discussing stuff with conservatives without any heat. Isolation breeds extremism.
It's true that it would close doors but man until the market takes that choice away from me I don't want to open those, and I say that as a guy who never worked with any of this even indirectly. And to be fair - not having experience with those things also closes doors, just different ones.
You asked why that would be a problem, not that we agree. I like your point of view but I think in general society is less diverse than our personal experience. At least in my country, which is a mix of very liberal and very conservative (Brazil), most recruiters would discriminate against gambling and porn, not by the other tech people but from the other areas of the company. Less likely to happen in a full tech company.
There's also the issue of money. If you are turned down for a job that would have paid 20% more because of working in a controversial industry that can have a big impact on your life. I'd prefer to be able to have civil discussions about politics with coworkers, but I don't care enough to sacrifice even 1% of my salary. This entire Ask HN is about income maximizing after all. I think getting into vice or anything controversial is a bad long term move, even if it includes a sizable temporary bump in compensation.
> If you are turned down for a job
If you don’t take a job that would pay more you are also hurting your income opportunities. Turning a job down because of some hypothetical problem at some future date isn’t rational imo.
If you genuinely believe certain industries would hurt your future job prospects, you need to quantify the risk. And I have a hard time believing the particular industry would matter at all to an employer. If you can build CRUD apps for a gambling company you can build CRUD apps for a pediatric cancer charity.
What are some examples of unsexy industries that are high paying?
Ironically probably porn is the most unsexy on a CV.
Funny I worked for a place that, before I was there, was a major vendor of search engines for the porn industry despite the owner being a conservative mutual fund manager. (e.g. I had a poster for an ETN I liked on the wall of my office and it got taken down before he visited)
I know things went bad and I had something in my contract that I'd be immediately dismissed if I was found to have pornography on my laptop or any other computer belonging to the company.
Right now, anyone who works in text-to-image or interacts with the website Civit.AI is effectively “working in porn” as an AI engineer.
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.)
Just going to jot down some thoughts about this, as it's something I'm very familiar with.
GS-15s aren't particularly common (fedscope data says 3.1% of federal employees are GS-15) and overwhelmingly they are supervisory positions (or more commonly supervisor-of-supervisors). Even if you do find a non-supervisor GS-15, the federal government mostly contracts development, so it's exceptionally rare to find a federal engineering position that does something other than contract oversight (generically called acquisition). I'm not saying those positions don't exist, they are just rare, and typically reserved for promotions from within the agency or federal government. Also, since GS-15 is so senior in the federal government, even if the position is technical it will start to be political.
Pay is pretty low for new grads and experienced engineers, but decent when you're in the ~3-8 year range of experience. Most agencies are hiring new grads at GS-7 or GS-9 (in SF that's $61k to $75k to start) which is a joke. So even if you can get on at a federal agency as a GS-14 or GS-15 level, you'll have an exceptionally hard time hiring new engineers. Pay at the high end, especially in HCOL areas, very quickly hits the congressional limit and makes it pointless to seek promotion (Look at the SF are GS-14 table: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... ). You can theorhetically bonus up to 20-25%, and I've heard that some intelligence agencies just do that across the board, but most agencies are probably giving a 2-3% bonuses each year.
This is a sad and interesting factoid: Long ago congress passed a law saying they need to track federal vs private sector pay and adjust the pay to federal employees to match that. Of course, there is an exception that allows the president to disband this requirement in case of national emergency. So now every year the president literally writes a letter declaring a national emergency and manually decides what the pay increase will be, which is always significantly lower than what is recommended. Here are the national emergency letters from 2023 and 2022, but they have been issued by every president for decades now:
2023: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action... 2022: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
Benefits are good, but not amazing. Yes, there is a pension and a wide variety of health insurance options, but they're mediocre compared to what a lot of high-paying tech jobs offer. TSP is basically vanguard with lower fees and a 4% match. You can look at the healthcare options here: https://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/plan-inf...
The 40-hour work week it completely true. If you're trying to work overtime, you'll actively be discouraged and told to stop it and go home. There is generally support for telework, but it's very political, and who knows if it will get killed in the future.
Lots of agencies, especially the agencies that need a lot of technical work, will require you get a security clearance and that comes with it's own considerations. Drug use and foreign contacts are a big problem and makes recruiting even more difficult.
It's possible to find a job at some agencies working on stuff that feels very rewarding and very important, but you will always constantly feel like the bureaucracy is constantly fighting you.
"Most agencies are hiring new grads at GS-7 or GS-9 (in SF that's $61k to $75k to start) which is a joke."
This has not been my experience, my agency hires new PhDs at the GS-13 level and BS/MS graduates at the GS-12 level. But YMMV.
"It's possible to find a job at some agencies working on stuff that feels very rewarding and very important, but you will always constantly feel like the bureaucracy is constantly fighting you."
Concur.
Of course, government jobs are very stable, which can be an advantage or not depending on what you want out of life. We find that most of the engineers we are able to recruit have been to industry or academia and found the instability and poor life balance to be incompatible with having a family. So my "new" recruits tend to be a little older, married, with a child or two. On the other hand, many of my actual younger hires eventually get headhunted and leave for industry to make 2x more than I can pay them. Then they find out that on an hourly basis they're making roughly the same amount, because their new jobs expect 20-40 hours of unpaid overtime.
This is being a software engineer?
At this point you'd typically be managing a team of software developers. But yes.
> 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.
This is incorrect information. Check out levels.fyi. The average stock grant for Meta E6 is well over $1M/4years. Just one example. Plenty of data on other companies offers there.
E6 is adjacent to Engineering Manager at Meta.
Companies give the option to either go Management Track (Manager, Director VP) or Technical Track (Principal/E6, Fellow, Distinguished Engineer)
In public companies, most Engineers will peak at the L5/L64/SDE3/E5 level by their 30s.
> Plenty of data on other companies offers there
Plenty of companies offer that kind of compensation, but the competition is intense as the number of roles paying that much are limited, and WLB is atrocious as it's basically a Architect/Team Lead role.
If anyone thinks they deserve a L6/L7 role with less than a decade of experience at peer companies they need to adjust their expectations or remain unemployed
> If anyone thinks they deserve a L6/L7 role with less than a decade of experience at peer companies they need to adjust their expectations or remain unemployed
I think a lot of HN commenters simply assume that every role at these companies is L6/L7+ and pays $1M/yr or whatever the meme is currently. Like it's the default for "Software Engineer" at these companies. In reality, these roles are exceedingly rare. You won't even often see them publicly posted, simply because there are just not many of them.
People see one example of this kind of compensation and declare, "See, it is possible to make this money at a FAANG." which is true, but in the same sense that it is technically possible to get struck by lightning. Your median FAANG employee is probably L4 and not making $1M/yr in compensation. They're probably not even making $150K, depending on their location.
> Your median FAANG employee is probably L4 and not making $1M/yr in compensation. They're probably not even making $150K, depending on their location
While OP overestimates salaries, you are doing the opposite and underestimating salaries for most mid-career SWEs working a Software companies in the US.
Most L4/5 equivalent engineers across the US will end up earning around $150-250k Base, 10-20% Bonus, and around $50-150k/yr in stocks assuming they are working for a Software Company as a SWE (eg. Salesforce in Indianapolis or VMWare/Broadcom in RTP or Denver - let alone the Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, and NYC scene).
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.
> "..where software is critical to them continuing to make that money.."
Having worked in the finance world, where the wheels are made out of software at this point, I never got the feeling that the old guard that still ran the place fully understood how crucial software was to their business, and how much it saved in labour costs.
The software department was generally seen as a cost center, with the salaries and outsourcing of projects reflecting that.
So I agree with the sentiment, just saying it doesn't always hold up.
Great way to grow new guard buisnesses.
Monzo, N26, Revolut and all of the other nouveau banks would agree with you.
But they don't pay well, so...
Also, look for those goldrush phases where there is lots of money thrown around eg now AI,
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..
> ... adult/gambling ...
Interested. Tell me more.
can you share some names of these hft/crypto firms?
Don’t ignore the other aspects of compensation: raises, bonuses, vacation days, health insurance, etc.
It’s not just salary.
> It’s not just salary.
The "not just salary" bit is very often used as a mirage intended to fool employees to take a lower compensation than what they can get, and then tag a bunch of conditions that can't possibly or realistically be met.
There is certainly a balance to be struck. Being in a meat grinder that pays well is not super fun, and a lot of people would gladly take 70-80% of that in exchange for work/life balance and strong PTO.
TBH that's one of the reasons I chose the company I'm at now. I had other options, but having a team that I love and very healthy PTO won me over. To each their own!
Sometimes money is really not the only variable, unless it's a very large amount, say half a million.
For people with family, I believe a good insurance plan and flexibility in hours also mean a lot. Especially hours.
> For people with family, I believe a good insurance plan and flexibility in hours also mean a lot.
Healthcare is one of those things that's a perk in the US, but is not such a big deal in most western countries. Hopefully the US will be able to benefit from that someday.
Healthcare isn't much of a differentiator in the kinds of jobs being discussed here. Pretty much all of them will have good healthcare plans that are as close to free for the employee as the IRS and insurers will allow.
You still have to interact with the insanity of the American healthcare system, but you're not being financially ruined by it.
> a good insurance plan
Can be purchased with money.
> flexibility in hours
Hard to not get flexibility if remote is on the table, which it usually is for these jobs.
When I was a consultant, I could not find a health insurance plan that was even vaguely the equal of my current job's health insurance. Not too expensive, but simply not offered.
That's not to say that job insurance is automatically good -- the job I had before being a consultant had worse health insurance that was a little worse than the plans I had as a consultant.
My plan next time I'm doing any kind of c2c type work will be to setup with trinet or another similar company to handle payroll benefits, even if it is just me.
You'd still have GP's problem of not finding any decent health insurance offered for a single-employee business. Google "adverse selection."
The health insurance would be from TriNet (not a single-employee business). There are similar collective businesses.
Good luck with that... I don't know what your definition of "good" is, but in looking around when my cobra policy ran out, there were definitely limited options, none of which came close to what most of the worker policies offered, and none covered my retina doctor. The eye injections I get would be more out of pocket than my net income right now... and after 7 months out of work, I was seriously considering jobs paying roughly half of where I'd been the past few years just to maintain a good insurance plan.
I had about 12 months of buffer, but several unplanned home and auto repairs ate into that.
Members of my family have serious health problems, and the company’s PPO plans cover medical treatments with world-class providers. It would probably be prohibitively expensive for us to purchase such a plan on the open market.
Basically a modern form of company town?
Instead of being indentured by spending company scrip at the company store you're staying because of health insurance that would otherwise be unaffordable to you.
Yeah, well. This is America.
That certainly can be true (not universally) when a company that might give you an offer is saying it.
If it’s coming from a peer, especially one whose been round a few more blocks than you, may just be an observation about life.
When I was younger, the salary definitely would have been the top deciding factor. These days I'd willingly give up $50K for an extra 4 weeks of PTO. And none of that "unlimited PTO" bullshit either.
I am part of the group that misses unlimited PTO. I was averaging 8-9 weeks of time off under the unlimited model while I am capped at 5 weeks at a company with actual PTO.
The only difference is that I get paid out any remaining PTO, should I leave, whereas with unlimited, there was no expectation that it will be paid out on departure.
I also came from a place with unlimited and I loved it. Makes me wonder if the people that regurgitate the notion that it's a trap actually have worked in places with unlimited.
Agreed. I was skeptical at first, but I've worked at several companies with unlimited PTO and they all specifically encouraged people to take time off. One place was explicit that the reason they switched to unlimited was to get people to take vacations: "PTO is not meant to be a bonus when you leave the company. We want you to rest and recharge."
My current company recently made a rule that you have to apply for time off through the HR software. Not make it harder to take PTO—all requests are auto-approved-just so HR can track it. At the next all-hands the CEO said something like "You guys work really hard... we're, uh, worried." My manager has been bugging me to take a proper vacation instead of my usual day off here and there.
There are certainly awful, exploitative workplaces out there. But there are also great companies run by good people.
There are three situations from what I've seen, one is toxic workplaces where PTO is closely tracked and people who use it are punished (socially or otherwise). That happens more often in unlimited PTO places, but absolutely happens in places with traditional PTO plans too. Second you have the more common situation where without a use-it-or-lose-it resource people end up taking less PTO than they would normally, this happens naturally A LOT. Third are people who have never worked somewhere with unlimited PTO who are justifying to themselves and others why it's bad :)
I've only heard bad things about unlimited PTO, but I've only experienced good things. I've worked at two places with unlimited PTO, and at both, I typically took ~5 weeks and nobody had an issue.
At one place I worked at, they only gave 3 weeks, but with the option to "buy" a 4th week with a slight salary reduction that effectively made that 4th week unpaid, but with the loss of pay spread out over the year. It was nice, though I actually wish I could have taken more, especially since the company did a shutdown between Christmas and New Years and forced you to burn a week of PTO at that time, which meant that you really only got 2 or 3 weeks throughout the year to do what you wanted.
Depends on the work culture certainly. Unlimited is, if course, not really unlimited. But whether (for a good performer) it's culturally 2 weeks or 6 weeks matters a lot. Even in an old-fashioned regular PTO company, I had people--though not my managers--incredulous that I would take 4 weeks of out-of-contact time.
More recently, someone I know who worked at a well-known unlimited PTO company told me that a newly hired head of corporate communications quit in short order because the CEO would actually go radio silence on vacation and they couldn't deal with that.
I've heard from friends who worked at an "unlimited" place who said there was a soft threshold at 4 weeks. If you took more than that your boss would very quickly give you a call to discuss it.
FWIW, no I have not worked in a place with unlimited PTO. Heard a lot of negatives though and that's what scares me off it. The peer pressure to not take PTO would make it difficult for me to actually relax. Everyone is different though and I'm sure there are places where it works. But it's hard to determine that during the interview process. So I'd rather have the guarantee of x number of weeks of PTO where x>5.
It is fairly common, it has been my experience and that of others I talked to, that unlimited in many companies means that you can take 3/4 weeks per year of time off, but you need the authorization of your manager or HR for any additional day. Which is not unlimited, but that's the word these companies use.
I believe it's not intended to be a trap; it's not to encourage taking more or less than a typical amount. Rather, it's done to avoid paying out on termination in places that require doing so as mentioned earlier.
Yeah, when you're young, salary being top factor makes sense. You want to build up a savings, put a down payment on a house, buy a nice car.
10 years later, the car is paid off, you've got a sizable savings, and your increased salary over the years means your mortgage payment represents a much smaller portion of your salary, and you're already capping out the 401(k) contribution limit. At that point, you're ready to start relaxing a bit. You'd rather have the PTO. Alternatively, your savings account is now a decent safety net and you're ready to take a job that has a lower salary in favor of more stock, or even play the startup lottery.
All of these are very significant at a FAANG and generally not as great elsewhere.
Start your own business & you COULD make way more than a FAANG salary!
With the most likely outcome being 0.
[dead]
You COULD also make way less than a FAANG salary.
At FAANG you will definitely make exactly as much as a FAANG salary.
Or with far higher likelihood, sending your entire saving down the drain
You don't have to quit your day job while starting a business. And a business can be started for nearly $0.
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.
> the kind of job where you need security clearance and a full background check
That's like saying "a tech job". Most jobs that require those things pay poorly. Big defense contractors like Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, etc. pay worse than most tech companies. I have over a dozen friends in defense (I used to work for a defense contractor) and none earn comparably to big tech. It's not a matter of clearance, to be clear - most of those dozen have TS/SCI and had to go through a full polygraph.
Unless you meant working directly for the government, not a contractor. That would put you on the GS payscale, which does not have carveouts for SWEs, meaning it won't pay as well as any private developer role.
Yes I’ve read this is a huge problem for these agencies. They invest in training people, getting them clearances, etc and then the people leave for the private sector because they make 5x as an ex-NSA cybersecurity expert etc.
Why we need to legalize weed, cus the glowies have already asked for it since they lose so much talent to the herb.
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?
More money now means less/no work later, whether its something more flexible or just earlier retirement.
With the way compounding works, highly paid years when you're young and can invest much of it sets you up for financial independence and much less money stress for the rest of your entire life, no matter what you want to do. I don't worry about getting fired or laid off or the stress of finding the next job because there is no financial stress about it.
Plus in my career so far, the best paying jobs have also been the best culture and WLB. People incorrectly think these big tech jobs are a constant long hours grind. IME, the absolute worst working hours and culture have been in startups and small businesses, with lower comp and equity lottery tickets with an EV of 0.
I'm not a maximize comp at all costs robot, but it's a big big factor. I'm selling my time and labor and I want to get a good value for it while I can. There's no guarantees these 300k+ years will continue. Get it while the gettin's good.
if one lives in a HCOL area and does not have family to pay for their living situation, the choice can be move to another state or get a FAANG salary.
Getting rent raises that are 1000% higher than annual salary raises, childcare costing like renting another apartment each month, per child, has become the norm
Spend enough time in a major US metropolin and you figure its about 50/50 people with very high income, and people who's family is funding their lifestyle
As someone who lived in SF on around 90k a year, I am doubtful this is true even if that was a few years back.
If you live in NYC and want to own where your family can live on a single income, then it's important to be north of 300k.
For me, it’s knowing that with a little hard work and a bit more luck in the stock market, I can FIRE after 5 years and actually enjoy my life while I’m still young…
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 think most would agree $250k is a comfortable lifestyle, but if your neighbor is making $1M/year in the same profession just because he works at a different company, a bit of bitterness and or desire for more is hard to combat. Your neighbor can retire at 45 with $10M+, why should you be content with the low end of upper middle class and working until 60 for a more average retirement?
I don't disagree, just to your point about early retirement, be aware of what you really want vs just chasing comp. If it's comp, then it also begs the question of why not FAANG then.
This is exactly it. Chasing high salaries for many of us isn't about buying more expensive things. It's about obtaining freedom in your life as early as possible. Add in a family, and the only way to do it in your mid 40s when your body is still capable of doing anything, is to make numbers like what you mentioned.
A common retort is "stop working for FAANGs, then maybe you won't be in such a rush to get out". I completely disagree. I don't care who I'm working for, even if it's myself, it's the fact that my time is controlled by some outside force that I'm trying to escape.
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...
IBM isn't the big deal that it used to be.
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.
FWIW I think having your descendants live in a HCOL country is underrated.
Bytedance, Nvidia, OpenAI, Stripe, Anthropic, Checkout.com, maybe parts of Shopify
Nvidia is based on past performance. An offer letter from them doesn't come very close to FAANG
Shopify’s salaries are nowhere near competitive. No clue where you got that from.
I encourage the downvoters to provide evidence to the contrary.
Maybe for Canada.
I say this as a Canadian living in Ottawa, their salaries are not good.
Yep, you're better off working for a US-based company with a presence in Canada.
The non-FAANG big and mid names offer dramatically higher comp than Shopify, and it's pretty sad.
They used to give a pretty good stock package but it lead to chaos in the company when the stock went down 10x and people were paid 50% stock.
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'm under the impression that Google/Microsoft etc get paid far less in the UK than in the US though, would you say that's correct? I've been working in the UK since the late 90s. Started in banking and banking contracts are still probably the primary source of big cash in the UK as there aren't many startup and much less FANG. I moved away from banking pretty quickly as I didn't really want to stay in London much longer and found the work fairly boring. Maybe I just don't like money :-( .
Yeah the employers side of hiring someone in UK/Ireland is far more expensive than in the US, plus we have incredibly strong workers rights and mandatory 23 day paid leave + 11 other bank holidays/national holidays a year. Not to mention redundancy pay. Downsizing ain't a knee-jerk thing here, it's a costly process.
In France its basically like they don't want a tech sector. Employee's rights are skewed so far to the left that Employers are often hamstrung and startup-culture is completely stagnant. Even running a Cafe you can end up paying an employee for a year or two who literally can't or won't show up for work.
In short though, Ireland/UK/Belgium are the highest paying areas for tech in Europe outside of a few select Financial/Banking enclaves in Geneva and Zurich, with the majority of non-FAANG Seniors capping out at €120k or thereabouts without going into the niche areas like SRE or Algo or Cloud Architect.
> Downsizing ain't a knee-jerk thing here, it's a costly process.
Not if you're less than 2 years in the company (in the UK). Which probably applies to a large proportion of software engineers.
IME it feels like companies/managers haven't realised the power this gives them. Some are still using formal probation periods - remember, a probation can't remove legal rights, only delay additional rights - and undergoing normal redundancies rather than cheaply cutting the newer employees.
For sure, less than 104 week's service means no entitlement to statutory redundancy payments. However, the redundancy process affords other protections.
The major one is an unfair dismissal claim against the company on the basis that the redundancy is not a genuine one - you can't just re-hire for the same or an equivalent but differently named position.
The other ones relate to fair procedures and fair selection. The Twitter Exec in Ireland who got an injunction is a good one;
https://www.irishtimes.com/technology/big-tech/2022/11/25/du... {Incognito or no JS for paywall}
Or the Wix developer who was paid out €35,000 compensation when she was fired after she labelled Israel a “terrorist state” on social media, because the manner in which Wix had dismissed her had been “procedurally unfair.”
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/israeli-tech-firm-ordere...
Meta etc pay less in UK but not much less. Still a lot by any measure.
Are you guys hiring :D?
I saw a 450k for a C++ dev in a HFT firm in Switzerland.
Never saw anything like this (also in Switzerland). Seems also especial hard to find a Rust job here (which is just what's most fun these days).
Apart from the fact that the only truth comes from the W2 tax document or equivalent, FAANGs jobs are, in general and in the grand scheme of things, fairly accessible, while some very high-paying jobs people are talking about here are the equivalent of "I saw someone making 5 million USD per year playing soccer".
I've never seen a HFT opening that didn't require existing HFT experience :) Similar to game dev positions, but these pay pennies of course.
> 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:
For example, I've never been a big risk taker, but I've made peace with it. Instead, I picked the top (or I thought so) late-stage startups in a category that I like, and I picked the startups that built the products that I used daily. Also, I focus on the startups that have potential scales to build my technical and product chops, as I'm interested in build general abstractions and systems, and am not patient or excited to deal with nitty-gritty details of a customer-facing product. I didn't become filthy rich of course, but my life has been exceedingly comfortable so far with me almost always focusing on building the things I like.Regular jack off mid western SWE, here. I come to these threads and cry.
Canadian SWE here, who works for half the money that my US colleagues get (same team, same project...): you are not alone.
At least you're a SWE :)
I made $1.5 million last year selling online data engineering courses.
Would you be willing to teach me how to do this. Develop a course from my expertise (programming/python/whatever) for like 20% of the profits?
I was recently wondering if people can still make good money this way, with the proliferation and noise out there of online 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
But will you make FAANG salaries as an external? At my work these are the worst paid employees.
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.
This reads like a company from the fantasy world!
Or maybe just how people turn out to be when they're not constantly competing in a cutthroat environment.
I'm guessing working for a credit union is a textbook example of a stable company.
I work at a similar company. You won't find it if you chase the money/prestige.
Yeah I agree. Such a company in Canda is going to pay way below market rate, maybe 60-80k and that's not feasible for me :/
It would be nice if the pay is around 120k.
A lot of european companies are like this (in the wealthier countries at least). Even offices of multinationals tend to be like this. Work/Life balance is taken very seriously.
Yeah. My European colleagues always have super long vacations during the summer so we all envy them :D Plus the pay is not bad comparing to Canadian.
Great story. With most interviews nowadays happening on-line, how can you recognize companies such as your friend's?
> how can you recognize companies such as your friend's
The signs I've picked up so far:
When the founders are a family, things get a little weird, because the family weirdo gets tolerated.As others have said:
- The people you speak with have been at the company for a long time
- The fairness and quality of the interview process (especially w.r.t. the tech screen)
If multiple people you speak with have been with the company for more than 10 years, it's a great sign. And if the interview is really high quality and fair (such that it is an accurate representation of your skills), it's a really great sign for company quality in the intangibles.
The company I just joined is like this, and I can totally understand why people don't leave to try to continue up the total comp pyramid elsewhere.
I’m Danish so this might not apply to an American context, or even a non-Danish context. I’ve been on the hiring side of things a few times, and I’ve worked in a lot of different organisations, and what I personally look for these days is companies which let you interview them as much as they interview you. This shows that they are looking for someone to be the right fit and that they know this process goes two ways.
I had an offer recently where it was online, it had gone through one of those ridiculous LinkedIn recruiters and it had been completely “missold” (not sure what the English word for misleading a “sale” is) to me. I figured this out after about 5 minutes of me asking them questions about their place and the work they wanted me to do, at which point I flat out said something along the lines of “I think I’m the wrong fit” to which they agreed, but they wanted to offer me another type of job in architecture and management. I didn’t want that, but the process of them being very open to me interviewing them helped us both out immensely in not picking each other.
It’s obviously only something you can really engage in if you don’t “need-need” a job.
This would be pretty normal in Europe, my dad went through the same and his job was never a concern. And treatment was fully covered by the public health system. Salaries reflect that of course, can't have it all.
is the company still active?
30% less a year for 3 years is about %100 of two years. You get the bonus of getting the money upfront and you would probably get 3 month sick leave at 100% place.
Money is the same.
> [heartwarming story of how money isn't everything and when life hits you hard and death is staring you in the face, you realize it's about the personal connections and love in your life that matters most]
> "yeah, but person could have made a more money-optimal deal elsewhere."
I mean, this entire post is about how to maximize money so I shouldn't be surprised, but this response just made me shake my head in sadness. Hope you're able to find joy and feel you have enough with your choices.
I got sick a few years ago and they were great for 6 months but the constant checking in and anxiety around adds up. Then they went out of business 6 months later.
I would rather have the money upfront. And it shouldn't bring you sadness, it's a reality that sadly many of us had to face.
AI/ML unicorns.
The problem with those is that they have to raise at very high valuations because their capital costs are huge.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pretty good because they offer huge comp packages, but many of the others are mediocre because there's limited upside to their stock (rather than raising at a $50m valuation, they might raise at a $1B valuation. A $4B exit is much more life changing when you own 20x as much of the company. And they're very risky.)
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,.
Which foreign companies are paying FAANG rates? Outside of Chinese ones I can't see that happening much.
Why pay easily 50-200% more for US talent when they can often get solid talent in Japan / Europe / China / etc. Outside of a small business and localization team, why bother?
Bytedance, Coupang, etc. I assume
Really? Why? If anything I'd expect the opposite, non-American companies to eschew hiring engineers from the US because they'd cost more than equivalents in lower cost countries where those companies presumably are / can access more easily.
More expensive is better!
Anecdotally I've heard that the larger chinese tech companies love exFAANG, because 'American engineers are better'. Maybe the Silicon Valley Mythos is another export?
Or maybe the fanga ones know secrets worth paying
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.
It's all about as trustworthy as the mythical high salaries for retired mainframe developers. I've never seen a single job posting nor any other proof that this is indeed true, in fact I've saw evidence to the contrary.
Most of these jobs would never get posted in the first place, you need to already be a known entity with these groups/be trusted before they let you close to the mainframe. Have a friend in one of these roles currently, ~10hrs/wk, remote, 6 figures.
People in these roles don't want to draw attention on their sweet comp packages which is why you won't see them crow about who/where they work.
Those do exist, but as far as I'm aware the most common structure currently is that it's mainframe consulting companies and their consultants that command those salaries. Anyone in an actual employee position I've never heard of making above 100k/year.
I have a friend who went from being the form to the latter and immediately doubled his salary, despite the consulting firm making it clear that he was at the bottom of the totem pole, despite his being 5 years or so into mainframe work.
To be fair I'm in this position but it's with a small company that aren't exactly regularly hiring.
I suppose the point is, these jobs exist but it's quite hard to replicate as it's not common with large firms that are regularly hiring.
I guess people who work at these companies don't really want competition.
I work in a network (like in computer networking, not setting up events) company where I get paid 75% of the FAANG salary for an equivalent role, working one-third of the hours expected from the median FAANG worker. My company has been freezing hiring for the past 3 years. There is no risk of competition.
But why should I risk being identified by mentioning the company's name for no gain other than the fleeting thought of appreciation from a random anonymous HN user?
I come to the conclusion that this is a terrible place to discuss anything money and job related because it’s either people who live in some bubble that has nothing to do with the rest of the world or people who, like you said, are in “trust me bro” mode.
StubHub. There you go.
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
Microsoft is not FAANG.
Is that because it's actually that different, or because it would mangle the acronym?
It pays dramatically lower than actual FAANG-type companies and has a lower hiring bar to compensate. Senior positions are around half the TC you'd get at Meta.
Amazon and Microsoft are very close in their compensation; in fact they except Meta and Netflix, everyone is very close to each other.
You should check out levels.fyi if you don’t have sources from those companies.
Sorry Amazon worker, but Amazon also doesn’t deserve to be in the FAANG for the exact same reason.
Aye. I've heard MAANGA used.
They're not in the FAANG but you'd better believe they still pay well.
levels.fyi has most of these rough TCO numbers, for big orgs. SF firms pay the most but you're also paying $5900/month for an apartment with a reasonable commute in the Bay Area, and greater Seattle ain't that crazy yet.
The M in MANGA is an update from Facebook to Meta
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.
RSUs are taxed as income when they vest, it's only capital gains that are treated differently, so there wouldn't really be much benefit.
Actually yes, but you won’t find engineers compensated that way. Usually it’s the CEO. They will take a symbolic base salary (often they will say $1 but HR forces it to be minimum wage behind the scenes) and get paid with stock.
The trick is that it’s not RSUs, so not regular income. Instead it’s some form of option (I am not a tax attorney so I hesitate to state the type of option, there’s a variety of them that are used with different limitations). I believe they exercise 83(b) style to avoid AMT as well.
As usual, you need to already have a lot of money to make this work. Tax avoidance is amazingly accessible once you have enough money. One trick I could do, but don’t — my bank gives me a line of credit based on assets they manage for me. I could quit my job and easily live for years just using the LoC and report zero income other than passive income from rebalancing trades (which are very minimal).
How is that a trick? You wouldn't actually have any income ...
It’s a trick because I’m effectively spending my gains without having to recognize them.
I don’t see how it would be any different for US taxes. When publicly traded stock vests you are taxed on value of the stock at that time as income. So, it is treated the same as if you received it as cash compensation for tax purposes.
I can’t speak to non-public company stock though.
I remember hearing that it was possible at Netflix a long time ago, but I assume not any more.
Yes, many AI startups pay more than FAANG for ML talent.
I think FAANG-like big IC offers right now are flying around for technical people familiar with the current hot "AI" methods. A lot of hype, a lot of situational ethics around copyright, and some investment scams, but some of the tech is ready for legitimate things people want to do, at acceptable quality levels for the application.
Also, one thing that happened early in the dotcom gold rush is that a ton of people swarmed in, all suddenly acting like experts and professionals, with little/no prior experience. Meanwhile, Internet people who were also prolific programmers were, like, who are all these people, and why do many of them have fashionable eyeglasses like nerds would never try to pull off. I don't know how much we'll see something like that this time.
agree 100% with this nice comment from a fellow dot-com crash observer.
Many HackerNews readers are young'uns who are seduced by FANG salaries, and the latest AI/ML bandwagon. They dont have the perspective one gets having seeing the highs and the lows.
I can bet there will be another rude awakening around the corner which will wipe out the "pretenders". After the dot-com bust, many pretenders left the silicon valley with anecdotes of leased BMWs abandoned at SFO airport.
After the AI/ML hype deflates, there is likely to be a similar separation. Folks in it for real will be separated from the folks who came in for the riches.
And for the history-buffs this rhymes with the CA gold-rush circa late 1800s - some found it, most didnt, levis profited selling denims to them.
But will that still be true in 6-12 months when the bubble pops?
>-- 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 ;)
I am reminded of how completely wrong I can be.
With all the layoffs over recent times there may never be another message like that.
Not a single one.
I guess you would have to look over old comments if you want to re-live the experience.
Sorry to be so misleading or hurting anybody's feelings.
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
RSUs are income and the expected value must be factored in when discussing the total compensation offered. Those are not the options that LLM-wrapper companies sling around like candy at Halloween.
yes, that is true. My target comp is around $370k. My actual comp this year will be ~470k due to stock increase of my initial grant.
Eventually it will normalize closer to the lower end as my large initial grant is replaced by refreshers, unless the stock continues to go up dramatically, which is unlikely.
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’ll be sure to tell that to my landlord.
> Controlling spending is something one can control to some extent once the necessities are paid for.
...
Yes: https://www.levels.fyi/leaderboard/
I made $4 million profit last financial year with my own software businesses.
What would be one piece of advice to keep in one's head for a young, aspiring entrepreneur/dev?
When someone online tells you they made millions, you have no obligation to believe them.
Best advice in this entire comment thread. Everyone on HN makes $2M/yr, has a vacation home in Tahoe and drives three Ferraris.
I like to err and still see what people have to say. Thanks for the reminder, i'll watch out!
Ha, no worries, I was mainly being cheeky.
Don't go looking for ideas. Either build for yourself or build for the obvious market gap in your industry. Anything else has a high failure rate.
Solid advice, I'm doing that, building the thing at the moment. Any thoughts on marketing and getting those first few clients?
Have a plan B.
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.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted - this is literally what two of the people I know do. They actually make more than what I make at a FAANG. The real kicker? One of their jobs is a contractual position and so they opened up a business for it and hiring family members as employees to save on taxes. So the take home pay is actually higher than me.
Doing so however carries a lot of risk and one needs to have a certain mentality to be able to actually do it (I certainly don't have that).
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.
Interviewed and was given a "huge" offer from them. 50-70% of the comp is non-liquid equity at the valuation of their choosing (ok, technically a 'third party' decides this, but I call partial shenanigans and it fluctuates wildly anyway such that a ton of their employees hired a few years ago at a ridiculous valuation are getting shafted - check blind)
It looks like they will IPO at some point, so that valuation issue should go away.
I look forward to watching the chips fall. I accepted an offer elsewhere for less money on paper and more in my bank account and I think I made a great decision. Not to mention the Stubhub culture, which upon interviewing them, I felt was toxic.
This really means very little though. Every private startup will tell you they’re 2 years out from IPO if you interview. And it’s common for employee equity to get massively diluted on the path to acquisition/IPO.
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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.
Those salary websites are very wrong.
Levels.fyi is to be trusted. 100% accurate for Google SWE ladder at least.
Can be an apples-to-oranges comparison for some other companies with large stock appreciation (e.g. Meta), where a lot of the comp number are vested TC rather than granted TC.
The numbers accurately reflect longer term employees W2s, but not the offer you’d get if you joined today.
What about it is wrong?
It's odd because top level salaries are a tool to hire the best. If someone is paying a good salary, it makes good sense to broadcast them. Otherwise, what's the point? Who's going to go after invisible carrots? All you can do is spread rumors or expect that people act on delayed rumors.
There's the argument that salaries are opaque so someone within wouldn't feel bad about getting a lower salary, but this is only really the case is someone is paying a L6 differently in US vs UAE vs India or something. But they know what market they're in.
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.
The unspoken assumption about salaries are that we picture earning that amount for the rest of our careers. $500k at one job feels much more secure and mortgage-able than $500k dependent on maintaining an illusion and level of work that will lead to burnout.
Show me the average startup engineer who has the time to be overemployed please...
I met a dude at a bachelor party who was working for three startups simultaneously.
I don’t recommend it.
Are you counting the $1m in options as compensation? If so, plenty of startups will offer you that.
The stocks come as RSUs of publicly traded shares for FAANG+. That's a lot more cash-like than the monopoly money of most startup options.
Sure they can offer it on paper, unsure if it'll be worth anything in four year or even four months.
At least with FAANG you know barring cataclysmic events It'll be valuable down the road.
To each their own. Comparing startup options to mature company RSUs is apples to oranges, and a retelling of the basic trade off between risk and reward. Upside, downside, taxes et. al. combine to inform individual decisions. Both paths have merit. Suggesting startup options are somehow inferior to RSU is simply disingenuous — I would have done much more poorly with RSU than options.
if you think the company's stock is worthless then you shouldn't expect them to be successful enough to compete with FAANG on salary