I have never worked in the valley, so the answer to this question might be obvious to the people working there. What happens to all the experienced engineers?
According to this, the Senior, Staff, or Principal titles are generally for people with 5+ year experience? Those roles make up 30%, 10%, and 3% of companies respectively. That leaves 57% of engineers in positions listed are usually for people with 0-5 years experience. Does that mean over half of engineers are relatively new to the industry? Are there large numbers of engineers that go their entire career without getting a Senior title? Are there large numbers that end up changing industries? I know some people transition from hands on engineering to management, but there can't possibly be that many management jobs to make up that difference, right?
I started working at FANG recently, after spending 15 years in a different field. The very first thing I noticed was how young the average employee is. It was a little startling. I've heard different theories:
* Today's big tech companies are still relatively young, so the workforce is young.
* The companies have grown exponentially in recent years, and they've hired many new grads to meet hiring targets. This would also shift the average employee age lower.
* The people who joined these companies 15-20 years ago would likely be very well-off financially by now, so they don't need to keep working. They've retired early, created start ups, left the Bay Area, etc.
I think there's likely some truth to these claims. But Silicon Valley also has a reputation for ageism, so who knows.
There was a peak in the mid-80s, and another around 2005.
CS enrollments reached a max around 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble. But when the bubble burst in 2000-2001, enrollments plummeted in 2002, 2003 and 2004, leading to the local minimum in graduates in 2009.
I'm getting a bit of a dot-com feeling around these compensation figures, especially seeing the sign up bonuses and how tangible stocks are considered as normal compensation now. The FAANGs remind me a bit of Microsoft, Cisco and Intel before their y2k peaks.
I do get some of that feeling. The differences is that the FAANGs are all public, have been for a while, and have real revenue. The dot-com bubble was mostly fueled by VC, IPOs, and a virtuous cycle (though I guess Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel had been public for a while, and they did survive the bubble burst).
Facebook and Google do ads, and most online advertisers look for immediate, real value. These success stories are as real as e-commerce.
That brings us to Amazon. It's e-commerce is real, but margins are low. AWS looks more like the dot-com bubble in that some of that money is coming from VCs. If funding dries up, AWS gets hit. That said, there's a larger migration to the cloud, and that's also real.
Apple makes high-margin phones that people all over the world buy. Full stop.
Netflix is the least like the others. It's smaller, and while it revolutionized how we consume content, it's current model is heavily funded by debt, and it's facing stiff competition. No one's talking about how Netflix will take over long-form video, they're griping at having to pay for six streaming services.
The alternate story for tech salaries is that PCs and the internet weren't ready for prime time in 2000. After the bubble burst, there were too few CS grads for when the internet was finally ready. The internet wasn't ready until 2006-2010 when most people had broadband at home, smartphones matures, and LTE was ready.
I'm surprised it started growing even that early. When I attended school (2007-11), we thought CS jobs would be outsourced to India/China/etc. (we were wrong).
I started a few years before you and remember people saying I was crazy to go into development since the jobs were all being outsourced. They might have been wrong in the long run, but I did spend the first few years of my career managing offshore development more than doing actual development.
>The very first thing I noticed was how young the average employee is. It was a little startling. I've heard different theories
These salaries come with a big gamble on SV real estate and the market performance of these companies. The first one is a big difference between young and middle aged people. In my 20s I averaged a new home every year as my financial situation changed and I wanted to live in different parts of a city. Now in my 30s with a wife and kid I don't expect to move for 10+ years. The only way to achieve that is buying a house. Which, in SV, means plunking down 3-4 million. That's doable given the salaries, but it's a huge bet that the real estate bubble won't burst.
Same thing with the market performance. Sure, the FAANGs + MS (and minus Netflix) make a ridiculous amount of money and that likely won't change. But what about companies like Snap, Pinterest, Lyft, et.al. that lose money? There's a huge risk that these companies (1) go bankrupt or (2) decide to focus on profitability and slash their engineering workforce.
If you're a 20 something renter you ride the gravy train as long as it keeps coming. If you're a 30 something with small kids and a mortgage you want stability.
Now in my 30s with a wife and kid I don't expect to move for 10+ years. The only way to achieve that is buying a house. Which, in SV, means plunking down 3-4 million.
I think you're pretty deep in the bubble or you have really extreme tastes. I have tons of friends in their 30s with kids in SV and NYC. Almost all of them are renters. The actual financial calculation for renting vs. buying in these markets is brutal. You need to stay for 10-20 years for buying to start to make sense.
Also, you don't need $3-4mm in either of these markets to buy a place suitable for two adults and a child. There are plenty of 2 bedrooms for a third of that.
Most companies in the valley have a terminal level (a level at which you're not expected to progress to the next one) that's close to level 3 in the chart here. In my experience, a lot of people don't progress beyond that. For the ones that do, the number of years of experience plays a smaller role than the quality of the experience itself.
Many go to management. You realize as you get older that the whole “you can progress up the salary chart as an IC just as well as management” is a total crock.
If you want to afford a nice house in a good neighborhood with good schools in the Bay Area, you’ve got to go into management.
I kinda disagree, Oracle/HP (personal experience) and Google/IBM (extremely good friends) both have career tracks for IC which go up to ‘Distinguished Engineer’ level, and where compensation can be equivalent to a VP on the management track.
What you might be trying to say is there are more available positions at VP than DE, so your chances of making it are better? Or that being promoted to VP is easier than to DE? I think having seen how the sausage is made, would agree with both of those.
> both have career tracks for IC which go up to ‘Distinguished Engineer’ level, and where compensation can be equivalent to a VP on the management track.
Sure, it exists. How many DEs do you know of, vs. VPs?
How do you get a DE job? Usually you are the most well known person in your field.
How you do you get a VP job? You have to be a pretty good manager.
At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many.
That's the BS. It's like saying "there is totally a path to getting really rich as an actor!". Sure, there is a path, but not a lot of people make it. And even the ones that do usually get there by also doing the management path (producer) at the same time.
The lie is in the claim it's just as easy to climb the DE ladder as it is the VP ladder.
> At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many
Fwiw, the number is significantly higher than 10, though still fewer than there are VPs.
That said, things get tricky: there are DEs who have reports, and there are VPs with no (or trivial, like 3) reports. But either way, if your metric is DE/VP or if it's manager of a large org vs IC/TLM, the number of IC-track people is higher than you suggest.
Yes, that's exactly what he's saying -- the "just as well" part is key. Sure, there's an IC track that goes up to the SVP level at many companies, but it's statistically much harder to climb pretty much everywhere.
I think most companies do not even have IC roles analogous to SVP. Google has two Senior fellows, and those are two guys who are far too famous and responsible for too much of the Google backbone infrastructure.
That took me by surprise too. One hypothesis could be that so many companies that levels.fyi tracks have grown so quickly that they've chosen to stuff themselves full of relatively junior SWEs. I think there are lots of reasons people in strategy positions would choose to do this, whether I agree with them or not.
But re-read the description of "Software Engineer (II)" closely:
> Typically 2-5+ years of experience. [...] At many companies, this is considered a 'career-level', as in you
can spend the rest of your career operating at this level without being pushed out for not being promoted.
So, it doesn't suggest it caps out at 5 years, and this could be where people who do "good, but not outstanding" work end up. Also the next level says "Role shifts more towards design rather than implementation depending on size and expectations at company.", so maybe the big break isn't "seniority and how good you are at your job" but rather "can you, and do you want to, work at the next level of design abstraction?"
It’s not “manage” but “lead”. Which basically means the technical aspects. Certainly I’ve seen lots of great leadership from people with 2-5 years experience.
There are a lot more people working in software now than there were 20 years ago. Even if everyone over 40 who started in the industry was still there, they would be totally outnumbered by young people.
Ageism is real, but so is the growth of the engineering profession, and so is early retirement (which is definitely possible at the salaries senior people make, especially if you consider they bought houses in Silicon Valley for a lot less than they sell for now).
> Does that mean over half of engineers are relatively new to the industry?
Jackpot!
All it takes for this to happen is that the number of software engineers in the world grows by 10--20% every year. (Because this means it doubles every 5 years, which means half the workforce has less than or equal to five years of experience.
I recall reading somewhere that the actual growth of the workforce is even greater than that -- somewhere around 25%!
It's so variable that I don't think there's even a good answer for this. My current company does the engineer -> management track, so there can absolutely be an abundance of management jobs. You can also work as an Junior/SEII/Senior for 5+ years without being promoted at all. Keep in mind all of these titles are arbitrary/subjective.
What I've personally seen is that the smaller the company the more experienced people you'll have, because they need more independent people and have less time/resources to mentor juniors.
So the proportion for a large majority of startups is not similar to what this document shows, which is centered to bigger (1000+ engineers) companies.
Often times experienced engineers eventually move to much smaller companies that aren't as likely to appear on levels.fyi
They might get tired of the politics at their company, or they just want to try something new, or founding/joining a smaller company might be the easiest way for them to continue to get promoted
According to this, the Senior, Staff, or Principal titles are generally for people with 5+ year experience? Those roles make up 30%, 10%, and 3% of companies respectively. That leaves 57% of engineers in positions listed are usually for people with 0-5 years experience. Does that mean over half of engineers are relatively new to the industry? Are there large numbers of engineers that go their entire career without getting a Senior title? Are there large numbers that end up changing industries? I know some people transition from hands on engineering to management, but there can't possibly be that many management jobs to make up that difference, right?