You get this guy, then you make the mistake of looking for projects on angel list and find half the people posting think they can hire engineers for 0 cash. I’ve been told my whole career that I don’t charge enough and yet I have to look hard to find people that pay my rate. Then I check HN to find what an underpaid loser I am. Coffee break over, back to the mines I guess.
Well, people most likely are correct telling you to charge more. Getting clients is part of the job,if it'd be easy, everybody would be doing it.As for $0/h expectations: those people are everywhere.A few month ago spoke to one in my network. I need an app.. what kind of app? Well, not sure yet, but could you recommend someone,who won't rip me off?? Oh my...
Honestly, dealing with these types of clients is why I stopped freelancing/consulting full-time. It's just so mentally exhausting to go through the "I need something affordable, I mean I don't want to pay $800 for an app or something crazy!" (actual quote) even when you qualify them early.
I think what helps early during the qualification process is asking if they've got money. I remember a fully fledged meeting with a whole bunch of people around the table discussing how they'd like the project to look. Eventually,after an hour or so,my manager at the time, asks: have you got budget for this? Emm...emm.. we may.. it's almost there..etc.
It was hard to read this... You'd need to write code that produces unicorn pastries to be able to go anywhere near such numbers here in Europe..
But the saddest thing about most dev jobs is that even the outcome can literally make companies millions/billions, the devs are rarely awarded for it. Take sales,for instance. You sell a few million worth of licencing and you get a nice comp.. As a dev, you write code that speeds up a process by 20%, the company increases profit margins and you get..well, a trip to a conference, if you are lucky..
Citadel is a good example,where even devs can earn substantial amounts off successful trading strategies,but then it's still a US company with only a handful of people working for them.
America, if you can refer to it in a monolithic context, has decided that individualism, self-reliance, entrepreneurship, etc. trump a lot of things. Almost no social safety net (barely enough to prevent you from starving or dying in the street, and not much more, and most of that won't even come from the government but from faith-based charity), but yeah if you're a software developer you might be able to make an extra $50-75k/yr compared to Europe. But how much are you going to have in student loans? I graduated in '08 with about $22k and that was a lot back then. What's someone graduating last year or this year going to graduate with?
There's pros and cons to both approaches, both at individual and societal levels, but I rarely hear Europeans acknowledge why US companies can pay its developers so much more.
I'm happy to discuss those 'why'. The cost of student loans or lack of social safety net hardly warrants higher salaries. This is probably more related to the availability of the specialists (immigration rules, the local supply of devs coming from universities,etc).Very few companies even in the US can pay 200-300K salaries to devs,most don't come anywhere near that.My main point is that European companies are less likely to reward employees,even though their contributions far exceed the costs. Similar trends are seen in other fields: recently, top tier law firms in London complained that the US companies with divisions in London can push graduate salaries to £100K. The same market,yet very different willingness to pay.
Not an expert in legal field but from my understanding, the US law firms moving to London was akin to a wake up call for the local firms that were very comfy.I think the US firms that tend to focus on high end services, whenever they open a shop abroad, the salaries tend to be higher. I'm already seeing this in my home country,where some firms pay 2-3 times the going local rate and the local firms would never ever pay that much.
I wonder what would happen if Tim Cook said they were no longer going to hire Facebook engineers as a matter of principle.
They could say something like, "if you're willing to sacrifice your ethics to work for a company that spies on people, you can't be trusted with our product."
Not a lifetime ban, but perhaps a 5 year ban from working at Apple after having had a tenure at Facebook. Maybe they could waive the ban for candidates that publicly renounced Facebook's practices.
It'll never happen, but if it did I imagine the effects on Facebook hiring and retention would be chilling.
But what of the chilling effects on Apple’s hiring? Do we really want to start turf wars where companies can essentially reenact anti-poaching laws and the associated depression in mobility but spin it as being principled?
I'd worry more about wages dropping due to WFH and creation of a "pay-adjusted" distributed workforce.
I'd also worry about the monopolistic behavior of the incumbents making it harder for challengers to succeed, creating less diversity in work or employment.
Principled stands won't happen. Profits matter, not morals or ethics. It's better for them to maximize the workforce pool and keep them fungible.
>Not a lifetime ban, but perhaps a 5 year ban from working at Apple after having had a tenure at Facebook.
Japan has something similar for Yakuza members who are defined as "anti social forces" with a cooling off period of 7 years. FWIW I find the idea when applied to Facebook rather appealing.
It really depends on where you live. If you want to own a home, Facebook and similar are really your only options for the Bay Area. Assuming you also want a nice commute, decent schools, etc. stuff that most professionals work towards.
And yet I get pilloried when I dare say that the Bay Area is a bad place to live. The median software dev salary for the US is under $110k. So half the people in the country make less than that, yet even in places with low salaries nationally software developers are well-paid and have no trouble affording housing and growing wealth.
You’re probably talking to a lot of rich dudes. That’s why they get on your case.
If you’re rich, it’s probably better than all those other places. But, again, need to be rich. And it takes a lot to get there for a person who grew up in a lower socioeconomic class. You’ll spend most of your life trying to get there and stay rather than enjoying the riches. (At least, that’s my experience so far!)
The reason commonly given for living in the Bay Area is all the jobs available but you're pointing out that's not actually the case because if you want to live well in the Bay Area then you have few employment options. Is that the reality?
Certainly is for me. The $170k/yr startup salary I get is certainly not enough to afford jack shit around here. Even an extra $50k/yr wouldn't do anything to alter my lifestyle. I couldn't get any kind of home around here with that and I'd still be very uncomfortable renting a home on that income - as it'd be more than a third of my take home pay (lose your job? You better have a very large emergency buffer - unemployment won't even pay a third of your monthly rent).
The engineers I know who stay around here are A) wealthy (bought home long before average price was past $1m or inherited one), B) rent, dual engineer income, and enjoy the renter lifestyle, C) Work at FAANG and/or have a spouse who does and make big fucking $$$$ D) Going to move away, no plans to stay permanently.
There are no young people (<35) moving here, working for no-name companies, and buying homes after saving for a down payment after a few years. Almost all young people I know who do such things have A) had a startup IPO or B) work at FAANG.
Certainly can't make it here on a single startup salary - not even in the faintest. I'm proof of that.
The reason people move here is because there's a chance (insert dumb and dumber reference) to strike rich. There's also way more jobs here than anywhere else in the country and that's why I moved here. I couldn't get a job anywhere else but I somehow managed to get one here four times in a row now.
I know plenty of people doing just fine in SF on much less than that 170k.
Yes, they rent. But "buying homes after saving for a down payment after a few years" is not a reality in any major metro area at the moment, unless you're fine with small, old, and far out in the suburbs.
> Yes, they rent. But "buying homes after saving for a down payment after a few years" is not a reality in any major metro area at the moment, unless you're fine with small, old, and far out in the suburbs.
Isn't true for people I know in other major cities that are working professionals. Most peers I have in their 30's are buying homes in other major cities - if they are engineers or have a spouse who is an engineer.
I'm not talking about people who work retail. I'm talking specifically about engineers. Engineers in most major cities in the US can afford to buy a home if they have a spouse who works some kind of okay job. This just isn't true in the bay area.
Depends on the people. $180k + $80k is only $260k. It's enough to get a house at $1m but you'll be somewhat house poor. You have to assume they haven't been saving at $180+$80k that entire time unless you're assuming they're late 30's.
9% down isn't common for Bay Area btw. 30-45% of all homes are bought with cash (higher value the property - higher the all cash offer %). Do you think those numbers are like that in other parts of the country? Do you think you can get by with <10% down for a jumbo loan? The people I know who bought here have either paid all cash or had to put down even more than 20%.
We haven't even discussed what a $1m home gets you here. I wouldn't buy a $1m home here. You will not get a nice home or neighborhood. Minimum $1.5m to break into the decent neighborhoods. Want something resembling what the rest of the professional middle class has? At least $2m+.
I wonder if that is part of the reason for the high compensation numbers. I do not know how widespread "counter Facebook ethics" are among Engineers. I could imagine them being higher that elsewhere as it is a somewhat high-compensation segment, even outside of these monstrous FB-numbers.
How do we solve this problem? How do we prevent, or at least discourage, people from turning a blind eye to the ethical implications of working in a dystopia accelerator company like FB when job options elsewhere are plentiful?
There must be some that pay £1M at the tech giants.
£100K is a minimum for most of the financial tech recruiters, for senior hires. At least I chat to quite a few of them and there doesn't seem to be anything under. Typical build-a-market-connector jobs.
Also there's a big contracting market where people will pay £600-£2000 a day, depending on what you do. They're semi-permanent jobs that superficially seem to be temporary, but something about how banks are organised makes them feel more permanent.
The contracting market will be culled from next year when IR35 changes come to play. That means people providing services as a business will not be able to claim business expenses (with some exceptions) plus they will have to draw all revenue as a salary. This makes essentially running such service pointless. They will also have to pay employee and employer's NI (without having any employment rights), that gives effective tax rate at around 54%. There will be awkward situation where engineers would work only half a year, to pay more reasonable tax or become an employee of agency. Coincidentally the share prices of Indian consultancies rocketed upon the announcement of IR35 going forward.
I have spoken to a handful of recruiters that have suggested £100k but they definitely seem rare. I've _never_,not once, seen or come across an offer for more than 500k. Im sure there are people who are on it, but I have absolutely no idea who they are or where they work.
I work in UK FS in London as a contractor. The work is pretty lucrative (for the UK) but not overly exciting. It possible to make this sort of money (I do not) but it is extremely rare.
Most of the >£100k permanent (not contract) jobs I see have "Architect" in the title which typically means not just coding.
As an additional note, the UK contracting market is on a precipice at the moment with an uncertain future.
I'd imagine much of the top performer work at FAANG (like the OP's post here) isn't overly exciting either!
> but it is extremely rare.
I'd expect so, and it seems this is rare in the US too, (this is literally the top of top performers at the top companies), but you'd expect to have _some_ indication of this information leakign out.
> Most of the >£100k permanent (not contract) jobs I see have "Architect" in the title which typically means not just coding.
As an architect you'll unlikely do any coding, maybe when there is a downtime and you are extremely bored. Most of this job are meetings, writing reports, passing messages, consulting developers and giving direction and resolving issues in the teams (e.g. team A wants to use framework X, team B wants to use framework Y) by creating guidance.
Assuming you mean senior jobs in finance, 100K is a sort of modal zone. You lose your personal tax allowance just above, so there's a dead zone around there. That's my guess anyway, what's the point of your employer paying 100% tax?
£500k as a salary is rare, most comp at that level is some sort of bonus.
I've heard of banks that hire people in at ordinary day rates, but then once they are familiar with the person will bump the rate to whatever.
> You lose your personal tax allowance just above, so there's a dead zone around there. That's my guess anyway, what's the point of your employer paying 100% tax?
It's tapered from 100 to 125k, but at no point is your employer paying 100% tax. From 100 to 125k, your marginal tax rate is ~60%, but drops after that point.
> £500k as a salary is rare, most comp at that level is some sort of bonus.
Even with bonuses, or RSU/some other form of shares, I think "rare" is understating it, and that's exactly the point. The discussion in this thread is that the top performers in FAANG are clearing _well_ above these values (multiples of these numbers).
> once they are familiar with the person will bump the rate to whatever.
Can you be a little more clear with the "whatever" number? 100k? 500k? 1m?
> It's tapered from 100 to 125k, but at no point is your employer paying 100% tax. From 100 to 125k, your marginal tax rate is ~60%, but drops after that point.
Actually you're right, I had misunderstood something. Looking at an online calculator, if you go from 100K to 125K gross, you take home 10K more.
What is a going rate for senior engineer in a tech company in the UK? Last I look, it was in the order of about £65K to £70K for the really top performers.
A big pile of "it depends", just the definition of senior engineer varies so much from company to company that comparison is all but meaningless.
I know that at Facebook the ballpark salary for something approximating senior is approx £100k. I think a range between around £60k to £110k is in line with what i've seen on offer for senior (source: i've spent most of this year looking for work, and this is pretty much what i've seen)
It depends far more on the company than anything else. I've seen engineers earning over £120k that wouldn't have been able to get hired as senior at my last role, where the senior salary was in the £70-80k range.
Maybe outside London. I recently left London but took my salary with me. If I needed to get a new job where I am I'd probably be looking at a 40-50% pay cut.
Holy crap, when you compare the numbers, how can people still expect Europe to compete with the U.S.?
In Europe, tech is seen as an unfortunate necessity, not a groundbreaking solution.. And things won’t change until the mentality changes.
FAANG hire in Europe. They are not paying drastically different amounts to those European employees. When I relocated from the US to Europe from a FAANG company my salary was market adjusted (about a 25% cut), but RSUs and stock were kept the same.
25% sounds like a lot, but my cost of living dropped more than 25% moving out of the Bay Area, so I was more than happy.
Once you become a senior enough engineer at FAANG the overwhelming majority of your compensation is stock, and when that happens the base salary becomes pretty irrelevant. My base salary is maybe 1/5 of my total compensation at this point.
I don't think it's true that the pay isn't drastically different. I was in the pipeline with Apple recently, and the pay for a sr. eng position was 80k. This is comparable to other companies where I interviewed. Of course, without receiving a solid offer I didn't hear about the RSU side, but I think your experience moving internally is totally different to starting a role with FAANG within EU.
> They are not paying drastically different amounts to those European employees.
Sorry but that's simply not true. Based on my personal experience at FAANGs (including management roles), SV packages are much higher compared to London, Munich, Paris etc. Only exception is Zurich.
> but my cost of living dropped more than 25% moving out of the Bay Area,
The number I look at is total saving amount each year.
What’s missing from this post is how common it is. E8 at Facebook is extremely rare. I can’t remember the exact percentage when I was there, but it’s around 1-2%.
E5 at FB is a terminal level, many engineers don’t get beyond that. I worked on a team of several hundred engineers and we only had one or two E7s, and nothing higher.
To put this in perspective: at FB, E8 is the individual contributor equivalent of engineering director.
It seems unbelievable really. It's literally 5x-20x of what a solid developer can earn in Europe. I mean, the best of the best (and I know maybe 1000 developers so not that small of a sample) I've heard is around $150K, a few over $100K and everyone else below $100K.
Of course, there's other stuff - 30 (working) days of paid vacation, solid and cheap education, solid medical coverage (I consider $50 medical bill damn high) etc.
It is less about the skills. With a good platform, your skills will transfer to higher value (I mean money really) than average platforms. It is not like the person with highest score in class end up with the biggest house. There is only one Facebook, one Google, one Amazon, one Microsoft and one Apple, and the US has all of them.
> Of course, there's other stuff - 30 (working) days of paid vacation, solid and cheap education, solid medical coverage (I consider $50 medical bill damn high) etc.
I worked at FAANGs in Silicon Valley for many years. I always got at least 20 vacation days, 10-12 holidays (like Christmas or July 4th), excellent insurance plans and could pay off my 40-45K education loan in a breeze. Total cost of private education is ~25K per child.
If you have a Software job at a FAANG in SV, it will be better than almost any other arrangement in Europe (exception: Zurich) even after taking into account vacation days, insurance premiums, California taxes, private schools cost and probability of gun violence.
> 30 (working) days of paid vacation
> solid and cheap education
> solid medical coverage
Unfortunately none of these are uniform across Europe. I only have 20 days of vacation, medical coverage is horrible, with 2-3 month waiting lists for even an MRI, and education is absolutely horrid.
I wouldn't even call them free, nor cheap: income taxes come out to about ~35%, and VAT is the highest in the world.
And to add on to that, achieving compensation above ~80k usd is basically impossible. With ~3 years of experience I barely get half of that at a Google L4 level equivalent.
This has been my experience. I have 25 vacation days, medical coverage is NOT free, as I pay it from my gross monthly income (around 400 euros per month) and waiting lists for an MRI are weeks or months long and generally it's very superficial coverage for a healthy person in their 30s.
Income and other taxes are damn high for what you actually get out of it.
The quality of social services and healthcare in EU countries is grossly overestimated. One can easily be left behind with no support American-style in countries like Spain, Italy, Poland, Czechia, not even mentioning Bulgaria or Romania. In countries with developed services and healthcare like Germany of Finland, the language barrier will heavily handicap one's ability to even benefit from them.
One simply sees their paycheck cut by ~40% monthly and in case of crisis situation is always put at the end of the queue as a low priority applicant. That's ranging from irritating to infurating depending on the urgency of one's problems.
My experience with "free" healthcare is horrible. I almost died because of waiting times and incompetence and it costs so much in tax, I could pay for a quite comprehensive private insurance for the money and you most of the time end up paying privately anyway, although private healthcare is not as expensive as in the US.
That's the unfortunate reality of working in Europe I think, especially in a lower cost of living country. I've just moved from Germany to the UK, and my salary has increased in gross terms (and an associated significant increase in net), but I lose many of the German provisions/safety nets that the high taxes pay for over there.
In California, if you're making over a million dollars you're looking at 50.3% marginal income tax i believe, which is a lot more than the 35% cited by the parent as "expensive" and you're probably getting a lot less
You're forgetting about the tax deduction for interest payments on your home, which you've front loaded so that you only pay off the principle after you've retired.
Yes, but they're still software developers: most teams I've worked on have had plenty of contractors. It seems like the more experienced developers either stay permie and move into architecture/management or become contractors. There are plenty of "contractors in name only", too.
I suppose for a lot of non US engineers the main issue is not so much believing the compensation packages but actually navigating the legal constraints to be allowed to work in the US (or more specifically in SV, Seatle, NY, where those packages are available).
I'd say in the US, as this is an immigration issue. Things are so much easier for those who have the luck of either being US citizens or somehow being allowed to legally work there...
Personally, I think the SV numbers are just too high. Your attitude is a good example of the issues that come with that.
We’re engineers, not royalty. There’s nothing any one of us could do that would justify these wages, if it wasn’t for US immigration policies causing an artificial supply/demand issue.
Well clearly there's something you can do to justify it because fb justifies it.
This is business after all. Your value is a combination of what you bring to the company and how hard you are to replace. FB makes $$$, the $$$ didn't just appear out of thin air, it happened because of the people who work there. Giving engineers a share of all that money seems much more reasonable than giving zuckerberg a second private jet.
> We’re engineers, not royalty. There’s nothing any one of us could do that would justify these wages, if it wasn’t for US immigration policies causing an artificial supply/demand issue.
Executives, CEOs and shareholders are all highly compensated for their risk in both time and money and are not "royalty." I would argue that being royal implies birth as an unjustifiably paid skill.
> Executives, CEOs and shareholders are all highly compensated for their risk in both time and money
That too is wrong. Paying wages based on supply/demand instead of based on the value an employee actually provides leads to exactly this kind of heavily distorted labor markets.
FB generates around $2 million in annual revenue and $600k in net income per employee (not just engineers). If the only thing you consider is value generated by each employee, then FB should be paying far more. Maybe 400k for a new grad and 1M for a senior engineer?
I have the opposite take. The US has something approaching a free labor market. That sucks if you're at the bottom. It's awesome if you're in demand and can get a 20% pay rise at any time by jumping employers (and yes, that 20% stacks reliably).
I admire Europe for achieving a good lower bound on the standard of living of a person in society. If it were my way, all labor laws would only apply to those making less than 100K a year.
The same laws which protect lower income earners by making hiring/firing expensive, make the cost of hiring/firing well paid employees astronomical. That puts a serious damper on the fluidity of labor markets.
It’s a matter of value generation. Code that automates value generation at scale can bring more than enough value to compensate all the roles involved in its production.
If you’re making this much, you don’t care about cost of living, assuming you’re not going to have some crazy standard of living (mansion, supercars, etc.). A 50% increase in your food costs is a rounding error, for example.
Some notes from a former FB engineer (DE, E5, London).
First of all, congrats to the author of the post! Even having worked there, seeing these numbers is a bit shocking :)
Some comments to help cool down EU emotions in this thread.
As the author points out, there are very few engineers at FB who have this sort of career path or income.
The author says that from year 2-8, every single year he got an "additional grant" over the refresher stock. I asked a friend who is a former Eng.Man. at FB, he says that these "additional grants" are given to very few people every year by the executive team, so this makes the career path even more of an outlier. He says this level of income is unusual even for E7-E8s. This career path is probably the statistical quivalent of building a successful startup and cashing out.
Also, to end up with the these W2 numbers (W2 is a tax form in the US, by W2 the author means "total gross compensation"), you need to join early, to get the nice stock appreciation. Having said that, so far it's never been the wrong time to join: in 2016 when I joined (FB was a 10+ yo company) stock was at ~$100, now it's at ~$300 :)
How are these numbers in EU offices: in London (in 2016-17), number were significantly lower than in US, both base salary (and hence bonus, since it's a multiplier) and stock grants, and also opportunities (products) and visibility (eg. every 6 months I got my rating from an unknown quorum of people at the Menlo Park HQ, and I had mostly remote managers who didn't have much time for me). Expect to make -25-50% if you're in London vs Menlo Park for the same work/effort. Per my recollection, as an E5 back then, everything added up (base, bonus, stock), my net salary was around 7k GBP/mo. If I would have stuck around at FB, without levelups, just because of stock appreciation and refresher stocks I'd probably be making >10k GBP/mo now. SWEs make ~20% more than DEs.
Also, to put the author's promotion track into perspective, I found that it's very hard to get promoted at FB. When I was hired (35 yo, working as a SWE/Data/Manager since 23), I felt E5 is under-leveling me, so I worked very hard throughout my time there, working weekends, doing SWE projects, etc. While working there, I saw how strong the talent pool is at FB, and how steep the expectations are (wrt measurable and consistent impact of your work), so I knew that I'm definitely not at an E7 or above, but I did feel that I'm an "entry E6 level" (which is significantly more money than E5). But getting leveled up was out of the question, there were simply no opportunities, either work or visibility for DEs in London at that time. So I left after ~20 months. In retrospect, the right thing to do psychologically, assuming you stay for the long-run, is just ignore the levels, collect the refresher stocks, hope/wait for the stock to appreciate, make/look for/wait for impactful projects, but take the long view (it's a marathon, not a sprint).
Overall, my advice for EU people: if you get a chance to interview at a FAANG, take it, it's a good experience! If you get an offer, take it, you'll come out ahead wrt learning, money, and you'll have a big stamp of approval on your CV. If you don't like it, you can always leave and it'll be easy for you to get another job.
The E5 comp quoted here correlates with the comp offered by the large FS organisations in the UK for senior tech roles (Solutions Architect, Development Lead, Principal Eng etc).
And if you're unlucky enough to be in the bottom 50% of programmers that can't make it through the Facebook interviews, you can at least make 1/3 as much.
eg. Stories, Marketplace, Live Video, Workplace, or a new type of Ad product, or it could be sth smaller. As a user on the web you perceive it as a big or small feature of FB.
> Year 1 was learn to become a good engineer,
> Year 2 was learn become a good Tech Lead
This made me laugh... One year to become a good engineer and another to become a tech lead. Seriously? Facebook seems like an interesting place to be. Maybe I should also apply there.
But on a more serious note. There is no way, no matter how smart you are, to become a Tech Lead (at least not at a reputable company) within two years. It's just mentally not possible to learn all the things you need to learn in that time. And that is not even considering the fact that most of the time you don't have such ideal conditions that you would be exposed to the necessary scenarios and learning opportunities to pull that off even if it was humanly possible. Perhaps Facebook's levels are more based on "business achievements" than actual competence, which is fine I guess. If I make the company 10 million dollars, why should I not get a good chunk of it, regardless of how experienced I am? (I am serious)
But the fact that E8 is still about "team of 4" tells me a lot. Principal Engineers at Amazon are responsible for potentially hundreds of engineers and that level is said to be about E7. Doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
And the author shows that:
"E6->E7 and E7->E8 promotions were mainly about making something successful. My execution could have been perfect but if the product didn’t work, I would not have been promoted."
Yup, pure business success based promotions, which makes any level based comparison between Facebook and Amazon kinda moot.
I would be interested to know if this is just one data point, or if this is how Facebook generally operates.
> One year to become a good engineer and another to become a tech lead. Seriously?
We don't know what the OP did before. They possibly had significant industry experience from before, and just had to figure out how to apply that at Facebook.
I worked for FB (left in 2018), and you are right. He started as E4, which means that he was not new grad (new grads starts as E3). So he was either phd, or had industry experience before.
His first year: "Because of the 3 launches and building a 4 people team, I was promoted to E5" -- looks like he should have been E5 when started (given that he was able to build team in the first year), and they quickly corrected for that.
In the uk a year or two ago there was an ad showing an eager young guy, in his very early 20s if that, and the text that thanks to this course, this guy was training to become a software project manager.
I almost started laughing. There's no way a green youth can manage a software project without being a decent software dev first. Not happening.
It is possible to have a non-dev be one if they are very experienced and have the right soft skills, I knew one and he was good, but straight out of uni to manage a project, no way at all.
You can't be a SPM without having some solid understanding of dev. Without that you can't make good decisions. It's like saying a person can become the captain of a ship without sailing experience.
The one good project managers I've had that didn't have a dev background instead put in a lot of time to understand dev and was an at-home hobby programmer so he had a large clue.
How does lateral movement work in these companies? If you were an individual researcher (with promotions corresponding to 10 years of experience, let us say) in a prior organization?
Depends on how her/his skills apply to such company / role.
I.e. at FB, you could be E7 by just technical work, but you had to be really good and be able to pick important problems and solve them (say that you are able to design and implement core systems for example). But it's easier to get above E5 by going TL way.
Yeah sure, if you have significant experience before, but then E4 would be a total mis-hire.
Then E5 or E6. But E6 would already mean you were essentially a team lead before you even started. Will they mis-hire you two levels apart? Maybe, rarely, if you really screwed up that interview?
But the OP also says he "became a good engineer" and he "became a team lead". And that is simply not possible. We do not talk about people who "were" a team lead and didn't know it. We are talking about people legitimately hired at E4.
PHD? Perhaps you can do it in two years, but a PHD very likely has a lot of the skills you need already, so it's not a fair basis to start from and they studied up to 6 years longer than a normal Master.
What bothers me more is the E6 -> E7 -> E8 promotion with the associated salary. That is just legitimately NOT possible at Amazon. This would mean you went from junior engineer to Senior Principal Engineer in 8 years. Well good luck with that. Maybe if you were the next Steve Wozniak, you could pull that off. I know A LOT of very smart people, people from M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon, etc. and they are challenged by just being a Senior Engineer at Amazon. Principal and Senior Principal just requires a skillset most people will never develop and according to the OP, that is not required by Facebook. In which case I consider it possible to get promoted to E8 within 8 years. This just means Facebook levels mean literally "I was successful", not "I am a competent leader". Which is fine and I will keep that in mind for the leveling discussion should I ever be on the lookout for a job there...
If you are smart (and I think the OP is very smart, don't get me wrong), and you have a good portion of luck to be in the right place at the right time, I imagine the OP's path to be possible if levels are handed out by "success". But this isn't meaningful to anyone else. The OP may have had a very different experience without a good portion of luck. Or at a different company, like Amazon.
To prove my point, I would encourage E8's at Facebook to try to apply as (Senior) Principal Engineer at Amazon and see how it goes.
I think there's a disconnect between what people expect from those job titles especially (L.E. from many US and most SV companies) if you come from companies structured differently or from across the pond. Also the language barrier maybe.
Being used to European style job titles of the time (some decades ago), imagine my surprise when I met with some vice-presidents from a big US company who turned out to be among the dozens glorified product managers the company had.
Same with tech leads where the expectation is that you are either just tech focused (best tech resource, authority on that tech in the team, still under a team lead), or less likely both team/people and tech focused (so among the best techs, and proven leadership skills).
> Given the importance of the product [...] the team was back to 4 engineers and since I was the first one, I became the Tech Lead for the product. [...] I was not even in top 3 of the team of 10 based on engineering skills
Being the first assigned to a product because nobody else was around and having your product draw the more qualified techs to you doesn't make you a lead of either kind.
A job title is relevant if it's assigned to people who proved their worth with those particular skills needed for the position (evidently not the case here). So a tech lead in FB basically means you're the first and do a decent job. In many companies this wouldn't fly because being better than your lead but not having the spot because you were not there first is a recipe for high turnover, or at least people dashing between teams and products hoping to catch that spot. But FB and other SV tech giants are juicy enough targets that rely on product attractiveness (success with users) * rather than product quality that this wouldn't be a problem. Hence they can afford to have such tech leads.
* > E6->E7 and E7->E8 promotions were mainly about making something successful. My execution could have been perfect but if the product didn’t work, I would not have been promoted.
The problem with job titles is that they are brag-tags in most companies. At the very low and very high ends they're used instead of a monetary compensation because the company can't afford to raise the salaries for all those people (poor company or very high salaries already), or because money stops mattering after a point and a pat on the back is worth more to the employee.
The post feels like an ad for "you can do it too, apply now". There's enough info there to make the person uniquely identifiable which is perhaps not the best position for our anonymous engineer.
To me if felt that the structure is similar to Google's. If you are assigned crap maintenance task, you may stay on the same level longer than you'd want. Come up with new great projects that may affect the bottom line and suddenly people throw money and resources at you.
It's not only possible, but it happened to me. I've also seen other talented engineers ascend the ladder rapidly. Of course, anyone who pulls that off is a very small minority.
