The average SUCCESSFUL founder is in their earlier 30s. At that point - you should be at least L4 (probably L5) at FAANG. Salaries are about ~$450k at that level and age.
In 5 years, if you work even a fraction of as hard as you need to be a successful founder, you should be L7 - salaries are usually >$800k at that point.
No, it is not like any average slacker straight out of college in 5 years can get to a $1M salary at FAANG. But if you're the type of person that could successfully grow a company to a multi hundred million valuation in 5 years - you can make $1M at FAANG.
2. Going from L5-L7 is _not_ trivial. It requires a somewhat miraculous combination of being on a productive team with a good boss, a lot of opportunities for showy work and your own gamesmanship around corporate politics.
Is it possible? Sure. But in my short stint at Amazon, I met a lot of people who should have been higher level and were simply not due to missing one of these factors.
A lot of the FAANG companies (all?) have promotion processes that are basically a combination of both peers and managers strongly pulling for your promotion. It often takes a few years just to end up on people’s radars, and that’s a few years of delivering lots of high visibility work and doing lots of tech talks and other sort of corpo-social tasks to get your name out. In a lot of ways, it’s like you’re constantly applying for a new job.
I meant say more about the gaming the politics part, not so much the showmanship and self-promotion part. Say there are several people who meet the criteria to get promoted, which ones tend to get it and which not, based on which political behavior?
Allies, not friends. In that sort of environment, what sort of things get you allies? other than what you mentioned. For example when you say gaming the process, how to approach reviews?
Allies/friends -- doesn't really matter what you call it. It's people in your corner. There's no gaming that I'm aware of. You just have to hope that you are able to get on peoples' good sides. Usually that works alright in the normal course of being a friendly and contributive coworker, but god forbid you have someone who has a chip on their shoulder about you.
Not saying I disagree with your conclusion, but if the question is about which is more likely from the perspective of an individual considering going either route, there’s also an implicit “given that an attempt was made”. You’re only comparing the absolute occurrence of each type of event rather than the occurrence relative to the number of attempts made.
Those aren't entirely overlapping skills. There are plenty of founders whose attitudes and generalist skill sets make them unhireable in the management ranks of FAANG.
The distribution of the ladder is logarithmic. Most never make L6. L5 is often terminal level IC without any “up or out” obligations. Lots of people spend a long time at L5 and retire.
Yes, people are mixing salaries and total comp in this discussion which is unfortunately both common and misleading. It also depends very heavily on the total economic outlook, if you happened to join Google in the fall 2021 cohort your equity was basically going down for the next 3 years and only recovered just now. To claim the average SWE is getting to $1M with that kind of deal is either engagement farming or pure delusion; it has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of most people.
You don't start there, but you can get there as you level up. A lot of that would be because the stock on your RSU grants goes up while you work there though. I don't think many SWE have 7 figure targeted comp (highest levels, yes). But plenty get there with refreshers and stock appreciation.
Many people top out at a lower level because they don't play corporate politics games or because the L7s aren't moving on, so there's no real room for promotion among the L5s and 6s.
Microsoft in the Ballmer years (early/mid 2000s) had this problem. Promising L65/L66/L67 (probably equiv to L5/6 at AMZN) would leave because the next step was full. All the "partners" were hanging around and not making room for the next gen of leaders.
While the median is much much lower, there are a couple of thousand individual contributor SWEs (non-managers) between Google, Meta and a few other big-ish tech companies who make >$1 million/year (steady state, does not depend upon recent run ups in stock prices), with a couple of hundred of those above $4 million/year even. The risk/reward for joining a startup is very skewed in terms of risk in these cases.
See levels.fyi. The pay levels for FAANG companies are fairly accurate. But you'd have to be something like L7/E7 level at a Meta/Google to break $1M.
Also note that some comp numbers get heavily inflated by people incorporating stock value increasing between the equity was first issued and the stock actually vested.
> Also note that some comp numbers get heavily inflated by people incorporating stock value increasing between the equity was first issued and the stock actually vested.
Yeah ever since COVID this has really muddied the water, partially both up and down. Depending on the year combined with the type of company (large cap vs growth SaaS vs finance) you can massively swing the same exact "offer comp" into many communicated effective comps.
Can you say more on this? I didn't realize FAANG TCO was quite that high. Maybe it's time to swallow some pride and take the adtech money after all...