Pretty easy to find photos of Facebook offices:
— goo.gl/kcj29O
— goo.gl/TK42jG

Typical open space, with a lot of fancy hardware.

US is a country of possibilities. When you work close to the source of decision making (or is a source of decision making) things are much more fun and you are rewarded when your decisions/work deliver results.

As I mentioned before Google (and others) have engineering levels. L3 is roughly junior, L4 is roughly middle, L5 is roughly senior, L6 is staff, L7 is senior staff, L8 (~director level on management track) is principal engineer.

Next numbers are _very_ approximate and are just my estimations based on multiple sources. So take them with a grain of salt:

L3 = base (100k — 120k) + bonus + RSU
L4 = base (120k — 150k) + bonus + RSU
L5 = base (150k — 190k) + bonus + RSU
L6 = base (190k — 230k) + bonus + RSU
L7 = base (230k — 260k) + bonus + RSU

Bonus is usually 15% of base, but can be higher if performance is great (can reach 30% or even 40% in some cases, if engineer is killing it).

Not sure what the formula for RSU is. So far a good estimate is base salary vesting over 4 years. But things vary much more here and I don’t have many data points.

Sunnyvale is not the most expensive. Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View are considered more expensive. There is also Atherton (it’s like the most expensive neighborhood in the area), and a bunch of others.

Sunnyvale is relatively not as expensive to rent/buy. Mostly because schools are not great there (there are a few school districts, and only one such district has good ratings).

Please don’t put words into my mouth.

Было 500 — 650 в легкую со старта любому инженеру с 5 лет компани опыта

Nobody except you mentioned 650k$ number. I only provided an example of my current total compensation for reference.

I also never said it’s easy to get specific compensation or that you would get high compensation from the start. Again, read my comment carefully — I said I stayed with the company for 5 year. I had non trivial amount of experience before joining them.

Think of Facebook 5 years ago as roughly Uber these days.

But in general you are correct, joining a well established company guarantees good income. But it also usually means you won’t win a lottery. Some people prefer risk + big potential upside (i.e. startups). Some prefer less risk + guaranteed income (i.e. big companies).

Ok, I guess I should have done a better breakdown in my comment. Let me try one more time.

Contractors are usually on L1 visas, they usually have two options — stay in US on 80k or move back home. That’s why companies can exploit them (relatively speaking) and keep them in Silicon Valley on a low salary. Getting H1B is hard, takes time and is a lottery. If you are on H1B/GC or a citizen and have a salary <100k (without potential big win in the future), it’s just easier for you to move to a different state/city where cost of living is much lower and you can still get pretty high salaries for SWEs.

That said, I should have focused on well known companies instead of generalizing for the whole SV. So let me rephrase that — ~100k salary is around the minimum base salary you would get at any of the bigger companies or well known startups for a SWE position.

Also, as I mentioned before, I do not exactly trust Glassdoor for total comp. Especially when you are checking against big players like Google, Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, Uber, AirBNB. The Glassdoor does not reflect RSU and sometimes even bonuses are not included.

As for the Facebook statement. I was not trying to imply future growth. What I tried to say is that if you’ve got ~200k of Facebook RSU before Facebook went IPO or when it was 30$, then you current compensation would be almost 2-3x of what you could have expected a few years ago. Think about this formula: 110k$ base salary + 20k$ bonus + 50k$RSU. Where 50 = 200 / 4 years. If you assume the RSU went up 4x, then total comp will go from 180k$ to 330k$. That’s not counting raises and RSU refreshes you might have gotten over the years.

The reason I mentioned pre-IPO startup is to give a sense of competition. If you are joining pre-IPO and have offer from Google vs some startup (like Uber), the startup would need to give you a lot of stock. That stock costs nothing pre-IPO, but if startup does IPO your upside might be huge (see Facebook above).

My main point is this: $250k-$300k for Silicon Valley is not unusual. There are multiple ways to get there. You can be great engineer and join Google, for example. Your total comp will grow dramatically as you go up in levels and get refreshers and salary bumps (takes some time). You can get lucky and join a startup (like Facebook 5 years ago) and your total comp could be huge after IPO and if company executes great (again, like Facebook). There are of course a lot of folks who do not earn as much too, that I will not dispute. The valley is full of stories about people sacrificing a lot of time and salary for startups that explode.

I’m glad you are skeptical.

Let’s start with initial 110k salary. This is almost a minimum salary for Silicon Valley for developers these days. If you account for taxes (~20-25%) and costs of living (2500$ for 1 bedroom + food + car) it’s not really that much. FWIW, I had multiple offers before I moved to US all in the same range of base salary ~100k-110k. I know that _contractor_ positions are in the 80k+ range (think of EPAM employees moving to SV to work for Google as contractors), and trust me it’s just barely enough money to live in SV.

On the salary for more senior employees. As someone mentioned there is a good growth in stock in some companies. If someone would have joined facebook 3 years — stock was 30$. Now it’s 120$. That’s a 4x.

Another point: ask anyone in the valley — beating Google’s offers is almost impossible for good candidates. So pre-IPO companies lure employees with high stock offers with potential upside of 2-5x. In other words, you could get 200k in pre-IPO stock with the hope that company’s stock will grow 2-5x after IPO.

And finally, there is a salary spreadsheet out there for Google. See: qz.com/...ees-share-their-salaries. I did have access to that one (and can’t/won’t share it for obvious reasons here). So it’s another source I was using for my personal estimations.

Glassdoor is useless IMO, and honestly I have never used it for salary estimation in SV companies. From what I can tell it only includes the base salary. There is no info on bonus and stock included there.

For example, if someone has a total comp of 250k in Google, that would usually mean ~150k base, ~50k bonus and ~100k of stock (these are made up numbers, but you get the picture). You would see the “base” of 150k on Glassdoor. The higher the level the more stock % you have in your total comp.

You might ask how do I know what’s the usual salary in these companies if not from Glassdoor? Well, there are a bunch of sources. For one, Google had leaked their salary spreadsheets (filled out by employees themselves; not official company reported numbers) that included both salary and stock. So that was a good way to confirm ranges.

250-300k — is not that big of a total comp in Silicon Valley if you work in 1st tier company (Google, Facebook, Apple, ...). I’d say it’s within a reach of a good L4 and quite usual for L5 engineers.

For context: L3 — is fresh out of college. L4 is what is usually considered a “middle level engineer”. And L5 is roughly senior engineer. There are L6+ levels as well. These are levels at Google. But similar ladders exists in Apple (A1, A2, A3, ...) and Facebook (E3,E4,E5, and so on).

See google levels here: www.quora.com/...es-technical-career-track
Facebook levels here: www.quora.com/...are-engineers-at-Facebook
Apple levels here: www.quora.com/...oftware-engineer-at-Apple
Most of other companies in Silicon Valley have a very similar ladder too.

From personal example: I moved to Bay Area 5 years ago. My “base” salary first year was around 110k. My total compensation for the last year (and expected for this year) is slightly above ~500k. That includes base, bonus and stock (RSU). I joined as ~L4 to one of the first tier companies and am still with them.