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The Mystery/Myth of the $3 Million Google Engineer
jfruh writes "Recently Business Insider caused a minor stir among developers with dreams of riches with a story about a nameless Google engineer who's making $3 million a year. Who is this person, and how unusual are pay scales like this inside the Googleplex? Phil Johnson uses public information to try to figure out the answer. His conclusion: the $3 million engineer may exist, but is a rare bird indeed if so."
His math is bogus, double counting compensation. His source is weak, a self-reporting site with no indicators of how well it actually represents googlers.
What startup could even offer 500k salary in the first place?
$3 million in W2 income? Never. Bean counters would never let that happen.
But I know a couple of people that have sold their startups to Google and their total compensation might add up that high, but much of it's in stock that they have to hang around long enough to vest...
Honestly speaking, you must already be born into a "wage" higher than $120k, or be incredibly lucky or blessed with talent and join one of the few circles where wages aren't locked into sane figures, like sports or the stock exchange.
The reason $120k seems to be a limit is because that's about as high as people genuinely would be willing to pay others for "work". Anything higher than that isn't payment for work, but a cabal of people paying each other more than their "work" is worth, because they can.
And yes, there are probably a few cases here and there where someone's contributions shatter this apparent border legitimately, but they're probably at least as rare as this elusive $3m figure in Google.
And that's not even counting investments and other doors that open, just salaries. Once you count those, things become impossible to practically assess.
The working people, including Engineers and Attorneys top out around $120k/yr.
That's one of the most ridiculous numbers I've ever seen pulled out of any asshole. Maybe where you live it's true, but at least in NYC (and I'd bet in a few other cities as well), there's plenty of regular job-type-jobs when people can, and do, make well above that - yes, on their W-2. You just have to be really good at what you do and be worth that much to the company that hired you away from the previous company that was paying you less. Mobility is part of the key here.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
That's a really low number. $120K (base) is in the neighborhood of what most tier 1 tech companies pay good engineers with about 5-8 years experience. Add in stock/bonus/fringe, and total compensation is usually somewhat higher than that.
The eventual top-out for most folks is likely much closer to $220K (total compensation) than it is to $120K. Outside of silicon valley, YMMV, though.
I believe the article is accurate. Back in 2010, a senior staff engineer received a pre-IPO offer from Facebook, but Google gave him $3.5M to keep him. I strongly suspect that person from 2010 and this person from this current article are the same, and it's probably Jeff Dean, one of the engineers who created Map-Reduce (which led to Hadoop and all that jazz) and other engineering feats.
In Silicon Valley the salary for principal engineers is well in excess of $170k, and if you're at a company with a healthy stock price, an additional $100K in vesting RSUs per year is definitely not out of the question.
The working people, including Engineers and Attorneys top out around $120k/yr
That's not true, I can tell you several companies around the bay area where the pay scale for a senior developer tops out in the mid $130k. That's before stock grants or options. And that's not talking about Architects, Staff Engineers, etc.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No, no they really don't. Here's a source for Software Engineers: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-highest-paid-software-engineers-work-for-these-25-companies-2013-4?op=1
Note that these are *averages*, not maximums. And maximums will be a multiple of the average.
And here I was thinking it was the guy who messes with the YouTube comments user-interface every now and then.
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/halo/images/3/3d/Give_that_man_a_cookie.jpg (appropriate?)
I don't know his salary, but clearly someone like Petr, currently working at Google, deserves such an allowance (Petr is known for his genius talent in algorithmics). $3 million is 30 times what makes a good engineer - is it worth it? Or, should Google replace Petr with 30 engineers, for the same price? The thing is that at the level of Petr, none of the 30 engineers are likely to solve the complex problems that require complex algorithms. To be convinced, try to practice (or ask your best programmer friend) some of the Google Code Jam finale problems, or from topcoder...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I would add that those numbers are from glassdoor.com, whose userbase almost certainly skews young
You are either ignorant, unintelligent, or a factor of the two
I've got a "jump to conclusions" mat for you to buy. You can afford it.
I recently left a job that paid $155k in salary plus around %30 bonus for one that *only* offered $145k in salary.
...Which puts you in the top 1% of American wage earners, pretty much demonstrating that AC's point is more or less correct.
why? because of quality of life.
A luxury that must be wonderful for you to enjoy. You stepped down from the 99th percentile to the 97th. Oh, the sacrifices you've made!
And, I was not "born" into this wage; it came out of years of studying when others would call me a "nerd"
We can tell that based on your first sentence. What percentage of people do you estimate are able to pull that off, realistically? You live in a bubble world surrounded by the success stories, and thinking that because there are a few hundred thousand of you, that the tens of millions who have not enjoyed that success simply did something wrong. The fact is that you won one of the lottery seats on the magic carpet. Hard work made you eligible, but it didn't get you there on its own.
In software:
60k is wage to do work
120k is wage to do meaningful work
200k is wage to be lead on important work
300k+ is wage for work that is high risk and critical path to business success
Oh...and he works remotely, from his home in Toronto, so he's not in NYC or SF.
You realize that after SF and NYC, Toronto and Los Angeles are the next most expensive cities in North America, right? So the idea that he's making great money and living somewhere substantially cheaper is pretty dumb.
Heh...true just about anywhere these days.
If by "just about anywhere" you mean for the top 4% of wage earners, then yes. Not saying your engineers don't deserve it, but you have a badly warped sense of reality if you think it's typical of what people are making for actual labor. Professional jobs occupy a fairly small, high-end niche between the wealthy executives and idle rich and the people who do actual work. For every person making $115,000 or more, there are 25 making less. Most of them will never even be within reach of making $115k themselves, even if a chunk of the population considers that salary an economic hardship.
$120k today is like $80k 10-15 years ago.
Yes, which was still a lot of money back then. The ignorance and assumptions are mind-blowing here. No, it doesn't make you rich, and no, it doesn't go that far when you're spending $3000 of your $5600 net pay for a fairly basic residence, but that is the cost of privilege.
What startup could even offer 500k salary in the first place?
Some ~$500,000 jobs for an experienced person:
Assuming you have experience and/or the degrees to back it up, Futures Group IT, LLC in NY is offering a starting salary of $250,000-$300,000 for Java/Python developers capable of doing systems architecture for a Quant Trading System.
A similar job for a C#/WPF developer for Westbourne Partners in Chicago, IL is offering $300,000-$350,000 to start.
The Hagan-Ricci Group is offering $300,000-$400,000 to start for a Senior Equities C++ Developer in Chicago with SQL, Java, and Linux experience bumping the number up to the higher number. They are also offering $250,000-$450,000 for a Low Latency Equities C++ Developer, with your choice of NY or Chicago.
There's a UK company offering 250,000 GBP - ~$410,000 at current exchange rates - for trading systems work in London.
A lot for the willingness of the finance industry to part with this level of cash might have something to do with what happened to Sergey Aleynikov, but probably not. It's just the kind of numbers they tend to throw around.
Note that all of the above salaries are starting, and come with discretionary performance bonuses, and for the startups, can include stock options and signing bonuses.
uhm, as a silicon valley engineer (20+ yrs in the bay area), I can confirm that number is WAY wrong. even in this economy, $120k in the bay area is actually kind of low for anyone with experience and 4 yrs is enough to be at the 120k level.
engineering in the bay area stays to top out (right now) at the 160-170 level. if you are at that level, you are damned near the top in terms of being a 'working engineer' (vs a manager).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I bet it's their UI designer. He's worth every penny!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Stories like this really do nothing to disprove his point. Top 5 Silicon Valley Companies hire the cream of the crop, most of whom went to the right schools and/or know the right people and (not to dismiss their work/intellect) were "born into it". Sure your Top 5 Silicon Valley Company has a couple guys with unconventional backgrounds, maybe they went to state U or you found them working at a small midwestern industrial manufacturer, but certainly they are the exceptions to the rule.
I think the point about $120k being this sort of psychological limit is that if you do the math, you basically have the amount of money someone makes if they get paid $60/hr and work 40 hour weeks -- a very typical labor rate for many trades across all industries.
Wanna make $120k / year? Go start your own business and log 40 billable hours a week at $60 / hour. If you're busy enough, charge $100 / hour.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I was friends with Jeff Dean in high school and he was my roommate in college for a year. We don't keep in touch much but he was in Minneapolis last fall and we got together for breakfast.
If Jeff Dean is making $3M a year, you wouldn't know it. He's one of the least materialistic people I've ever known and I'd guess that between salary and stock options he could if he wanted to live a pretty high-end lifestyle. But he doesn't.
When we were planning our breakfast, he was staying St. Paul because a charity his wife is involved with was having a board meeting. He wanted to pick a place he could WALK to, which is kind of challenge if you're in downtown St. Paul. I was thinking "Walk? You don't have a town car? A rental? Or a self-driving car?"
Anyone else making a $3M a year wouldn't be walking or would want to have some kind of fancy brunch at the St. Paul Hotel (which I don't think he was staying in, either).
I even asked him as gently as I could -- "How much do you still work? I mean, you don't need to, do you?" His answer was "only about 50 hours a week." "Why?" "There's still a lot of interesting problems."
I don't think Jeff works for the money or even cares that much.
I also asked him about the NSA revelations and he said that they were "really pissed" and "making internal changes to make it a lot harder to get any useful information."
Part of your compensation is getting to live in New York.