I keep hearing all these high numbers getting thrown around a lot. Is $300K really the typical pay among, say, 5th year Google engineers who joined out of college? If so that's pretty amazing.
Why should it? Most software engineers don't have significant equity i.e. equity that creates a cash flow equal to 100% of their salary annually. I only make this comparison since 141k is median at Google and you are saying lots of software engineers make 300k.
Standard new grad package at Google gives you over $120k worth of equity over 4 years, and I think additional $30k a year is definitely worth mentioning. For more experienced people it's obviously even more, and if you manage to stay for 4 years, the next stock grant will probably be significantly higher to keep you and your acquired inside knowledge inside the company.
At companies like Google or Facebook, you expect to get 10-15% salary raise every year for the first few years, and around 10-15% annual bonus. Assuming that after 4 years, your equity doubles, the $300k figure seems to be pretty accurate for the fifth-sixth year of working there.
Yes, so $300k puts you in the top 3%, $380k puts you in the top 1% of earners nationwide. The median salary of presidents of private Universities is $400k. If you start at a salary of 150k and get 0.15 raises annually for 5 years, yes your will make 300k a year, but I'd be very surprised if this is the experience of general employees. Google has 50,000 employees. If you paid them all $100k, that would be 5 billion roughly equivalent to Googles costs.
Early in his career, Bill Gates was making millions of dollars.
I never saw any convincing data on HN to back up the claims - it's always an anecdotal data point here and there. My guess is that a small fraction of the engineers actually make the stated figures, and confirmation bias leads HNers to believe that's the median pay.
Gates was making millions when he licensed DOS -- he was quickly worth $300 million and because he owned a big fraction of Microsoft.
When I was making six times what a new Camaro cost, I was just a 'worker bee' on a salary working on mostly military applied math and software around DC.
I didn't think that the income was so great: A new, two story, traditional, center hall floor plan house on a 1/4 acre lot cost three or four times what I was making. So, I didn't really have money enough to buy a house and support a family.
For $300 K in Silicon Valley, there is considerable question if that is enough to buy a nice house, say, 1/4 acre lot, two car garage, full basement, good insulation, central HVAC, four bedrooms, two baths, powder room, walk in closets, LR, DR, eat in kitchen, family room, deck and support a family.
