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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."
$3 million in W2 income? Never. Bean counters would never let that happen.
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.
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.
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.
I bet it's their UI designer. He's worth every penny!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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."
Wow. Such disappoint. Much lecture. So sad.