https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/elon-musk-used-to-say-he-p...
> In conversations with recruiters we’ve heard from some candidates that OpenAI is communicating that they don’t expect to turn a profit until they reach their mission of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As with any startup, there are risks associated with equity and it’s important to consider the possibility that equity can be worth nothing.
This is weird. They don’t expect to be profitable until AGI exists? Does the monetary system we have today even matter at that point?
OpenAI is modest in employee count and extreme in employee talent, with its employees rewarded commensurately.
At that point, they are not hiring you, me or anyone who directly applies themselves via the job form.
They are hiring their friends from elite circles.
(Not that I think I would have a realistic chance, since I'm sure they're getting the best of the best applicants right now. But still.)
I am that person for myself, for my first year in the workforce.
I am also that person for myself when I was studying in college.
I think it is only interesting in the case when you are performing the exact same job, and yet the compensation varies by an order of magnitude or more.
But it's also important to note that only $300K of that is in cash. The other $600K is in profit participation, which could take years (maybe even a decade!) to be realized. It could also be worth $6M a year when it's realized.
But ultimately it's an investment of your time. Or to think of it another way, you're getting paid $900K a year but you're also investing $600K a year in OpenAI, which may end up being an amazing return or nothing at all, just like any startup investment.
Although with Sam at the helm, my guess is it will probably be worth more than $600K a year.
In the case of OpenAI you also have interesting tech and a brand that will massively accelerate your career if you want to stay in that field. So while yeah, you have to hire the best people; and OpenAI like everyone else will be paying $LOTS to a few useless engineers in the mix, I think "$900K and everyone knows it" is a pretty good substitute for talent-spotting, which anyway can't be bought.
I mean, Netflix-style hunger-games management might be their thing, and if I got in there at $900K (I did apply!) -- then sure, I'd be working nights and weekends just to shine.
But even at infinite comp, above a certain size there will be dead weight.
If one (“talent") is a stellar runner, but when the team goes on a run the "talent" has to wait for their teammates to get to the finish line, most of whom go running once every two months, and the "talent" gets dress shoes instead of spikes etc., the "real talent" is worth, to the team or company, as much as the average employee on that team.
An easy and naïve recommendation would be to remove the constraints that limit the work of talent, but it is much easier for talent to move to organizations that, for a variety of reasons, are more conducive to the expression of their abilities than to fight the inertia of organizations. Those very organizations which, for one reason or another, have existed for a long time and pay salaries to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
They can pay it, it sounds good for investors/general public, but if you take away the brand/hype fapping on "we only have the best" would sounds like a red flag to an experienced engineer.
All this money spent, yet if the open source world can catch up, it'll all be for naught.
They need a world where everyone sits atop OpenAI, not a thousand different startups with their own models.
OpenAI might pay its engineers $900k, but an AI startup founder can easily get to a $5M, $10M valuation in under a year.
A sole proprietor landscaper making $45-50K a year in California is paying $675 a year in annual registration fees just to keep his newish pickup truck on the road. Why newish? Because the people he's servicing trust a guy with a nicer work vehicle than a beaten down 30 year old Tacoma.
A $900k developer with the same pickup is also paying $675 a year.
Extrapolate this seemingly trivial example across literally EVERYTHING in life.
I can’t sell equity in a private company to exchange for goods and services like I can stock that gets deposited in my brokerage account every six months.
Edit:
I love this analogy
> Or to think of it another way, you're getting paid $900K a year but you're also investing $600K a year in OpenAI, which may end up being an amazing return or nothing at all, just like any startup investment.
Would someone invest 2/3rds of their compensation in one company? I know I diversify my RSUs within six months after getting them.
offering a lot of money attracts everyone including in-demand talent.
offering less turns away in-demand talent.
no "right to first refusal" or some transfer restriction?
We do not have marginal sales tax rates because it is not feasible.
Marginal income tax is feasible, and so it does exist in most places.
Marginal property/wealth tax is somewhere in the middle, given the difficulties in valuing thinly traded assets, and the tremendous effort required to appraise them all the time, over and over.
and if the info about the actual architecture of GPT-4 is legit, OpenAI might not have as much of an edge on the competition as they'd like people to believe. So that equity might not be worth quite as much as they think and explains why they so cagey about it in their paper on it. And why Sam Altman is calling for restrictions on research to slow down competitors
https://twitter.com/soumithchintala/status/16712671501017210...
I look at 900k$ and think wow from the perspective of my very well paid job in France.
Getting 900k$ a year would bring great things to me and probably make me retire earlier. This will not be life-changing though.
And then I think about people who earn 5% of what I do and for them multiplying their income by two would probably be truly life changing for them.
And then these 900k$ do not look that wow anymore.
That's getting close to some Nuremberg level shit. Not yet there of course but consider when the next pandemic rolls around and the anti science propaganda will be produced by these how many will die?
We know manually produced anti vaxx propaganda killed about 300 000 people in the United States (source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071... ) , what it'll be next time?
What's described here affects everyone, and is a reason to something something Gini coefficient.
Someone on $1k/year can't afford for their $50 smartphone to get damaged or stolen; on $10k/year they can't afford for their fridge to break and their food to spoil; most of us are close enough to $100k/year to not need an example; $1M/year I can't imagine, as despite my close (logarithmically) to $100k income, my expenses are closer to $10k but without the stress of low earnings.
Yeah, a bit higher than the minimum wage.
It seems to be inflated wages not based on skills but on technical fashion trends.
Mafia?
LA introduced a mansion sales tax.
Anywhere else?
My main issue with a marginal property tax is that the areas with high property values already have enough taxes generally for the things property tax covers.
Not sure at least in the US how feasible it would be to have a marginal property tax and the revenue go to the state and the Fed (or even the county's general fund in most places).
My guess is there's a 0% chance the marginal property tax could go to the Fed to reduce Federal income tax, and in most states, a low chance it could even go to the state, or even in most counties that it could go to the general fund instead of mostly to the local school district and local fire department (which are usually already funded adequately).
First, ~46% of it is gone in taxes including federal tax (~25%), state tax (~8%), FICA (~4%), and sales tax on everything you eventually use the money for (~9%).
So that's 162K left. Not a lot to pay sky-high rents, car payments, insane medical bills despite insurance, lawyers to fight said bills, save up money for parental elderly care, save up money for yourself for retirement, etc.
And yeah, having kids on that money? Very difficult.
If you're not in the bay area, different story, it's a very nice income. But they probably won't give you that package if you're remote.
And if you're in the bay and not planning on having kids, it's an okay salary.
Extrapolate this to literally anyone making less than a developer.
I know exactly how much my shares are worth on my spreadsheet -
=GOOGLEFINANCE("AMZN", "price") * number of shares
What type of goods and services can I exchange for illiquid equity or profit sharing that may or may not come years later?
How do you quantify best? Number of degrees? Publications? Association with prestigious institutions? Past work experience at top companies? Speed of problem solving? All of this is gameable once it starts being _measured_ and enough incentives exist for people to devote their life to winning the "game".
However, if you happen to hire a math olympiad winning PhD with numerous publications from a tier-1 research institution with a known track record in industry, it would be hard to argue they aren't the best. But success breeds success, and top people will keep being poached to other top places. Kinda how money makes more money.
The big issue in my opinion is defining property/wealth (not just land and cars, but also intellectual property, art, etc), and then the feasibility of appraising all of that, and then litigating those appraisals (for the populace as a whole).
Seems like it could get into quite a bit of the country’s resources going to refereeing the game, which at some point takes away from productivity.
Or are you claiming that some of the smartest AI researchers in the world are only slightly more qualified than the average high-schooler?
Either claim is roughly equally absurd.
=GOOGLEFINANCE("AMZN", "price")* (number of shares).
I can log into Fidelity and sell my shares during hours when the market is open and not at a discount.
What type of market do you think there was to buy my options in the 60 person startup that no one ever heard of at my previous company? I was paid in cash at market value so it wasn’t a big deal - and “market” for your standard enterprise CRUD developer architect was nothing to write home about compared to tech company salaries.
Yes, it's a huge problem. There are greedy people buying more houses than they can use as investment vehicles, renting them out to everyone else who can't afford housing at unaffordable prices, and that ultimately increases prices across the board on everything because local businesses and service industry also need to rent commercial space and personal space -- and that ultimately comes from greedy landlords who keep lobbying against building more housing.
Most of SF is NOT living a life that I would call "livable". Having roommates in late 30s out of necessity rather than choice, and working out of a bedroom with no sunlight and not retrofitted for earthquake and fire safety and removed of mold spores isn't even ethical IMO, but that's the reality that lots of people live in.
Comments of this nature would be much more informative if were they to begin with "what I've seen is in my professional life", "in the three or four teams I've worked on", or "according to some friends, who consider themselves to be top engineers, working in teams similar in size and scope."
Otherwise, we are left with the sometimes realistic and sometimes much more fairy tale-like story of incompetent leadership holding back talent for no other reason than incompetence or nepotism or envy of those who are smarter and more accomplished.
I have been in similar situations and considered myself a top professional, which may well be true, but in large, mature organizations, regression to average performance is largely an inevitable consequence of size and the need for coordination, a problem whose solution is not to be found in a redistribution of salaries.
How else, with a few exceptions, do employees at Google, Facebook, Uber, etc. think that back in the day things were so much better, that talent was treated better, that there was a real engineering culture, whereas now it's all about sitting in chairs, people in finance having the most power, interviews were so much harder, and we have so much technical debt?
OpenAI is, at this point, a research organization, in spirit and in purpose. If and when it becomes a "normal company," the logics of scale and scope will lead the early employees to complain about how things have evolved. But I suspect that the "let's get rid of the makers of technical debt and use the budget to give top talent more money" will not produce the expected and desired result of a renewed engineering culture, because top talent will not be as useful as it once was.
Whenever a top executive leaves a mature company (or dies, see Apple), the risk of catastrophe is aired, but catastrophe rarely occurs. There is a lesson there.
Common advice is to value earlier stage equity at zero anyway, so how the heck are people credibly calling that worth 600k...
If you're really well-known, they'll come to you. Otherwise, get an insider referral.
You surprisingly (considering you're making 5x the median household income for the US) end up having to lightly adhere to some sort of budget. With car payments, sending money to your family, and local inflated prices, it's easy to find yourself not saving enough for early retirement
I think if you just don't buy new cars or first class international plane tickets you can get by pretty comfortably though. I saved $100k a year with a pre-tax total comp of $350k for a few years in the Bay Area
You can get legal insurance as well and get all that nonsense done for $20.
Elderly people can go retire in Mexico and have a better life than whatever is possible in the US, in towns full of other retired people.
Both may be benefiting openAI here. There’s lots of places to work on LLMs but “GPT” is a product/brand that people have heard of, and if OP is to be believed then they certainly seem to be paying “enough”.
Fed + fica is 21% combined. State is 6%. Imputing sales tax doesn't make sense either - rent isn't subject to it.
Take home is a bit north of $200k. Yeah, that's affluent here. Not upper class, but solidly upper middle.
But keep in mind that Google regularly launches new products and features that are more profitable than many startups, and then shutters them, and regularly launches individual features or pieces of infra that are industry leading (or defining, as in the case of k8s). They just aren't new consumer products.
>save up money for parental elderly care
Sorry, what? Your parents? I can see that paying for 3 generations on one income can be hard.
And the dollar sign goes on the side I put it: nine hundred thousand dollars. The fact that you want to write $900k is just an idea specific to the finance world (such as using parentheses for negative numbers).
Do you usually write m4, in7 or lb9?
Or $50k to book a charter flight and just have my driver take me straight onto the tarmac, thus avoiding the airport entirely
1. It's not as bad as you describe it. Not for tech workers, at least. Please go to the lady working at Walmart and ask her about her income and living arrangements before you rant about $300k a year.
2. Of course it's by choice. Nobody is forced to live in SF or the bay area. Especially not people in tech.
I was writing mean rates, not marignal.
For 300K in CA:
- marginal is 35% federal, 9.3% state, 2.35% FICA
- mean is 24.74% federal and 8.06% state, 4.79% FICA.
> I can see that paying for 3 generations on one income can be hard.
Yes, most working class people have to care for 3 generations. Parents being wealthy enough to take care of their own retirement expenses is a small, small number. Working class people in their middle ages choosing to not have kids is also a small number.
However what this viewpoint doesn't account for are team dynamics. A strong TL can turn NNPPs into incremental positive contributors. A great programmer without leadership capabilities will not be able to outpace the technical debt. There are also more subtle dynamics depending on the structure and personality traits of the individuals. Ultimately programmer productivity is not an absolute value, it depends on the whole ecosystem (including other functions, leadership stance, etc). After doing this for 25 years (IC, TL, EM, CTO), I strongly believe a healthy team is about harnessing and orchestrating different individuals unique strengths rather than trying to set too high a bar—the latter will lead to counter-productive competition and ultimately burn out your best folks.
But this is just the bare salary - you will have to take off about 20-30% for various taxes. But then you get free healthcare and education, and retirement.
Some companies will have a bonus ("intéressement / participation") which can be an extra 10 to 20% once a year.
You would typically have a straight salary, no equity or something like that.
When you look at the most senior positions, this is about 130k€.
But it really depends on the city, on the industry etc. Generally speaking your salary is not that big, bt you have extra advantages (such as the social committee, a company-funded organization that will reimburse part of your vacation costs, give gifts at Christmas, ...)
LOL. Do you live in Mars?
If 300k is "barely livable", then how does a Starbucks barista make a living in SV?
Norway has a wealth tax of up to 1.1% of wealth, with discounts based on different types of wealth and a minimum deduction of ca. $150k. Discounts are based roughly on how liquid assets are. Houses etc. are valued at 25% of market value, so let's say you have a $600k house, the taxable value is $150k, which falls entirely within the minimum deduction, so most people pay very little wealth tax.
(I jest. I just really like that song's beat & Busta's verse in terms of sheer speed & enunciation & crispness in staying on beat.)
It might sound simple, but I've never viewed startup equity like that; thanks for the slightly different perspective.
Personally, from my life in tech, I do not feel that OpenAI has done a great job (and rather frankly, work that has been supported by both "press" and popular sentiment, because who doesn't like the heroic effort of a group of smart people facing poor odds against the Goliaths?) because management in Google or Meta cannot recognize who is writing great code.
Think about the problem of "hallucinations" with GPT. After all, it was considered a minor hiccup on the road to the AGI, a path opened by a team of mavericks. But if Google, had it been first to market, had delivered such a product, the press would have gone from "oh, that's funny, it will get better with time" to a more worrying "Google is destroying humanity with those hallucinations."
It is much easier to be innovative when you are small, hungry, with little to lose and much to gain, rather than when you are worried about your current salary or equity or reputation. It's not just a matter of paying top talent more and getting rid of more average people; I'm sure there are enough brilliant, highly paid people who have enough capital to build small, high-IQ teams in any of the major technology companies to get to GPT-like models before OpenAI. But incentives, reputation, the nature of public companies play a role in being slower, less innovative, less risk-taking.
Or by living in someone's backyard shed: https://news.stanford.edu/2021/05/04/revealing-complexities-...
Or by sharing one-bedroom apartments to split rent, and eating as little as possible, to afford closer housing and reduce commuting costs: https://www.reimaginerpe.org/20-2/Goldman
If you can't retire at 65 on 300k a year, you're not living a middle class lifestyle. Not even close.
Rent: 4k/month = 48k. Car payments 750/month = $9k. Using your post-tax numbers (which are wrong) that leaves over $100k per year for all the other random stuff you've listed, which is more than most people in the Bay Area make in a year.
(Also, you're math is wrong on the taxes; the rates you use are the statutory progressive rates, not the effective rates (so, for example, the effective rate on $300k would be approx 22% at the federal level assuming standard deduction but no retirement contributions or child credits). FICA is capped at the first $160k of income (meaning you don't pay more if you make more).)
I would argue the engineers in big techs also have benefited from the rent seeking structure. The only reason why they're not enjoying bigger payout is because the actual structure was created by the big tech companies, and not through coordinated effort by engineers. As a result, they reap less reward as they're just highly paid henchmen, and not the bosses.
I also sell my RSUs right away. But you're forgetting one thing -- if I make $600K somewhere else, I can't invest it in OpenAI. It's the opportunity to invest in a startup that you wouldn't get otherwise that is most valuable, if you think the startup will be valuable.
Do you mean tax? I think you mean a tax, on owning a car. Nothing promised in life but death and taxes.
There have been many startup employees that have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes only to see their paper gains eventually disappear.
There's a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to most companies, even if they are in the same "local market" [0][1] (Some use the term "dark matter devs" but I know it has another meaning [2]). These guys tend to fly under the radar quite a bit. If you are in a tier 2 market or company, your chances of attracting one are close to nil. Because they are extremely valuable, they don't interview a lot and tend to hop between companies where they know people (or get fast tracked internally).
FAANG companies have internship pipelines, with bonus for returning interns. These guys are off the market years before they even graduate.
[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
[1] http://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/
[2] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
Are they just extremely rare cases or am I just not aware of the valley and their customs?
OpenAI will probably end up like UberATG where Microsoft bails out a handful of $10m-plus equity packages, some engineers transfer into MS and get partial recognition, and a bunch of engineers get laid off or sent to a competitor for basically zero. Good chance of this happening when sama has to scale up aggressively and flops.
Although with Sam at the helm, my guess is it will probably be worth more than $600K a year.
or not . I would rather work for facebook with profit participation. zuck seems to know how to make a profit.
If I set "max price" to 4k in Cupertino (random SV place) and 3+ bedrooms (2 kids), there's literally 8 results on Zillow.
Someone in the UK on £236K ($300K) currently takes home only 57%, and doesn't have access to 30 year fixed rate mortgage loans
> When you look at the most senior positions, this is about 130k€.
You're being generous here. A new grad in France in engineering or development gets more often in the 40k€. The most senior positions in most companies plateau around 90k€.
In some companies in Paris it's higher, but that's the exception.
C-Level folks make many millions a year, either liquid or paper.
I am at FAANG and virtually everyone at L6 (staff Eng level, many thousands of people) is paid at least $500k, with monthly liquidity (no cliff).
With a bit of luck stock wise, it’s also not uncommon at all to get to $500k+ at L5 (senior eng level, many dozens of thousands of people).
Everyone in my SF network (hundreds of people) virtually make above $500k.
Can you name on tech company that went public in the past decade that has outperformed the S&P? What’s OpenAIs moat that couldn’t be duplicated by a deep pocketed public tech company like Facebook, Google or Amazon (my employer)? Two of those companies already have large publicly available data centers and an existing customer base to sell to.
If you want them to pay, tax the fuel and consumables like tyres, or put a tax based on how hard is to recycle the car once it hits the scrapper. Bit more complex with EVs I admit, but making someone pay just for keeping car even if they use it once a week is silly.
Yearly fee should be proportional to legalese required to keep it registered (paying wages), not much more.
As a concrete example, I've gotten more accolades for silly personal projects that sound impressive, like training a convolutional network to pilot a simulated car on the GPU, than for impactful work at my actual job, which was a lot less challenging.
I guess hiring is just incredibly noisy, and I think companies could really get far hiring less than the best people, and just squeezing good quality work out of them (I believe Amazon is known for this).
Obviously OpenAI should not hire subpar people lol, they should keep doing what works for them, just grumbling loudly here.
Some of the best all-around programmers I've met, and also the best programmers at some specific metric (rapid development, good at unraveling complex problems, good at big-picture stuff, good at architecture, good at maths/algorithms, etc.) make market rate or below market rate. Probably because they either (A) don't know their value (B) didn't go to a top CS school (C) value things other than raw income (D) aren't good at playing the political game at work (E) aren't good at self-promotion.
What paying high salaries does get you is... the widely-publicized knowledge that you pay high salaries. Sites like levels.fyi and HN will viralize this knowledge. Like your neighbor who has a shiny new BMW M3 in their driveway, you assume that they must be doing well, and must be a good investment.
Cigarettes I know. Marijuana is a bit funky, but it's easy because--by process of elimination--it's not a cancer stick. But now I have to squirrel away a third possibility.
Go on Zillow and find all the 3-bedroom rentals available under $4k/mo in the Bay Area that are within 45-min commute distance from downtown SF via Bart/Caltrain/Muni. I count at least 1,000.
I live in a modern 1-bedroom apartment within biking distance to work (major FAANG campus) and pay $2,500/mo. My apartment complex offers 3-bedroom units, with private patios, for $3,500/mo. This is a nice community, professionally managed, with pool, gym, BBQ areas and park for kids to roam around.
Isn't that enough to raise children? Most people in major European cities raise perfectly functional and happy families on much less sqft and amenities.
I mainly hang out w/ people from Europe and random parts of the States (like MA, they're paid good but not THAT good).
Dumb question maybe, but now I'm curious.
What does it really take to land a job like this one? Luck? Your network? Experience? All of it?
Wow, great to hear that.
Do you know of any "outsiders" (people not living in the valley, working remotely) making that much money as well?
I honestly don't know what to say. If you really think 300K/year is barely livable then I hope someone in your family has a sit down with you and ask blunt questions about what the fuck you're doing with all that money.
That one is up to a 20% tax deduction on this year's income without spending any of this year's money. and it rolls forward 5 years if its value is greater than those percentages of your income. so it adds up if you keep incorporating that into your strategy.
I like this more than donating generally appreciated assets
B) Traditional 401k contribution, with W-2 salary this is up to $22,500 this year in most circumstances. But, the next part is important too for double tax deduction:
C) Borrow $50,000 from the 401k (assumes the 401k already had more money in it from prior years and good investments) and donate that $50,000 cash to the above non-profit. Borrowing from a 401k requires you to pay it back across an interval over 5 years. So in future years you're doing that + 401k contributions. Or paying it off whenever you want. Or just accepting the tax and 10% penalty. On years where you have a ton more deduction you might only be paying the 10% penalty if you chose not to repay your 401k.
So now lets add this up from a $300,000 base salary.
The government was originally looking at a $300,000 AGI to tax you on, but now you reduce this by
A) $60,000 B) $22,500 C) $50,000
so now they are only looking at a $167,500 AGI to tax you on, while you still have $167,500 + A) $60,000, so $227,500 cash. But you want to keep reducing that AGI from here.
Stop here if you're plan is to put cash in a bank account and never take any risk. This is probably already way too much for anybody addicted to conservative generic personal finance forums.
=======
D) I typically have some expenses for a side project or something intended to be profitable. The great thing about this is that it involves you buying things you already wanted to buy. if you're in tech that's consumer electronics, software licenses, good CPAs, lawyers, domains, subscriptions.
I'm being conservative when I say $30,000, but lets say you actually did an ad spend, the sky is the limit.
Your various side project pursuits just have to make revenue in 5 years to prove that its not a hobby. make an LLC for all of your various interests and get around to it making some money eventually.
For sake of this, you spent $30,000 of your own money (but realistically, all the banks offered you credit cards with high limits and you can float this balance for years too, and interest on business purchases can also be deducted, if you're not allergic to the mere concept of holding debt)
AGI: $137,500
E) did you get a mortgage yet? lots of deductions there on a highly leveraged asset. too many variables for this, but just the interest is deductible not the principle payments. you can play around with a lot here, such as paying interest up front to generate more tax deductions.
on a $2,000,000 property with a 30 year mortgage, let's assume another $30,000 in interest paid annually.
AGI: $107,500
F) was the mortgage on an investment property? investment property is also depreciably on its current assessed value divided by 27.5 (residential) or 39 (commercial). so, on a $2,000,000 property that's another $72,700 tax deduction every year.
AGI: $34,800
in conclusion with a "salary" or AGI of $34,808, according to SmartAsset.com for someone living in San Francisco, they would be on the hook for about $8,000 in taxes. This is effectively a 2.6% tax rate and you’ve already bought most of the consumptive goods you wanted to buy anyway and have plenty of cash left over for savings and investments.
not advice. I could go far more aggressive than that.
That has basically been my strategy. After a bit more than a decade of working in the Bay Area, immigrating from Europe, I accumulated $4M in liquid net worth invested in fairly diversified assets, so I’ll be pulling the plug not too far into the future, and retire in Europe. I still cannot believe that these opportunities exist: in my own country, doing the exact same job I’ve been doing, I would probably have less than €200k saved up.
I understand that people’s circumstances are incredibly different, but to the extent that one is willing to go through the discomfort of uprooting their lives, spending a few years in the Bay Area and making a lot of money is a no brainer arbitrage opportunity that is still wide open IMHO.
I don’t work at a FAANG so I could be totally off but I think there’s only about 1,000 L6+ at google [0] and they employ the most. So it’s not thousands of people at this level within a company. Maybe only a few thousand in total of all companies in the US.
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-are-at-each-level-of-t...
First, the comment you linked is 7 years old. Most FAANG companies increased their headcount many fold ever since.
Second, there is such a thing as title inflation, over time more and more people get promoted to their terminal level, which at my FAANG is very often L6, each tiny team has always at least one or two of them. There are many, many more than 937 L6s at my company. Hell, I know for a fact that there are several hundreds of distinguished engineers (L9) at my company, which is an incredibly hard level to reach, so do the math and then scale it across the entire valley.
Third, do not discount my comment about L5 compensation reaching that $500k+ level very often. L5 represent a very large portion of the talent pool, probably the first or second largest (after L4).
You clearly do not have to believe me nor take my word for it. Not a problem. I just want to make sure other readers hear both sides of the conversation.
fingers crossed. don't forget to buy some of the S&P too.
It’s not as easy as some posters make it sound, but it’s still on the order of 20-50k engineers. If you wonder why these firms move faster than the rest of the industry, this is a major contributor.
Seems silly enough to get you somewhere cool. Though the best pass is recommendation. Impress your colleagues so bad, they will recommend you somewhere one day.
than for impactful work at my actual job
Oh you have to fight hard to get one of those. You cant just do what you're told. Ive got a cool story to tell from my time at amazon but I fought heroically to get it (I was younger though).
I guess hiring is just incredibly noisy
Careful what you believe because your belief becomes your reality.
If you want to be great, you cant just act and think like anybody else. Work on yourself and be great. Get the mindset first.
"life has strange ways"
and you can use the last known price as well, the real beauty is that it is not volume weighted
so you get the last price for 1 of that thing, and use that to donate 1,000 of that thing to keep more of your cash, even if it was not possible to realize it for cash
(for the 20% deduction in my example that one relies on cost basis, unless the price has gone down, then its current value)
There are also people working in the office making that much as software developers working in Nashville, the DC suburbs, Dallas, etc.
What complex do you live in?
I'm actually looking to move apartments, want something a bit more modern, and I'm seeing mostly 1-bedrooms for $3500 and 2-bedrooms for $4500 in south bay for anything modern (e.g. anything from Prometheus) and located in a safe area (e.g. not East Palo Alto).
I’ll take my former $150K in the burbs of Atlanta over $300k in the burbs any day.
And before the usual responses implying I’m disdaining what I can’t have, I current work for BigTech remotely.
How many people making the median income in San Francisco are living in a walkable area?
Not aware. That's not unusual compensation for key contributors. Especially in AI or other niche fields. Even outside the valley.
We acquired something a while back in Montreal, Canada and it sure wasn't cheap. Salaries were in the same ballpark as our positions in the valley. We actually got most of the team to relocate to California on O-1s but still have some guys over there.
We’ll, by the number of Leetcode Hards they’ve completed, of course! /s
Car payments were calculated based on a 50k new car, so if he's paying more than that he definitely has a luxury car.
“I feel like such a failure because I’m 30 years old and only make $300K”
My guess is that the maligned commenter I replied to is of the other school of thought, that they want to retire in the same house in the same town
This is incorrect. There is often significant unmet demand for private successful companies. Employees can often sell at close to what investors end up paying for it.
I decided I was tired of all that bureaucracy and decided to join a series C startup making $230k + worthless stock options. It was fun for a year, but it actually hurts now. And there’s been a bunch of nickling and diming on perks and benefits too, and no comp adjustments.
And here in NYC it’s surprisingly easy to blow through that paycheck. Didn’t feel that way when I lived in SF.
$500k is more like $275k after taxes. Assuming $60k/yr in living expenses, which is pretty frugal in the Bay Area, that’s barely over $1M in savings in 5 years. Let’s say $1.3M after return on investments over 5 years.
Nowhere close to retirement money anywhere in the US.
Though not really for the population as a whole: the majority of people don’t have all that much in the way assets. The proposals that get floated in the US don’t kick in until your wealth is in the tens of millions.
But since 2020, it became absolute misery.
I moved to NYC, and I’m much happier here. So your point about being in a walkable city still stands.
Capital gains taxes are income taxes. Property/wealth taxes are taxes paid based on the “market” price of an asset just for owning it (presumably society provides for its security and environment in which it became valuable and will continue to be valuable).
I'm a very average engineer (probably way below average amongst the HN crowd) and I'm in that range.
* have a set of interview questions that help clarify they have the "right" kind of person
* have a performance review process that ensures that hired individuals continue to engage in ways that are understood to be most useful to the company; i.e. that validate (or invalidate, as the case may be) hiring practices
You don’t need a special mind to be a programmer, you just need to have a willingness to do this work. Which many people don’t.
Especially if you're American. Gallup [1] reports:
> The median annual household income worldwide is $9,733, and the median per-capita household income is $2,920
Even among developed nations, Americans get paid more.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo...
And sure they are paying double payroll tax, but they also get to deduct all their expenses associated with employment (customer dinners, internet, computer equipment, mileage to customers, etc).
I'm not saying the highly-paid developer is hurting, but the better question is why does it cost $675/year to register a vehicle in CA? Our income tax system is already highly progressive, so why do we have all these other stealth taxes that hurt low incomes the most.
I was like that until I read levels.fyi data and blind app and gave it a shot
Worse they can say is no
Stock appreciation is the key + performance for sticking around
* The Bay Area is a place where you can make $100k a year and be classified as low-income [1].
* Tech employees tend to live low-key lifestyles that don't really show how much they're making. I know people who make $500k and still live with roommates.
* Income inequality and progressive politics combine to make people less reluctant to talk about their TC packages, unless you're also at a similar socio-economic level.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/under-100k-low-income-s...
And L6 is very, VERY senior. Not ridiculously senior like the aristocracy at L7+ but L6s are rare and there's probably one of them for every ten L5's. L5 to L6 is a major weed-out promo, and not many people get that far. I've been trying for 5 years.
I literally have PDF copies of offers I received in 2018 from both Facebook and Google for L5 roles in the $400k range, and things just went significantly crazier since then. And I am the most average engineer you can imagine, with most of my peers in a similar situation.
I cannot comprehend how your TC can just be $250k at Google after 5 years of refreshers. That’s like L3 comp in the pocket of the organization I’m at.
however, in practice, few are able to land such positions when interviewed externally - I’d believe the pass rate for L6 is less than 1 in 10. Even after accounting for screening steps.
What sort of non-profit is this? Can you just register a 501(c)(3) with the sole purpose of giving yourself charity and then use it to pay for food and housing for yourself? Trying to honestly learn here as I have a massive W-2 tax bill.
> requires you to pay it back across an interval over 5 years. So in future years you're doing that
This sounds like you're just deferring tax to the next 5 years? Don't you have to use after-tax money to repay the 401k loan?
> Your various side project pursuits just have to make revenue in 5 years to prove that its not a hobby
My understanding of the IRS rule is you have to profit in 3 out of 5 consecutive years if you want to claim tax losses in the other 2 years. Not revenue. (IRC 183).
But you're absolutely right - don't gatekeep writing software. It's not that hard and everyone should have access to that realm, even if they don't use it.
To put some real numbers on it.
My 30 year fixed 3.5% mortgage all in from 2016 - 2021 was $2185 and that included the FHA PMI since I only put 3.5% down. I refinanced in 2021 to a 15 year mortgage and bought points and got rid of the PMI. My house is now worth close to twice that.
My mortgage? 1.97% fixed 15 year - $2550 and $1575 of that goes toward principal. My total household expenses as of March 2020 when I was making “only” $150K with my wife working part time making $25K was around $6000. We were bringing home after taxes and before retirement savings about $10500 after maxing out my retirement savings it was about $9300 a month.
And if you haven’t noticed, people are moving away from the west coast and office occupancy is down - that doesn’t bode well for home prices long term.
Our lifestyle is a little different now (see below). But out of my base income which is still only $160K - and my wife no longer works -with the rest coming from RSUs, we still manage to pay all of our expenses and I’m able to max out my 401K.
(>>36306966 ).
I don’t think people who have been in the tech bubble understand how easy it is for a two income earning family to accumulate wealth where one is making your standard enterprise dev tech salaries in a major non west coast city.
Most couples I know our ages where one is a mid career developer also has a spouse working making at least $70K (the average salary of a college grad). You can do quite well in most cities with a household income of $220K.
If you’re younger and single making $135 to $170K - typical for a developer with 5 years of experience outside of the west coast - you can find an apartment or buy a condo in the city for $2500/month.
If there is so much money, which is where the "absurd" is, better target people with validated maths PHDs. Moreover, those researchers will need access to super computers in order to test at scale their work (because it all about stability at scale), and that's a limiting parameter.
Additionally, "AI" is just a set of empirical algorithms attempting to mimic human cognition. The trick is to find mathematical stability (production, training, etc) for large scale simulated connectomes: I am still surprised there is still not a "sleep" regime for those articial connectomes, which we know is critical for brain stability, maybe it is a part of the new "training" regimes.
I am still waiting for the educational material which will let people picture a connectome based on the latest "transformers". Because, in the end, nobody understands anything about this, it is beyond us. It will be hard to tell apart the scammers looking to steal fundings from the others.
$39k/yr may not give you a life of luxury anywhere in the US, but there's certainly people surviving on less - and surely if you were OK on $60k/yr cost of living in the Bay Area it wouldn't be hard to find parts of the US where $39k/yr stretches further than $60k does there?
Of course there's many people who wouldn't want to move to a cheaper area, and especially anyone who is able to earn $500k/yr is likely to choose to work longer before retiring to not have to be as frugal - but "nowhere close to retirement money anywhere in the US" seems way off. I'd even be surprised if $1.3M wasn't significantly greater than the median amount of pension + savings owned by Americans at the point of their retiring.
edit: Actual numbers back up my assumptions above, for example "According to the Fed data, the median net worth for Americans in their late 60s and early 70s is $266,400. The average (or mean) net worth for this age bracket is $1,217,700, but since averages tend to skew higher due to high net-worth households, the median is a much more representational amount." from https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-net-worth-of-americans-a... or similar at https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewrosen/2022/06/16/are-you-... etc.
This isn't entirely accurate, as crack isn't the only drug people use "crack pipes" for. I couldn't tell you what, if anything, crack smells like because I'm not aware of having every been in the vicinity of it being consumed, but I have been around people using what look like crack pipes and I've used them myself too.
In my case: a few times I tried vaping weed with them (though for weed an electric dry herb vape is better, and if wanting to use glass pipe and a flame there are designed-for-weed vapes which are better than generic crack-type pipes), and DMT is another illegal drug that needs (when in pure form, rather than changa) to be vaped rather than smoked - so a crack pipe can be useful for that too. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other drugs that sort of pipe can be used for, too.
Personally I wouldn't use that sort of "crack" pipe in public, partly because many people think like you that it must be crack that's being used, and partly because even people who dont have that incorrect belief could still rightly (or at least, almost always rightly) deduce that something illegal is being consumed.
> And if you haven’t noticed, people are moving away from the west coast and office occupancy is down - that doesn’t bode well for home prices long term.
I wish, but it’s just a dream. The traffic is bad, rents are up, the housing market is insane. You are betting that the “it’s too crowded so no one comes here anymore” will regress so much that housing prices will drop, but that’s not how equilibriums work.
Everyone in our industry should be maxing out their 401k’s, no matter where they are living. However, those who survive in a HCOL will have a lot more assets and money at the end of it than a LCOL, simply because their house is worth more and they made more money (same percentage of savings even with higher expenses).
There are good reasons to live in an LCOL, especially if you like the place and you have friends and family there. But making more money overall than a HCOL isn’t one of them unless the jobs you can get in the HCOL don’t really pay much more than the LCOL (then get out of dodge as fast as you can).
Yes, everything here is just deferring. What you’re really doing is staggering the tax events across different years.
Like, it’s not important that something increases a tax footprint in year 5 if you have already planned on reducing tax footprints another way that year. More Net Operating Losses, more thing to carry forwards, more and bigger real estate depreciation, offsetting the increase in income.
Or eventually just paying taxes. Its not controversial to do.
Another aspect is the time value of money. With strategies like this you can go to your employer and file an exemption from employer withholding. So you get your full salary now instead of hoping for a tax refund next year , and that lets you employ these strategies at all and invest and live your life. Take a chance on having more capital gains, so you start getting taxed at the lower Long term capitals rate and phase out your W-2 work when this exceeds your income.
Even at large "boring" corporate developer jobs that don't pay a fraction of the FAANG salaries, it seems the decent engineers either escaped this trap (promoted to $150k+) or have settled into the $130-140k quicksand with little to no annual raise.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/california-popu...
And house prices are declining in Seattle.
https://www.king5.com/article/money/economy/seattle-housing-...
Why live in a high cost city when more jobs are remote?
Again, this is a "It's too crowded so no one comes here anymore" problem, not a "California sucks, let's leave" problem. If you can't make it economically in SF or LA, move to somewhere like Atlanta where making it economically is easier. Housing prices fall a bit, from $2 million for a starter house to $1.9 million, but they just as quickly go back up as well. If you look at a population chart for California, you'll see this huge increase in the last 80 years that is finally tapering off. Did everyone honestly believe that California would or could grow forever? Equilibrium means that SF will shrink and grow around some stable population point.
> And house prices are declining in Seattle.
Read the article. They went up 20% last year and are now down 2-5% this year. And again, you are doing a lot of wishful thinking, since inventory is super low right now and people are struggling to buy houses even if they have the money. I actually wish your story was true, but it simply isn't.
> Why live in a high cost city when more jobs are remote?
I work remote in Seattle and love it (but my wife has to RTO, so we still need to be here). But I guess if someone isn't great at math, an LCOL city is probably a better choice anyways, since they don't have to think so hard about the math and can justify their choices with simple click-bait-style narratives.
If you saw their w2 or 1040, your claim would be more credible, since that's when most of us learn how much we actually made in the previous year.
So exactly how does it make more financial sense to live somewhere that is more expensive than somewhere much less expensive making the same money?
What’s the mortgage on that 2 million dollar home compared to mine?
And I’ve been to Seattle a number of times. That’s where my employer’s headquarters is located. It’s a dreary place.
If you look at one you have a pretty good way to extrapolate the expected TC for the year.
I'm trying to be nice to you by sharing information you can use in your future negotiations, but it seems you're just angry you are not making as much as my friend. Maybe next time I should just let you leave 100K+ on the table and go on with my life.
Also, doesn't Google famously have an internal spreadsheet where people share their salary anonymously? You can check that too if it still exists.
That means 10 people have to be completely destitute to achieve that level of distribution...
Though GDP can always grow, the simple truth is that a nation has a fixed amount of production in any given year and this shit is a disgusting manifestation of the imbalances of its distribution.
Doubling salary post-tax will at the very least put you at a 50% savings rate, and that yields a time from zero to financial independence of 16.5 years. Assuming historically-similar stock market returns and a safe withdrawal rate of 4%. This relationship does not depend on absolute numbers beyond those stated above, only savings rate.
Most likely you'd not be starting from zero and having a positive savings rate already. Whether you'd be comfortable doing this is a different question. Many would never be, and hence never completely comfortable retiring.