I left the game industry for FAANG and I'm getting paid 2-3x more. I'm happy with this situation if I consider the big picture but, at least in my case, my game job was much, MUCH better than FAANG. No matter how many fancy drinks and energy bars FAANG gives me, if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt.
What this means is that FAANG is actually paying what it needs to pay to get employees, otherwise many people would simply work elsewhere.
There is a myth that working at FAANG is amazing for everybody, but most people I know there are actually kind of miserable and doing fairly dull work for which they are massively overqualified. Nonetheless, these companies have money and they want the "best" (in their eyes) people for everything, so they pay for it... Well, it's a decent deal.
My theory is that while work is dull, people are not overqualified. They need smart people not because logic they write is complex, but because navigating total chaos of internal system complexity needs smartness. If they could refactor and get internal systems in order they could lower qualification bar, but that refactoring requires super duper overqualified people, etc.
I think that's about right, and the "mess" isn't just code, but organizational. You might be hired to maintain some simple widget, and then 1–2 years later be writing a large scale job processing service, or designing a new front-end rendering system, or any other number of high-impact, challenging projects. Theoretically, these could be different sets of people (like techs vs engineers or something), but since companies are constantly re-orging and don't know what they need, it's the same people doing both.
I have to say however, that for engineers this is a massively good thing, both in terms of being able to work on lots of different stuff, and the compensation implications.
My theory is FANGS pay more because it's a casino like setup.
Yes, their employees are making lot of money but where her money ends up going? A large part of that ends up paying rent in a region where there are many others making similar wages like you, and trying to outcompete you out of the best property you can choose to live.
Mostly people at headquarters or major offices get paid large salaries.
Executives make decisions where to open office, they've upphand on the info and have access to money, they buy the land in and around the region where office will be setup, where their employees will want to live.
That way half the money they pay ends right back into pocket of executives while FANG employees have statisfaction of making highest engineering wages.
It doesn't matter how much you make, if you still find yourself doing the same thing you were doing 5 years ago, perhaps, all that money didn't bring you much.
Now, there are exceptions to this where people saved up their salary and launched another business into huge success, yea those benefit the most. But most of the FANG employees will find themselves doing similar job after 5 years, so...
How exactly that extra money has changed your life? Are you driving Buggati or Bentley to your office? Do you have celebrities (male/female -depending on your orientation) caressing your hair while you hack on the code? Did you start a school to teach underprivileged kids?
As we can see most of these luxuries are still not available to majority FAANG employees regardless of how much they make. It's the money on paper, it doesn't buy much power. To have real power in society, having more money than your peers is not necessary - what you need is vastly more money and influence over other people.
I mean, FAANG compensation lets you trivially retire (or achieve financial independence) by ~40 (if you're single), and that's assuming you're budgeting for 200k/year with an extremely conservative withdrawal rate (3%). If you're willing to resettle somewhere cheaper and live a somewhat less extravagant lifestyle, you could do it by your early 30s no problem.
And, again, this is if you're single, i.e. no second income, paying a single-filer's tax rate, and no benefit of cheaper housing by having someone to split the expense with, etc. A partner earning any real amount of money speeds this up dramatically. (Kids do cost money, if you have them, but they don't cost enough money to offset having a second SWE income, even if you pay for extremely expensive daycare, unless you have like five.)
I don't know about you, but having "fuck you" money after a decade in the workforce, or "no, really, fuck you" money after 2 decades is a pretty good deal. It is, in fact, much easier to make this happen working at a FAANG (or comparable) than elsewhere. People like to complain about the cost of living, and yes, those complaints are valid, but working at a FAANG it's entirely possible to save more after taxes and expenses than software engineers in other parts of the country make _before_ taxes; trying to equivocate between those situations is really quite silly. The first is in a dramatically better financial position than the second.
I imagine this is true in theory. The math checks out. But every FAANG company has been around for at least 15 years now and we don't hear many stories of their early hires retiring. Where does it break down in practise? Is it just too hard to give up the high paying role? Is it that retirees don't talk about it? Or is it that the theory is actually wrong for some reason, and working for $200k for 20 years doesn't actually leave you with fuck you money after all?
Divorces are ridiculously expensive. That was the major culprit for my generation. Only one peer of mine has actually retired before 50 (that I know of), and he stayed married. Everyone else ended up splitting up, which wiped all their savings. Or they went another path.
I followed the other path - total mental breakdown, severe depression followed by "non-retirement" - working freelance, as a co-founder and in interesting jobs while travelling. Turns out that being a well-paid employee for years and years isn't something I can actually do without getting depressed about it.
Both the divorce rates and the divorce cost are thanks to the divorce industry and the divorce lobby. We have a massive industry set up to encourage and profit from divorce.
Most countries don't have this problem, but it's a bigger problem than even the US' ballooning medical costs.
I'm not American :) The UK and Australia both have this problem.
I think it's less to do with the actual costs of the divorce, and more about converting one household into two. All the equity in the house gets split up, which usually gives a decent deposit for another house for each partner, but nowhere near enough to pay off the whole mortgage. Each partner needs enough rooms to host the kids during their shared custody, so a family of 4 goes from needing a single 3-bed house to needing two 3-bed houses. They need two cars, instead of being able to survive on one. If one of the partners gave up their career for the kids then there's alimony to pay. And so on. The legal bills are like icing on the cake.
Luckily I observe this from the perspective of having a happy marriage, which happens to be incredibly frugal compared to two single people living alone. A house for two people who enjoy being together does not need to be larger than a house for one person; although you need a larger house when you have kids. Of many objects you only need one piece, because you are not using them all the time. Cooking is cheap; it requires time, but if you spend that time talking, you don't really mind. Minus those expenses you had in the past simply because you felt alone or bored.
The expenses of two people living together are almost the same as of one person living alone. The extra expenses are mostly for the kids (including the mortgage for the larger house). Which means that if one person has a good salary, the other can "early retire" immediately. Or if both have good salaries, they can save half of the income, and perhaps retire as soon as the kids become independent.
I will argue against a system where there is a lobby designed to glorify and encourage divorce and stoke marital conflict, followed by a litigation which costs around $200k between both sides to bring to completion, which ends when one side or the other runs out of money.
At that point, in most cases, the custody and financial arrangement is designed to be ridiculously complex and inequitable.
Maybe the retirees feel less pressure to talk about themselves on blogs/twitter, since they are retired they don't have to try and stay relavent and instead can just enjoy life.
Sorry, when I said 200k, I meant withdrawing & spending 200k/year, not earning 200k/year. In today's environment you're more likely to be earning (at least) 400k/year by the time you retire if you're following that playbook.
If you take a pretty standard estimate of career and comp growth for an engineer that joined a FAANG company as a new grad and stuck around, generally speaking they'd get promoted to senior-equivalent within 7-8 years (faster for Facebook - 5 years there). Over that time, assuming annual expenses of ~50k/year (single, renting a 1-bedroom in the Bay, leaving you with 20-25k to cover everything else), and sticking everything that's left over into the market, you'd have well over a million by year 8. Let's then pessimistically assume your compensation never grows after it reaches 400k - at that point you'll be taking home ~225k after taxes, or 175k after expenses. Stick that into the market for another decade, you end up with ~5m.
You might say that 50k/year in expenses is unrealistically low for someone living in the SFBA - it's not, really, you aren't even living with roommates and you have five figures to play with after housing and transportation (remember, food is close to free, since most of these places will feed you 3 meals a day M-F if you want). But even if you bump that up to 60k/year that pushes out your retirement date... by a year. Maybe.
This is all inflation-adjusted, mind you. 5m in today's dollars is enough to retire on extremely comfortably, and unless you decide to drastically increase your spending in retirement it'll be growing faster than your draw-down.
I imagine most people who do this either keep working or start working on their own projects. I'm not aiming for this just so I can watch TV all day, let me tell you :)
And most who could will in fact keep working in some capacity, either because they’re excessively paranoid about the capital markets or they enjoy work too much to quit.
Many people (including this comment) severely underestimate the sheer volume of information processed everyday by those staff level engineers in big techs.
Imagine that each day you need to review 1~2 design docs, read and reply tens of mails, attend at least 3 meetings and make non-negligible engineering decisions each, keep the lights on, manage and mentor some junior engineers. And write some code and design docs for your own projects upon all the crazy stacks of technical and procedural complexity.
Time is limited resource, so you cannot really have enough time to understand everything needed as scopes expand. You will eventually need to embrace ambiguities and uncertainties stemming from the complexity. And this needs more than just willingness and patience. Perhaps having some level of smartness can help, but this alone might not be sufficient though.
We're paid well because we have to shift gears a lot, learn a lot, fake-it-till-you-make it, and put up with oodles and oodles of BS.
From a technical standpoint a 16 year old could do my job. We're getting paid for patience and the ability to "code switch" in the socio-linguistic sense.
I think this might be about right. Google's internal tools were built by very smart engineers for use by other very smart engineers. (I'm thinking especially of the Producers Framework as I write this, but there are other examples.)
I've seen plenty of intelligent people struggle to get their heads around Google's abstractions. The tools are powerful enough, though, that once you get it you can pretty easily build stuff that scales to ridiculous levels.
It could be that better design will make these kinds of tools more accessible in the future.
FAANGs/large companies in general have a ton of accidental complexity. A lot of the work devolves into "make this work in our complicated environment". Its just more pronounced at FAANG due to the scale.
> but that refactoring requires super duper overqualified people, etc
Yes, and it needs super duper overqualified managers to understand that the super duper overqualified engineers actually are on to something with their suggestions.
The picture seems to be different here in Sweden. It's possibly related to the difference in wages being less extreme overall.
The best salary I ever had was as a software engineer at a AAA studio, and I used to work outside the game industry and had offers from a consulting firm which I know offer competitive salaries.
I did end up leaving for a smaller studio who couldn't offer quite the same level of compensation, but the difference is still less than 20%.
I've thought about it a lot and even if the pay difference was much bigger I couldn't imagine leaving the game industry. Being surrounded by people who love games, getting to spend my days on serious technical challenges in the service of making something which brings joy to millions. It is an amazing feeling. I make enough that money isn't something I need to worry about and I love what I do in a deep and intense way. No regular frontend/web/dev ops/ whatever development job will ever be able to compete with that.
Anecdotally the way to achieve a high salary in the software industry in Sweden is to do solo consulting. Most companies seem to keep the salaries from inflating by getting seniors from consulting agencies or freelancing consultants; which comfortably segments the high earners from the internals.
This does match what I have seen as well. It's part of why I myself briefly considered a consulting gig.
I also know two people who, when we worked together at one studio, were unable to move from junior designer roles to producer roles. They quit and started a consulting agency together, and now get contracted as assistant producers.
Yep. How is a startup supposed to compete when today's economy has resulted in fresh grads commanding $200k total-comp? Of course the answer is "you raise money!" so you can pay them "market-rates" at which point you may as well say fuck it and just get a job too because now you've given up so much equity and have such an aggressive burn-rate you're pretty well screwed from day one.
Not sure where you are that fresh grads get compensated with $200k but please, as a fresh grad who spent 6 months job searching and just accepted a software engineering job for $50k, let me know.
It's refreshing to see someone pushing back on this narrative a little. FAANG employ a cumulative total of about 100,000 software engineers globally (can't find US-specific numbers).
There are 4.4 million software engineers in the USA. I'm sure the graduate -> $200k move happens, but it's only an extremely small number in terms of the occupation as a whole. People on this forum seem to casually mention it as if it's some kind of default.
Google, Amazon, and Apple together almost certainly hit 100k by themselves. Facebook is a bit smaller than those 3 in terms of engineering headcount but not by much. Netflix is tiny, relatively speaking, I'll give you that.
But, I mean, new grads at MSFT can get pretty close to 200k, even though the comp scales up poorly with career progression compared to FAANG. There are a bunch of other companies where you can hit numbers that are in that ballpark, and they also employee a non-trivial number of engineers: Snapchat, Uber, Lyft, Twitter, Square, Stripe, Doordash, Roblox, etc, etc, etc. Sure, add them all up with FAANG and you probably barely touch 200k. But, uh, 200k is roughly 5% of the software engineers in the country (_very_ broadly classified; I think a more reasonable classification would put it closer to 10%). So, sure, it's not the _default_ outcome, but "top decile" is hardly shooting for the moon.
Also this is specific to the Bay Area - they don’t pay these rates internationally or even everywhere within the US. And finally, it’s not every grad & stocks massively inflate this number.
I’m sure some people reading this will have done it - it’s not ‘common’ and definitely isn’t the pay of the top decile of developers in the world, the West, or I bet even in the US.
Yep, they don't even hire mid-level engineers. They hire seniors and above. But their size is tiny compared to the rest of those top tier tech companies, so Netflix could be ignored for all intents and purposes here.
>Also this is specific to the Bay Area
Not really. Seattle has pretty much the same level of comp and no state income tax. And pretty much all of those companies discussed above have significant presence in Seattle too (minus Netflix afaik). But yes, still an expensive place to live in.
>stocks massively inflate this number
How is this "inflation" or an issue at all? You can sell stocks immediately as they vest and treat it just like cash comp. Or you can hold and hope they grow in price (which a lot of times is a valid strategy). But for all intents and purposes, stock compensation at publicly traded companies is just as valid as cash compensation. It isn't some stock options that "might be worth a lot when we go public, but currently is just a monopoly money you cannot do anything with" in a privately held startup.
>it’s not ‘common’
It depends on how you define "common". Among my peers who applied to those top tier companies and got the offers, around $200k starting out of college was way more common than not. And no, I didn't go to Stanford or anything like that, it was a public state college in Georgia (albeit a very good one, but still, nothing "exclusive" like MIT/Stanford/etc.). There were a couple of people who were truly exceptional, and their starting offers reflected that appropriately (closer to $300k than $200k), but $200k seemed to be the baseline.
And no, none of those companies require some wild credentials or experience to interview. Pretty much anyone can get a Google interview at some point (everyone I know from my school who tried applying, got at least one shot at the Google interview process; I also know a lot of people with either no college education at all or those that went to colleges that no one has even heard of, and they all got invited for Google interviews), the problem is that most don't pass. But it doesn't seem to be just pure luck (even though it is a non-insignificant element of it), given that the people I know who studied the hardest were also the ones who had the highest pass rate for those interviews (as well as the highest offers).
> Google, Amazon, and Apple together almost certainly hit 100k by themselves.
No way. Amazon might be coming close (I don't have a very good idea of their size, but my guess is they have like ~75k software engineers); Google probably has about 50k, Apple has like 10k.
How about we stipulate that you can convince Facebook to pay you $70k to work for them. But they’re also happy to pay you $300k, so if I were a fresh graduate I,would benefit from taking that on board and adjusting my goals and strategy accordingly.
After all, if someone on a forum is talking about $300k graduate salaries while the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks the median pay of programmers in the US is $89k [1] I gotta take both of those numbers into account in my world view.
Otherwise you end up being out of touch with reality, thinking that bananas cost $10.
That's what I'm getting at. The BLS has told you that lots of people make $90k programming computers. Whereas Facebook has shown that they are willing to pay some people four times that much to do the same thing.
From your perspective, they only ever need to do that _once_. To you.
The takeaway is "Facebook will pay me $400k if I work on convincing them to do so." That's a much better thought to have in your head than "maybe somebody will pay me the median developer salary."
Of course, you're welcome to approach life however you choose. Personally, I chose that higher number for myself (for the handful of years it took to retire). And I'd recommend anybody reading this do the same.
Edit: I see this same argument coming up every time salary is discussed here. Somebody will say "look how much you can make", and somebody else will pop up saying "sure, but look how _little_ you can make!".
It's as though they're trying to justify not having to ask for more money by convincing themselves it's impossible. But it's not impossible, and all you can accomplish by thinking negatively is to make less money.
You misunderstand my post - perhaps we have different ideas about what "pushing back on the narrative" means?
I'm not talking about setting personal-level goals used to guide your career planning. I'm talking about knowing the broader, population-level facts in order to inform discussions about public policy and advise the actions of others.
After all, knowing your country's median bodyweight is 170 lbs doesn't preclude you setting your personal goal weight as 135 lbs.
Yeah, this is sorta why you sometimes find the same big box store within a few miles of eachother. It's not that they think they need that other store, it's that they think they need to keep that location out of the hands of competition.
Something that also plays a big factor in the general over qualification of FAANG employees is that mistakes can be very very costly. It’s worth paying one engineer that gets things right 99.99% of the time twice the salary of engineer that gets things right only 99.9% of the time.
From what I recall of the training I received from a somewhat well-known Chief Quality Officer, you don't get things right more often by getting better people, you get things right more often by making better processes for people to follow (the latter of which isn't as directly tied to better people as you may think).
Frankly, I don't get the hype. I've interviewed FAANG engineers and have given a thumbs down almost as often as I did for engineers from other companies.
Re: the hype .. what I would say is, as an employee of a FAANG, is that I work with really smart people. Some of the smartest and most competent people I've ever worked with. Most much smarter than myself.
But after 9 years, I'm not convinced that their intelligence always yields results that exceed that of other companies I've worked at. In some ways, yes, but in other ways no. So, I dunno.
But in my experience striving for consistency means that before improving something you have to go and change everywhere that pattern appears in 400 different code bases going back 20 years (and all of the documentation across however many platforms). As a result nobody ever improves things.
This is something that gets parroted A LOT, and has been for at least 20 years now.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I'd really, really like to see some actual numbers on this.
My biggest gripe with this theory, is that it assumed all responsibility and decision-making on a single worker. In every other industry I've worked, where employees have the access to some extremely costly "kill switch", where you can basically bring down the whole system, it's always - ALWAYS something that needs to go through multiple people.
That also goes for more fundamental roles, like design and implementation. These things go through multiple people, reviews, and later audits.
I'd be amazed if internal guidelines and regulations at FAANG behemoths allow potential multi-million decisions to rest on single employees.
Is the "costliness" because of the scale the systems operate at?
It's not a knock on the companies or employees, but my initial reaction was that embedded code in safety critical systems like what operates infrastructure, cars, airplanes, etc. would be less forgiving in terms of mistakes
And also at this point where else would they be spending money? They make so much that waste isn't too big of an issue. So in the end some money ends up with employees.
There’s some truth to this I’ll admit. But if most of the work is dull why do you need the “best” ?
I saw an explanation later in this thread that made more sense. FANGs do have a lot of good employees. And if they didn’t pay high salaries other companies would simply swoop in and free ride on all the hard work they do to find and groom talent. FANGs spend a lot of money scouring the entire globe and interviewing so many people in detail. It’s a juicy target for recruiter raiding. And just like you can’t get fired for hiring IBM you can’t get fired for hiring FANG. This attracts yet more talent. But yes the level of the engineers is not as great as the salaries would suggest.
But on the flip side for anyone doing hiring. If you want some wicked smart devs who don’t ask for as much then look at game devs.
Theres no reason to not pay for the best. Engineer's provide so much value compared to an individuals cost. I can give an a example of what I'm working on. I'm doing maybe 2-3months of work, the project cut a one time cost in half saving 10million dollars. I make about quarter million in a year. A tiny fraction of the value I provided this year alone. Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good? 100k is 1 percent of that value.
Now that I type this out I feel like I'm getting ripped off. BRB to demand a raise lol
>Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good?
with regards to the game industry: because outside of maybe a dozen studios worldwide (EA and Rockstar studios level of profit), most of the games industry literally cannot compete with the salaries FAANG offers.
all those trillion dollar companies have dozens of services and products to monetize off of (indirectly or directly). Games need hundreds of employees to deploy one short lived project in a few years minimum. And attempts to monetize in a service format (the default for FAANG) has been met with much criticism. So games operate on razor thin profits.
FAANG needs good employees because of how big and complex everything is. A lot of work is just integrating the 100s of services that already exist into whatever new product is coming out.
Is the work novel, not really, but it is difficult and very complex.
> if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt.
There are exceptions. Roblox has a reputation for being competitive with FAANG. You should check them out. It's also a platform company, so it has all the technical challenges of the gaming industry without the crunch-time that comes along with releasing a major game.
You are adjusting too hard in the other direction. "Most" people at FAANG companies are absolutely not miserable. The typical engineer at Google/Facebook works 40 hours a week, gets a good salary and is content with their life.
I'm not sure if you're trying to say that is too much or too little. In my experience at several such companies, no one is putting in more than 2-4 productive work hours a day.
It's all about finding a company that's small enough so revenue per employee is north of a million and your work is visible to your entire organization and the quantity of work far exceeds the number of people. With these three conditions, you will get both meaningful work and high pay without even trying (except trying to get into the company).
I left games 24 years ago in large part over pay. The work itself I loved doing, but it was never going to let me buy a house nearby or retire. I’m glad I did as I don’t think the was enough extra enjoyment over being able to enjoy other work (albeit less) but have some amount of financial security.
As an outsider looking at this it seems like you can just work a decade in that job and earn what you'd earn in 2-3 decades in the game job. Even more if you can invest.
Unless you're truly miserable, it seems like the obvious choice. You can always go indie or head back after that first decade and at that point it's all gravy.
A decade is pretty long. Long enough to not be into video games anymore, long enough to raise your life expenses to match your income, long enough to burn out, long enough to have children and other interests …
Going back to lower income is really difficult, a lot of people bore themselves to death, dreaming of another job but stay just because they are well paid.
I’m not saying you are wrong, but how can you be sure that the « you » in ten years will have the willpower to follow your initial plan ? Good pay can sometimes be a trap.
A decade is a huge portion of your life and I certainly wouldn't want to spend what little time I have doing something I'm less fond of in the hope that I'll be sitting on a pile of money one day and maybe then I can go do what I actually want.
This was my experience at FAANG as well. I had some terrible game industry jobs, but I've been at a few studios where I had a much better experience than FAANG even if pay was lower
What this means is that FAANG is actually paying what it needs to pay to get employees, otherwise many people would simply work elsewhere.
There is a myth that working at FAANG is amazing for everybody, but most people I know there are actually kind of miserable and doing fairly dull work for which they are massively overqualified. Nonetheless, these companies have money and they want the "best" (in their eyes) people for everything, so they pay for it... Well, it's a decent deal.