No More Hustleporn: Software Engineer Comp is Bonkers
Tweet by Dan Luu
http://patreon.com/danluu. Less tech-y alt account: @altluu
Despite the market already seeming bonkers high then, it has gone way up since then.
E.g., a friend of mine who was "senior" at Google (there 4 years with no promo) now makes $750k/yr and got a level bump for changing jobs after FB and another company got into a bidding war.
I've found it interesting to watch companies that don't value retention hemorrhage key employees by not keeping up with the market when people are close to burnout and primed to leave, causing predictable & 💰 disasters.
(
,
, etc.)
Another thing I've found interesting to watch is how quickly companies have responded.
At the forefront, there are companies like FB, which are either causing the increase in market rate or responding so quickly that the difference can't be observed externally.
Then you have companies that are months behind, where it takes months of complaints from hiring managers to get the org that controls comp to adjust comp targets.
And then in the tail, there are the companies that still haven't responded to market changes.
Hiring managers at those companies are having a very bad time while the company debates whether they should do something "next quarter" or "sometime in 2022" (e.g., I know of someone trying to hire a non-trendy specialist who had a double digit number of offers turned down).
As with
, the companies are the still struggling to mount a response to market changes well over a year after things really picked up are sending a strong signal to candidates that the comp determination process at the company is severely broken.
BTW, that wasn't an isolated case. Lots of people are reporting getting 50% to 100% raises by interviewing and getting a level bump or two.
It's always been easier to get a bump by interviewing than via the internal process, but the sheer rate of these today is unprecedented.
I was around for the tail end of the dotcom boom, and while there are specific ways that market seemed more overheated then, e.g., new grads getting $100k/yr job offers after a 30-minute on campus interview, on balance, the market seems much hotter at the moment.
Offer numbers from someone with 5 years of experience, currently making $300k/yr. They consider offers of $500k/yr so low that they're not even worth mentioning.
I shopped around a bit and have found similar, in that large companies are willing to offer me >= 2x what I'm making.
