My REALISTIC, non FAANG pay over 3 years

the other day i had a conversation with an old friend who was updating me on his job search after college he was deciding between two thing offers and weighing out the culture the benefits and the compensation of each when he asked for my take on which i would choose if i ran his shoes he prefaced the question by asking me how much i was paid four years ago when i just graduated when i told him my total compensation or tc for short was less than half of his base salary he felt bad almost embarrassed and seemed like he pitied me the truth is most people aren't in fame yeah shocker right when you think of people in tech you think of people in patagonia vests getting phil's coffee on the weekend or they're hitting up their local rock climbing gym which was reimbursed by their company's wellness program what about non-fang people where's our company merch where's our six figure salary and where are the kombucha machines i remember back in college when i took an unpaid internship at a startup after getting rejected by fame they told me i'd be getting invaluable experience which to them is more important than money supposedly then i would come back and hear my friends talk about how they made the equivalent of six figures working as summer interns not doing most of the salaries i see are also pretty inflated which makes sense people are only comfortable talking about their salaries when they don't have a reason to be embarrassed you see it on glassdoor cs curate questions levels blind and even youtube we don't ever hear about the underdogs that work for those companies that always claim like they're the top 100 places to work for on linkedin in the field of software engineering and in general it can actually hurt to not know how much your peers are paid as someone who's exclusively worked in non-fan companies i'll give you a three-year progression of how much i made at each role and my experience coming in and out but before that let's explain total compensation in tech total compensation or tc for short is mainly composed of three main parts salary stock and bonuses we typically don't include benefits like 401k matching health plan or those snazzy kombucha machine privileges salary is what we're familiar with this is the amount that you're paid annually some of us are paid an equivalent wage which is common if you're a contractor or a consultant this can be a monthly bi-weekly or most commonly an hourly figure the second component is stock this tends to be the most complicated part of total compensation let's break it down first of all what is a stock a stock or share is a slice of a company that represents ownership or equity stocks are sold by the company to the people like you and me to raise money in returns for equity or for your ownership you can earn stock in a couple different ways like an employee stock purchase program or employee stock options oftentimes companies award stock in the form of rsus or restricted stock units to incentivize you to stay longer and do better work they're restricted from your access until you stay long enough to actually receive them lastly some are paid a bonus you can expect to find a signing bonus for when you get the job performance bonus for when you do well and a retention bonus for when you stay longer there are however a couple gotchas that you have to keep in mind and typically these bonuses require you to stay a certain amount of time in june of 2018 i landed my first software engineer position right out of college it was a short one-month contract at a startup in san francisco just months after i had graduated in may i received a three thousand dollar check which when extrapolated to a yearly salary would have been around thirty six thousand dollars coming into this i had a two month internship under my belt at a startup and some research experience from school i had average grades and couldn't even reverse a linked list my interview was project based thankfully i knew i didn't like front end development but i was desperate to find any job and so i learned react and redux just enough to be competent for the interview i got the offer and like a lot of college grads i took my first and only offer after being rejected so many times i confirmed that i did not like front end development because i felt like i was too visually creative and i was really bad at centering divs the idea of working in a silicon valley startup with other brilliant 20 year olds is pretty dope but ultimately i still felt uninterested and bored however it was a good way to learn what i didn't like early on in my career ultimately since my daily commute was around three hours and everything was pretty expensive especially the avocado toast i decided to fly back to san diego in october of 2018 i landed my second job here in little italy in the heart of downtown san diego this one landed me a base salary of 55 000 no stocks or bonuses but this was about a 50 increase from my last job to prepare i did around one hard one medium and 20 easy questions on lead code also there are some major life events happening at that time i just gone through a breakup there were some beat between my friend and i and i just needed a comeback probably the biggest shift for me was moving back into my parents place i just felt like a kid i worked on the back end for a new payment system which involved a lot of c-sharp and writing a lot of sql it turns out that this place was a huge ponzi scheme i mean it in the most literal sense and i nor did any of my co-workers want to be a part of that i actually ended up leaving the data that i told them which was sometime in december i studied for about one month before i got a job offer in la jolla in february of 2019 at a biotech company for a six-month contract to higher position i was initially suss at the whole six months thing but i trusted my recruiter and i was eventually hired this one cashed in at thirty five dollars an hour or seventy two thousand eight hundred dollars for salary no stocks or bonuses it was a thirty percent increase and was the first work i really enjoyed it's pretty funny i remember getting absolutely wrecked and rejected the day of my interview but the next day the hiring manager actually opened up another position for me because she said that she liked my personality this was also my first time negotiating a role not that i had a counteroffer or anything but they gave me 35 after giving me 32 when i had asked for 38. at this role i felt a little bit of imposter syndrome because i had already worked for six months and i already had left two jobs and i had no tangible experience yet anyways i worked on data engineering and etl projects that involved a lot of high availability infrastructure in aws i took on some pretty complex projects and learned a lot of python bash and high level understanding of machine learning and bioinformatics this was also the first time that i got the opportunity to work from home which is kind of crazy to think about considering that i've been working from home for about four years now six months flies by and by september of 2019 i'm no longer on a contract but a full-time employee with a salary at 80 000 this was about a 10 increase in six months still no stock or bonuses but a highlight in december was going to vancouver to attend the machine learning conference for some research my manager led what's up people i am in vancouver right now at the nurse conference nerfs sorry i said that kind of weird uh today is uh thursday december something like 11th or 12th and i really have no clue where i'm going right now i by this time i felt really confident that i was making more of an impact in my company which was something that i really valued i learned a lot about distributed systems especially in the context of kubernetes and microservices fast forward to january of 2020 the group that i worked in actually ended up getting acquired by a bigger company i negotiated my base salary to 95 000 after having asked for 115. they didn't offer me any rsu's but rather involvement in a stock purchase program where we could buy stock at a discount at certain parts of the year also if we stayed for a year we'd be issued a ten thousand dollar retention bonus with another 6500 performance bonus that i got half of clocking in my total comp at 108.250. at this point my years of experience was around two years i ended up staying for another year and a half where i would successfully reverse engineer and improve the backend of our workflow system that we inherited without any documentation from our former parent company i got a lot of hands-on experience with all the major components of aws at this point i was tackling bigger things and leading bigger efforts the last position i took before i quit my job started in june of 2021 here in torrey ponds california i was mostly a remote worker but i had the occasional weekly commute at this role i was paid 120 000 as a salary nearly 4 000 rsu's vested over four years and a 12.5 annual bonus which was around fifteen thousand dollars a quarter of the stocks vested in the first year which meant that in the first year my total compensation was around two hundred and thirty five thousand dollars the interview involved some technical system design leadership questions and some system admin stuff at this point i had three years of work experience two and a half of which were directly related to cloud architecture i had more than 100 increase in total compensation for my last role i was hired to leave their cloud migration from their on-prem servers to aws i designed and scaled their infrastructure by myself functioning as a system architect a software team lead and a developer there was a lot expected out of me and i was not prepared to tackle everything i wanted more mentorship which is what i was lacking in my previous jobs and unfortunately i got put on this role way too soon i quickly burned out from school and balancing everything going on that's when i decided to leave that job now as of february of 2022 i make zero dollars annually i'm working on a couple things but they won't produce money instantly honestly i miss the money every week i'll get recruited emails from fang and other cool startups i thought of going back to the workforce and although it may happen this year i have no intention of going back to the 9 to 5 in the short term here's the final graph that shows you my salary over the years and don't get it twisted software engineers are still paid very well in comparison to other disciplines i'm not complaining that we're not paid enough well i just wanted to highlight my experience of working as a non-fang engineer so you could have another data point to compare before i go i'm going to leave you with a couple things that i've learned number one your salary should never be tied to your self-worth number two you don't need to work in fang to make a good amount of money number three growing a career is oftentimes not linear for us in tech a lot of the big jumps happen in the beginning and middle of our careers versus maybe a business owner who realizes most of the gains later down the road number four software engineering is a career that normalizes asking for more and more money every time you get a new role once you get an offer don't be afraid to ask for more money they want you as much as you want them and the worst they can say is no often times they'll probably just meet in the middle number five don't be concerned with staying at a place for a certain amount of time to say you've been there for one two or three years if you've got a resume with keywords are smart and can show it in an interview you'll land the job number six your pay depends on a lot of things like your years of experience cost of living in your area your education sometimes and what your discipline is in like data science embedded systems web dev or app dev it's up to us to talk about them and determine whether or not we're underpaid or overpaid and that just about wraps it up so as always guys thank you for watching i hope you found this video informative and relatable let me know in the comments down below if you have an experience similar to what i had and i've got a lot of videos planned for you guys so stay tuned it's a whole list anyways peace out have a good day thanks for watching guys you

Channel: Jan Tanja

Views: 10,355

Keywords: salary, tech, professional

Id: h_O0o-ayAJw

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2022