Are a lot of these 300k-500k TC positions putting in 40 hour work weeks or more?
I think that's worth bringing up because it's a huge factor at the end of the day. For example, getting 400k TC but you routinely put in 60-80 hours a week is much different than 40 hours a week.
Personally I would much prefer working 30-40 hours a week for X vs 60-80 hours a week for X * 2. The amount of taxes you pay in the X * 2 range are so massive you end up not getting anywhere near a true 2x amount in your bank account but you put in a true 2x amount of hours. Working 70 hours a week as a typical employee role isn't sustainable in my opinion.
Generally, people at big companies work less than at small companies. Most software engineers I know making more than 400k work ~30 hours a week.
Things get different at the super senior levels making several million, usually a lot more meetings, hard to speak to their specific hours. But on the other hand, they get to retire after two years if they want so...
> Things get different at the super senior levels making several million
Right, everything changes at that point of income. Putting in ~70 hours a week for a few years to make 3-5 million seems like a no brainer.
But grinding 60-70 hours a week for 300k-400k, I don't know. That's a much harder sell. You'll probably burn out before you could retire. I don't know what taxes would look like in CA but it would probably be like an effective 9.5% in state taxes and then another effective 30% in federal. I know there's maxing out a 401k for deferring taxes and other deductions but quick napkin math probably puts you at like 180k take home on 300k income. Not sure on the total cost of living in SF but maybe 40k to live in a studio with no family while living reasonably well? So you have 140k to save and invest every year. That's a lot of years of 60+ hours / week to retire comfortably.
Not to be rude but did you read the entirety of my post? This doesn't happen that much, the people putting in those hours are generally making 250k or less at mid level or above. Those making 300-400k generally either don't have to work many hours or are capable of passing interviews that will allow them to work significantly less.
> 180k take home on 300k income
Without going into too much detail, often by the time your stock is paid out to you it's worth much more than what you signed at so that you had an effective pay raise of sometimes 50% or more. You're also leaving out bonuses, which at some companies can be substantial.
Suffice to say, plenty of people retire in a decade.
Eh, I helped several people job hunt this year, here are the offers accepted (total comp, not salary, which tends to cap around 200k). None of the people listed have more than 5 years of experience:
None at FAANG (aside from Netflix, none of the other letters pay top dollar for anything below staff anymore anyway). These were mostly companies that had IPO'd more recently, very late stage startups close to IPO.
All had the format:
-Hiring manager phone screen
-Technical phone screen
-(virtual) On Site
3/5 had leetcodes, 2/5 had no leetcode. No leetcode was harder than medium.
All had behavioral interviews
All but the fresh grad had design interviews
For the non leetcode, coding questions two main forms:
1. General line of business code e.g. take some JSON, derive statistics, turn it into new JSON, etc.
2. Bug squash in a new codebase (find the bug, write regression tests)
I think that's worth bringing up because it's a huge factor at the end of the day. For example, getting 400k TC but you routinely put in 60-80 hours a week is much different than 40 hours a week.
Personally I would much prefer working 30-40 hours a week for X vs 60-80 hours a week for X * 2. The amount of taxes you pay in the X * 2 range are so massive you end up not getting anywhere near a true 2x amount in your bank account but you put in a true 2x amount of hours. Working 70 hours a week as a typical employee role isn't sustainable in my opinion.