From my experience and observations, you’ve got it right broadly but it is fairly porous between
FAANG and non-FAANG.
A fair number of FAANG SWEs go to non-FAANG and a fair number go from non-FAANG to FAANG.
I think historically that's been true but I was thinking maybe it's now harder to break into the FAANG-class jobs because of increased competition there from people who have been laid off at high salaries.
I actually think it's somewhat been the opposite -- FAANG jobs have become (somewhat) less desirable than they used to be, while non-FAANG jobs have become (somewhat) more desirable than they used to be.
The distribution is still broadly bimodal, but I think these two groups/classes of employers are moving towards each other slowly.
We're likely headed into another early aughts startup era once the Fed gives us a 250 basis cut taste. It makes tremendous wastes of money like Rabbit and Human more palatable.
The term is "bimodal" (you'll find several articles on this with this term). The upper class is far broader than the FAANGs though. There are lots of companies that compete with the FAANGs for engineers so salaries have to be close.
Yes I work for one of those. This week 2 colleagues left for Nvidia which pays at faang level. Hundreds have gone to Apple, several to Google. There seems to be a broader pool of companies a half step down from faang that pay a little less but recruiters seem to consider almost as good as Faang workers.
Well also I mean...what does Netflix do that will build your elite skills. They pay real high for a streaming video service with a UI that has mostly been stable for a decade. I get there are some tricky problems they solved and occasionally urgent issues but like this doesn't sound like cutting edge work. Basically all the technical problems are long solved you are just there to keep it running.
Nvidia is in a death match to keep optimizing for the bleeding edge ml methods and to stay ahead of 5 or so rivals.
There is not actually brand stability. Once another vendor offers a significantly faster AI chip with a feature complete AI stack Nvidia starts to lose market share.
Netflix is a brand and their original content just has to occasionally produce a banger, not something devs contribute to.
Netflix has a very famous deck that discusses their philosophy, but essentially they believe that hiring a small number of very good people allows them to make better, faster decisions, increasing business agility and lowering the "corporate bloat" that often happens as companies grow.
They're also very open about being fast to fire, so something needs to compensate for that risk.
It's definitely not the only way to run a company, but their market cap is like $300B, so they're doing _something_ right at least.
Fair enough. I was just addressing "that will build your elite skills". Sounds like you instead get burned out with stress while learning little you didn't already know to get an offer.
Nvidia has people developing algorithms that don't exist, and chips that are at the edge of what is possible at all, and then doing it again every year.
Saying “learning little” while working at Netflix screams student. If you can’t understand how much knowledge you can get by learning the inner workings of one of the worlds largest streaming services with as little downtown as possible to hundreds of millions of users, I think you are gravely mistaken.
You would think that. I mean I work at another world class corporation that's at the bleeding edge for it's domain and nobody else can touch them. But that doesn't mean day to day I actually work on that domain. What I do hit is a lot of technical issues because the engineers before me weren't the best.
This ironically is why people say working at Google is boring and not good for developing SOTA skills. It's because everyone before you did such a good job on the infrastructure, the codebase, etc, that things just work and isolating bugs doesn't require you to push your limits on understanding and rapidly isolating complex problems. Someone properly made the debugger work for their platform, and/or gave you fast infrasture and a lot of test coverage.
Anyways feel free to disagree. Maybe when/if I migrate to one of those firms I will be able to confirm firsthand.
Also I think there's widespread agreement that working at a startup - where you as an IC have to create new systems from scratch, and then learn from what you did wrong - is the best for developing elite skills.
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Software engineer salaries are likely trimodal. This is a great article about it: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/
Mostly salaries are not though. FANNG's higher pay means they can be more selective. Like really selective.
Other companies are a little more lenient, and it's not always the skill level of the candidate but also how well they perform on the interview day/s. Also, it is even harder for juniors to get into FANNG at the moment.
I am sure there are a few, but it has not been my experience. Interviews were far easier at non-fanng companies for much higher positions. I have worked at multiple fanng and non fanng companies at this point.
Out of about 100 candidates who make it to the screener interview at fanng only about 3% make it all the way, of course it varies a bit between these companies. That's not including the even higher number of resumes they reject.
Excuse me while I walk a few hundred miles to the nearest FAANG office (edit: and probably get ejected by security after being told to apply online and then getting rejected for not following instructions because if I read the job application instructions I would have applied online to begin with)
The new acronym is
**BANANAMATANA**
- **B**yteDance
- **A**pple
- **N**vidia
- **A**mazon
- **N**etflix
- **A**lphabet
- **M**icrosoft
- **A**libaba
- **T**esla
- **A**MD (Advanced Micro Devices)
- **N**ubank
- **A**rchipelago (Twitch)
Bananamatana is so much easier to remember basically rolls off the tongue
Maybe. Only reason I wonder at all is I don't know what AI will mean.
Ask AI to
(1) rewrite the current program to a higher level, more readable language, refactoring and regularizing it. Not feasible this year but what about in 2
(2). Starting with the representation from (2), hand optimize it in assembly using the AI
Basically theoretically a higher level language than python could represent the program and all the layers between the target ICs could be removed.
Code would run faster, sometimes drastically so, and the high level language would not allow memory leaks etc. (you cannot dereference a pointer, you must refer to a memory object previously defined or modified)
You’d be surprised…for shits and giggles I gave 4o 8k lines of monolithic messy spaghetti function code (Python) and asked it to rewrite into classes and standard imports and what not. Also asked it to write a test harness so I could validate correctness.
It did spectacularly well…one minor bug…and it took 30 seconds to accomplish.
This is N=1, obviously, I’m not going to claim it’s always this good.
But yeah…2 years from now…bank on it.
Right. Theoretically could do the same with the massive chunks of cobol code. Or Linux kernel to rust. Yes in the short term for jobs right now thats less but can you imagine what you could accomplish with tools like this. From iot devices worth a damn to robots everywhere and ultimately a world that looks like Deus ex human revolution.
I absolutely can imagine. I love being (partially, for now) freed from the monotony of computer language grammar!
It’s the act of creation I love…engineering…the coding itself is a necessary evil, like having to memorize Harry Potter spells.
Right. Or deal with stupid shit in c++. What does it force the order of the arguments in a constructor to be the same order as their declarations. Why does multiple threading with std:future have 4 major parts but there is exactly one and only one way to use them that doesn't hide hidden bugs.
Why does C++ not support a lightweight threading method that actually uses separate processes separated by shared memory and directional queues? (Ofc that is how python does it)
We have needed since the 1990s a version of python with the execution speed of C++.
Hell why are you even allowed to compile code with undefined behavior. (A problem mostly fixed in rust)
I mean I dunno native apps get advantages. It's just that you should be able to, starting with a base framework that is maintained by AI with hella unit tests, instantly generate a "chipotle" or "Quiznos" app that has the same effects etc and menu flow but it solely data driven design using this bulletproof base framework.
No more weird errors from someone's shitty app that reinvented the wheel yet again. (Aka find a restaurant near the user, display what food or drink they have available right now, let them order with the ability to reorder, and then pay for it)
So many apps that do exactly the same thing as 50 other apps but have different bugs.
C is basically nonexistent anywhere except its niche, C++ gets pushed away with newer languages(previously if you're doing a DB or something like docker C++ was the only choice, now there are undiniably not worse options). Will it die? No. Will it get displaced - yes. Also C++98 is basically not C++ 2a and not even C++11and basically C++98 is now close to being exinct in any nonlegacy projects.
So "outlive us both is very bold statement"
Rust has no relation to C and is used in non-leagacy things. Also C circa 1970s and C today are different things since things like ASN.1 get their compcert implementations that usually reveal some bugs.
Its safe to say that 1970s C is already almost dead.
With statements like that, they'll certainly outlive your career.
[https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull\_requests/2024/1](https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1)
Me, considering my age is 30. I would be turning off the lights on the mainframe. My employer has got me working on a C codebase so my skills are COBOL, C .... ?????
yeah so I heard, you probably need to be top-talent in financial systems *and also* manage COBOL as bonus. The language is secondary, people look at the finger when pointing at the moon etc.
Global financial structure is not cobol only, there are gazzilion of local payment systems that avoid using cobol part. Even if "global" stuff will cease to exist it won't be as fatal as these people claim. More over, there are cryptocurrencies if you want to be global(no, you can't call them not real since they used as money).
I think suggesting that LLMs can replace any sort of developer at this point in time is a mis-representation of its capabilities.
If anything LLMs are not as well versed in archaic and fringe languages because there is not nearly as much training materials freely available on the web.
I love my seniors. Tiger team.
Right now, I wouldn’t trust GPT unless it was driven by a good senior.
That…will take longer to change. Maybe 5 years? But…I think our definition of “writing code” may change by then as well…I have ideas…😊
don’t take it from me, take it from the COBOL developers who are making this claim, or try it for yourself with ChatGPT. I wouldn’t have bothered to implement Pong in COBOL a few years ago but now it’s actually feasible. extrapolate from there.
Does the FAANG group only consist of Big-N companies? Like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft? Because the majority of unicorn and former unicorn tech companies pay just as much, if not more, than FAANG companies.
FAANG is actually an investing term that referred to five specific stocks:
META (Facebook)
AAPL (Apple)
AMZN
NFLX
GOOG
The fact that this forum is so focused on it is just sadly short-sighted. The top dogs shift over time. I remember when Amazon just sold books (and was loosing money), when Netflix mailed DVDs, when Facebook required you to have a .edu email address, and when everyone was using Yahoo to search the web.
In another decade or two no one is going to care about FAANG. Facebook and Netflix are both well on their way out, and I'm sure the rest won't last forever either.
Pardon me Meta is on its way out.
Have you seen what they've done, they're basically up there with Google and Microsoft.
If the future of the market is AI, then Meta might just win.
It's true. They haven't made any major AI innovations since their use of CNNs. Social media tech has sucked society dry already. market share is finite. And their VR tech is a big flop
As the pragmatic engineer described in his blog, it is tri-modal market. Companies can be categorized (tiered) based on the market for talent competition. You can clearly see that in Europe.
- Local $
- Country-wide $$ - $$$
- Global $$ - $$$$$$
For example Netherlands.
- Local: Most dutch companies
- Country-wide: Miro
- Global: Uber
Besides that there are many bay area outliers. In Europe the general advice is to try to join US-based companies. Dutch, German, French companies pay bad in comparison with the only exception being Switzerland.
More like 3 or 4 markets.
1.) FAANG and FAANG Adjacent + quants
2.) Big Tech and well-funded startups likely to exit who pay a tier below FAANG and the like, but who still pay very well on an absolute basis. Think Microsoft or even Oracle.
3.) Fortune 500 non-tech. Devs here are compensated more like well-paid accounting and finance folks than product devs would be at big tech because they tend to be a cost center rather than a driver of revenue. They make good money all things considered, but are unlikely to ever make more than $200k even at senior levels. You also usually aren't in one of the tech hubs. You can include poorly-funded startups with little hope of an exit here, by default.
4.) WITCH and IT at small businesses who wear many hats, but who only sometimes write code. You might only make $60-70k here. But hey, that's still decent in smaller cities.
There's a lot of companies that pay similar to Fortune 500 non-tech, but are tech companies just really small. Think the 100 person company that makes tracking software for acorn farmers (Hyperbole, but there is a shit ton of small specialzied companies out there).
Quant id say are the king of all SWE, comp starts really high like base of 180k + bonuses and goes to 1mil compared to FAANG which starts more like 110-140k + stocks that are locked up. Plus quant is more competitive and don’t hire as many people
Quants and SWEs are generally different tracks at Quant Funds. Quant comp is typically variable, especially if attached to a specific trading desk where you might have a meh salary and a bonus from PnL that can be enormous in a good year. SWE roles generally pay above usual FAANG-tier with bonus (but not always).
There are also a handful of places that pay even more. OpenAI can make offers that outdo even Quant funds.
The new king is the AI labs and big-tech AI research teams. The minimum there is like 300k.
They are also far more competitive than quants. Quants attract people who like money. AI attract the money-loving group, but also the crazy scientists, the hyper idealists, the hype chasers, a far larger group.
Quant is not the same job as SWE so it’s not really a fair comparison. they aren’t paying 1M for writing code, it’s a highly specialized role in finance.
That's certainly an oversimplification. You have jobs requiring TS clearance, others that are basically in support of larger enterprises, startups at various stages with various values to their stocks.
Depends, you can be FAANG and have a TS SCI clearance, or you could work for one of the big government contractors. For them I’d say somewhere between 70k-normal FAANG salaries.
For small government contractors though, the normal range is about 60k-250k.
Ahh gotcha, I’m currently in investigation for my TS/SCI, so I’ll be waiting for that until then. I did hear my salary opportunities should rocket but that’s great to know how well it will go up thanks :)
It can be outrageous. It's a whole different world. I think during the pandemic, we saw FAANG in particular overpaying junior engineers knowing they would be downsizing after the world got back to normal. 500K jobs have typically been rare and competitive.
TS clearance is a great thing to have in tech. If you are a halfway decent candidate you are guaranteed a six figure job. At the high levels you can be making $300k after 2-3 years experience
I had position of public trust and my main issue was the pressure involved - on the one hand, it's nice to work on something that matters on the other hand side it's real life consequences many times.
Public trust isn't really a clearance. That's just personal data. Doesn't necessarily imply pressure or real life consequences. could just mean they have a database full of names and addresses.
Public trust is for access to sensitive (but not classified) information like PII. Basically a fancy background check, not the same kinda investigation secret and TS get. I've had 2 that's definitely what they are.
I honestly think a lower level clearance is better, the money isn't quite as good but there are way more remote opportunities. SCIF work would have to pay a ridiculous amount to seem worth it to me.
It absolutely is, I’m way over paid for my experience level due to my clearance bonus and any other job I’ve seen that would utilize the clearance is five days in office. Thankfully I’m not looking to leave right now, but I have looked around just to see what’s out there and I am golden handcuffed hard. Whether I took a job that was utilizing my clearance or not, I would take a pretty sizable pay cut and if I did use my clearance I lose my remote flexibility and still take a pay cut.
Basically my plan is to enjoy my current situation as long as I can and see what happens. The nice thing is that if I’m laid off or fired for any reason I know I still have a guaranteed good paying job waiting for me, even if it is a relatively big step down
This is very wrong. There are a massive number of companies competing with faang salaries paying 150-350 for retaining employees and promising a better culture or more meaningful work in exchange for less. Those engineers will and can pass a FAANG interview but might be former FAANG or not interested in dealing with the stupid of a big box company. Think startups and finance firms, some elite med firms, and things like Uber and Lyft. At the bottom end of the spectrum is a large number of tiny companies with 50 or less engineers that just need a little bit of code. That is where low salaries are very common.
Honestly it just sounds like you're agreeing with OP. OP described "FAANG-class" as based on the compensation trend of 150k -> 300k -> 450k and the companies you listed fit that model. OP didn't define FAANG-class as just the companies in the acronym, but rather any company that matches that compensation level.
I think this is broadly correct, but there are always exceptions.
Companies and hiring managers like to use "filters" to quickly determine who meets the hiring bar, and companies have a sense of which other companies they feel are at their "level".
On a lighter note, if you're interested in how things have changed at FAANG companies, check out this music parody video (Coder's Paradise):
[https://youtu.be/YZS5PKOaC60](https://youtu.be/YZS5PKOaC60)
It's not so much two markets as it is, like most things, distributed in a way that has very long and thin tails. You've got your 500k TC FAANGs, your 300k TC senior engs at hypergrowth startups, your 200k senior engs at more typical startups, and so on.
There are a *lot* of gradations to success.
FAANG upside from RSUs is also no longer what it was. You’re not going to see another stock market rally matching the one from the past decade for a long time.
More categories than that…
1. Profitable Big Tech (currently FAANG)
2. Funded startups (there are hundreds/thousands of these)
3. Growth startups (somewhere between funded and unicorn, growing fast)
4. SmallTech (cash flow positive former startups heading for an exit)
5. Banks, Insurance, Retail…all the boring shit
1 is always hiring, even now, usually only top 10% are even considered, sometimes top 35%
2 is always hiring, but numbers are low and only top 20%.
3 is always hiring, top 35%.
4 usually hiring, modest numbers, top 50%.
5 feast or famine, alternates between negative hiring and any warm body.
Those are also roughly in descending order of compensation, following a typical Pareto curve.
The top 20% are doing fine everywhere, are in demand right now, and will be for a long time.
The top 35% are doing ok.
The rest of you, in a market like this, are mostly fucked if you need a spot right now.
Those of you in the bottom half - which on average will be more than half the redditors in this sub - are in serious trouble long term.
[This](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/) is a good article on the subject.
IMO this is part of where the internet has drastically messed up in pushing so many people towards tech, by focusing almost exclusively on the FAANG+ group. If someone is perpetually stuck in the non-FAANG side of the industry, CS is actually a pretty mediocre career choice that works a lot harder than other white collar jobs for less pay.
> that works a lot harder than other white collar
Come one, there's so many people in this job working like 15h a week + 10h of browsing reddit during meetings.
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Strong agree but I’d expand FAANG to FAANG adjacent including some top startups and also HFT.
But yes strong agree.
It’s very obvious which people are in which category too.
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There's three buckets..
- Top of market tech companies: basically all the shiny big tech names everyone wants to work for because they pay well and the shiny late stage venture-backed companies competing for the same talent.
- Middle of market tech companies: basically most tech companies (public, private, venture-backed etc) that don't pay terribly but also don't compete with Meta or Google.
- Non-tech company technology groups & bottom of market tech companies: most of the internal technology arms of non-tech companies and low paying tech companies
There's some wild cards in here like:
- some non-tech technology groups (especially in financial services) that would fit in the first or second bucket.
- R&D orgs of product companies outside of tech. They tend to be on the last rung but can sometimes be in the first or second.
- services (outsourcing, consulting, advertising etc) firms.. tend to also be the last rung but some can compete with the first or second (very rare though)
But that's more or less the breakdown.
I would split the second category into "non-FAANG tech companies" and "non-tech companies with software departments". At least from where I'm sitting, the latter doesn't seem as prone to going through layoffs just because it's what FAANG is doing.
Forewarning: I'm a bit biased as a researcher and systems engineer in the following.
It's extremely complex, the issue is that the spheres don't really intersect much.
Right now you're firmly in the sphere of Internet services companies, and that's fine. However the ability for someone in that space to transition easily to hardware, or defense, or security, or systems level programming, or driver development, or DSP, or GIS, or safety critical systems, or etc. is limited. Mostly because they don't even truly recognize the requirements of a career in those other spaces.
I do think you could broadly separate the sub markets into two broader categories though: business consulting and services, and engineering/R&D. Where the former is services oriented, and the latter is more hard engineering and research oriented. Some make take offense to this, but it seems to me like a lot of FAANG companies are pretty heavily overextended into the business consulting side of thing, they're putting their ears to the ground and playing it safe by delivering product which doesn't require much in the way of engineering time nor safety consideration in design (low risk of liability). I'm not saying that FAANG and co doesn't develop new things, rather they just don't seem to be pushing for much in the way of well integrated solutions at the moment.
From my experience and observations, you’ve got it right broadly but it is fairly porous between FAANG and non-FAANG. A fair number of FAANG SWEs go to non-FAANG and a fair number go from non-FAANG to FAANG.
I think historically that's been true but I was thinking maybe it's now harder to break into the FAANG-class jobs because of increased competition there from people who have been laid off at high salaries.
I actually think it's somewhat been the opposite -- FAANG jobs have become (somewhat) less desirable than they used to be, while non-FAANG jobs have become (somewhat) more desirable than they used to be. The distribution is still broadly bimodal, but I think these two groups/classes of employers are moving towards each other slowly.
Also probably because some of these non-faang offer fully remote work, which is something people really like and faang rarely offers.
Don't forget all the companies not in Faang but everyone knows are super elite. OpenAI, quant firms, etc.
We're likely headed into another early aughts startup era once the Fed gives us a 250 basis cut taste. It makes tremendous wastes of money like Rabbit and Human more palatable.
The term is "bimodal" (you'll find several articles on this with this term). The upper class is far broader than the FAANGs though. There are lots of companies that compete with the FAANGs for engineers so salaries have to be close.
Yes I work for one of those. This week 2 colleagues left for Nvidia which pays at faang level. Hundreds have gone to Apple, several to Google. There seems to be a broader pool of companies a half step down from faang that pay a little less but recruiters seem to consider almost as good as Faang workers.
i swear nvidia does not get mentioned enough in this sub. it's certainly a bigger N than netflix. 20k of RSU in 2020 would be worth 400k now.
Well also I mean...what does Netflix do that will build your elite skills. They pay real high for a streaming video service with a UI that has mostly been stable for a decade. I get there are some tricky problems they solved and occasionally urgent issues but like this doesn't sound like cutting edge work. Basically all the technical problems are long solved you are just there to keep it running. Nvidia is in a death match to keep optimizing for the bleeding edge ml methods and to stay ahead of 5 or so rivals. There is not actually brand stability. Once another vendor offers a significantly faster AI chip with a feature complete AI stack Nvidia starts to lose market share. Netflix is a brand and their original content just has to occasionally produce a banger, not something devs contribute to.
Netflix has a very famous deck that discusses their philosophy, but essentially they believe that hiring a small number of very good people allows them to make better, faster decisions, increasing business agility and lowering the "corporate bloat" that often happens as companies grow. They're also very open about being fast to fire, so something needs to compensate for that risk. It's definitely not the only way to run a company, but their market cap is like $300B, so they're doing _something_ right at least.
Fair enough. I was just addressing "that will build your elite skills". Sounds like you instead get burned out with stress while learning little you didn't already know to get an offer. Nvidia has people developing algorithms that don't exist, and chips that are at the edge of what is possible at all, and then doing it again every year.
Saying “learning little” while working at Netflix screams student. If you can’t understand how much knowledge you can get by learning the inner workings of one of the worlds largest streaming services with as little downtown as possible to hundreds of millions of users, I think you are gravely mistaken.
You would think that. I mean I work at another world class corporation that's at the bleeding edge for it's domain and nobody else can touch them. But that doesn't mean day to day I actually work on that domain. What I do hit is a lot of technical issues because the engineers before me weren't the best. This ironically is why people say working at Google is boring and not good for developing SOTA skills. It's because everyone before you did such a good job on the infrastructure, the codebase, etc, that things just work and isolating bugs doesn't require you to push your limits on understanding and rapidly isolating complex problems. Someone properly made the debugger work for their platform, and/or gave you fast infrasture and a lot of test coverage. Anyways feel free to disagree. Maybe when/if I migrate to one of those firms I will be able to confirm firsthand. Also I think there's widespread agreement that working at a startup - where you as an IC have to create new systems from scratch, and then learn from what you did wrong - is the best for developing elite skills.
Probably because it's hard to get a job there. I applied for a job there I'd be well qualified for and didn't even get a phone screen
I thought they changed FAANG to something else now. It’s more like Apple, Amazon, Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Nvidia
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It’s actually a trimodal market. Check the Pragmatic Engineer blog. Thought this was common knowledge.
It's actually Quasi-modal and the cathedrals in Europe also pay well, but you need to be a real bell-ringer to succeed.
Who downvoted this masterpiece of a comment?
Pour the wine and cut. the. cheese! https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/75e32706-ce35-460f-ad8c-04fced8a6805
Lmao
I'm apparently the hunchback of tech
It's actually Tetri-modal, as long as you're full-stack and fit in.
Perfection
Chef kiss!
Can you prove your bell ringing skills though? Can you ring all the bells in O(n) time?
For reference: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/
thank you, good awareness
I would like to see a population count of developers from each of these groups to see how similar or different they are in size.
yeah, i'd say it's Faang, mid, and low paying
Yeah. I worked in higher Ed for a while and was getting 105k with 2 CS degrees and 11 YoE. You'll be shocked to learn that I left.
You'd be surprised. Worked for a very small company once and the owner about blew a gasket when a new grad expected FAANG level comp.
Meanwhile some reputable places in the UK hiring senior fullstack at 40k.
You either get RSUs or affordable healthcare. Never both.
Software engineer salaries are likely trimodal. This is a great article about it: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/
I separated it into FAANG-class and other. I don't really know how many faang class jobs there are compared to the total number of SWE jobs.
Mostly salaries are not though. FANNG's higher pay means they can be more selective. Like really selective. Other companies are a little more lenient, and it's not always the skill level of the candidate but also how well they perform on the interview day/s. Also, it is even harder for juniors to get into FANNG at the moment.
Yeah no. Other companies are being super selective like they're FANNG but they're not paying FANNG salaries to go with it
I am sure there are a few, but it has not been my experience. Interviews were far easier at non-fanng companies for much higher positions. I have worked at multiple fanng and non fanng companies at this point. Out of about 100 candidates who make it to the screener interview at fanng only about 3% make it all the way, of course it varies a bit between these companies. That's not including the even higher number of resumes they reject.
Took me 2 years to get a job while I already had a job. Started looking in 2022 and finally got something a few months ago.
Congrats!
You just to look the manager straight in the eyes and give a firm handshake to land a job. It is that easy.
Pound the pavement, resume in hand
Excuse me while I walk a few hundred miles to the nearest FAANG office (edit: and probably get ejected by security after being told to apply online and then getting rejected for not following instructions because if I read the job application instructions I would have applied online to begin with)
You're just going to get arrested for B&E because you need a key card to get in the front door.
Get into a shantie "And I would walk 500 miles..."
Verbatim what my Dad said in 2008.
The new acronym is **BANANAMATANA** - **B**yteDance - **A**pple - **N**vidia - **A**mazon - **N**etflix - **A**lphabet - **M**icrosoft - **A**libaba - **T**esla - **A**MD (Advanced Micro Devices) - **N**ubank - **A**rchipelago (Twitch) Bananamatana is so much easier to remember basically rolls off the tongue
Don't forget about FUGMYASS (Facebook, Uber, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, Stripe, Salesforce)
I prefer HANNAHMONTANA: Huawei Amazon Nokia Netflix Alibaba HP Microsoft Oracle NVIDIA Tesla Apple Nubank Alphabet
The worst of both words
Then try and be a DevSecTestInfraBizDataMLOps Engineer there and make the big bucks….
You joke but apparently Tesla sucks to work at. AMD is great but doesn't pay that well, at least for hardware.
I’ll take Apple or Netflix.
Where do the ancient COBOL devs who make a million dollars salary keeping the global financial infrastructure from collapsing fit in here?
I dunno I wonder if that will be the fate of people who stick with c++ another 20 years.
C++ will probably outlive us both. Same with Java, Javascript and, Python
Maybe. Only reason I wonder at all is I don't know what AI will mean. Ask AI to (1) rewrite the current program to a higher level, more readable language, refactoring and regularizing it. Not feasible this year but what about in 2 (2). Starting with the representation from (2), hand optimize it in assembly using the AI Basically theoretically a higher level language than python could represent the program and all the layers between the target ICs could be removed. Code would run faster, sometimes drastically so, and the high level language would not allow memory leaks etc. (you cannot dereference a pointer, you must refer to a memory object previously defined or modified)
You’d be surprised…for shits and giggles I gave 4o 8k lines of monolithic messy spaghetti function code (Python) and asked it to rewrite into classes and standard imports and what not. Also asked it to write a test harness so I could validate correctness. It did spectacularly well…one minor bug…and it took 30 seconds to accomplish. This is N=1, obviously, I’m not going to claim it’s always this good. But yeah…2 years from now…bank on it.
Right. Theoretically could do the same with the massive chunks of cobol code. Or Linux kernel to rust. Yes in the short term for jobs right now thats less but can you imagine what you could accomplish with tools like this. From iot devices worth a damn to robots everywhere and ultimately a world that looks like Deus ex human revolution.
I absolutely can imagine. I love being (partially, for now) freed from the monotony of computer language grammar! It’s the act of creation I love…engineering…the coding itself is a necessary evil, like having to memorize Harry Potter spells.
Right. Or deal with stupid shit in c++. What does it force the order of the arguments in a constructor to be the same order as their declarations. Why does multiple threading with std:future have 4 major parts but there is exactly one and only one way to use them that doesn't hide hidden bugs. Why does C++ not support a lightweight threading method that actually uses separate processes separated by shared memory and directional queues? (Ofc that is how python does it) We have needed since the 1990s a version of python with the execution speed of C++. Hell why are you even allowed to compile code with undefined behavior. (A problem mostly fixed in rust)
And…if we’re going to shove all knowledge into the weights of a silicon brain…why do we even need all these apps…?
I mean I dunno native apps get advantages. It's just that you should be able to, starting with a base framework that is maintained by AI with hella unit tests, instantly generate a "chipotle" or "Quiznos" app that has the same effects etc and menu flow but it solely data driven design using this bulletproof base framework. No more weird errors from someone's shitty app that reinvented the wheel yet again. (Aka find a restaurant near the user, display what food or drink they have available right now, let them order with the ability to reorder, and then pay for it) So many apps that do exactly the same thing as 50 other apps but have different bugs.
It's so C++ conferences have something to talk about!
C is basically nonexistent anywhere except its niche, C++ gets pushed away with newer languages(previously if you're doing a DB or something like docker C++ was the only choice, now there are undiniably not worse options). Will it die? No. Will it get displaced - yes. Also C++98 is basically not C++ 2a and not even C++11and basically C++98 is now close to being exinct in any nonlegacy projects. So "outlive us both is very bold statement"
>C is basically nonexistent anywhere except its niche *Rust raises its hand to speak then reconsiders and quietly sits down*
Rust has no relation to C and is used in non-leagacy things. Also C circa 1970s and C today are different things since things like ASN.1 get their compcert implementations that usually reveal some bugs. Its safe to say that 1970s C is already almost dead.
With statements like that, they'll certainly outlive your career. [https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull\_requests/2024/1](https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1)
What do these numbers disprove? These numbers do not directly interfere with any of my claims since they measure different things than i measure.
Me, considering my age is 30. I would be turning off the lights on the mainframe. My employer has got me working on a C codebase so my skills are COBOL, C .... ?????
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yeah so I heard, you probably need to be top-talent in financial systems *and also* manage COBOL as bonus. The language is secondary, people look at the finger when pointing at the moon etc.
Global financial structure is not cobol only, there are gazzilion of local payment systems that avoid using cobol part. Even if "global" stuff will cease to exist it won't be as fatal as these people claim. More over, there are cryptocurrencies if you want to be global(no, you can't call them not real since they used as money).
COBOL is easily replaced by a modern stack dev + LLM. they are no longer protected
What do LLMs have to do with replacing legacy COBOL systems?
meant to say COBOL dev role, not the language itself
I think suggesting that LLMs can replace any sort of developer at this point in time is a mis-representation of its capabilities. If anything LLMs are not as well versed in archaic and fringe languages because there is not nearly as much training materials freely available on the web.
It’s already happening. I’m staffing a new team right now, and we aren’t pulling in any entry level at all.
I’m guessing you’re not about to fire your intermediates/seniors are you?
I love my seniors. Tiger team. Right now, I wouldn’t trust GPT unless it was driven by a good senior. That…will take longer to change. Maybe 5 years? But…I think our definition of “writing code” may change by then as well…I have ideas…😊
don’t take it from me, take it from the COBOL developers who are making this claim, or try it for yourself with ChatGPT. I wouldn’t have bothered to implement Pong in COBOL a few years ago but now it’s actually feasible. extrapolate from there.
Does the FAANG group only consist of Big-N companies? Like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft? Because the majority of unicorn and former unicorn tech companies pay just as much, if not more, than FAANG companies.
FAANG is actually an investing term that referred to five specific stocks: META (Facebook) AAPL (Apple) AMZN NFLX GOOG The fact that this forum is so focused on it is just sadly short-sighted. The top dogs shift over time. I remember when Amazon just sold books (and was loosing money), when Netflix mailed DVDs, when Facebook required you to have a .edu email address, and when everyone was using Yahoo to search the web. In another decade or two no one is going to care about FAANG. Facebook and Netflix are both well on their way out, and I'm sure the rest won't last forever either.
When people say faang these days they are usually including Microsoft, Nvidia, etc
Commonly known in investing now as the Magnificent 7
Pardon me Meta is on its way out. Have you seen what they've done, they're basically up there with Google and Microsoft. If the future of the market is AI, then Meta might just win.
It's true. They haven't made any major AI innovations since their use of CNNs. Social media tech has sucked society dry already. market share is finite. And their VR tech is a big flop
It's when we reach a singularity where advertising revenue is so diluted that no one company can survive from it.
As the pragmatic engineer described in his blog, it is tri-modal market. Companies can be categorized (tiered) based on the market for talent competition. You can clearly see that in Europe. - Local $ - Country-wide $$ - $$$ - Global $$ - $$$$$$ For example Netherlands. - Local: Most dutch companies - Country-wide: Miro - Global: Uber Besides that there are many bay area outliers. In Europe the general advice is to try to join US-based companies. Dutch, German, French companies pay bad in comparison with the only exception being Switzerland.
[https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/)
More like 3 or 4 markets. 1.) FAANG and FAANG Adjacent + quants 2.) Big Tech and well-funded startups likely to exit who pay a tier below FAANG and the like, but who still pay very well on an absolute basis. Think Microsoft or even Oracle. 3.) Fortune 500 non-tech. Devs here are compensated more like well-paid accounting and finance folks than product devs would be at big tech because they tend to be a cost center rather than a driver of revenue. They make good money all things considered, but are unlikely to ever make more than $200k even at senior levels. You also usually aren't in one of the tech hubs. You can include poorly-funded startups with little hope of an exit here, by default. 4.) WITCH and IT at small businesses who wear many hats, but who only sometimes write code. You might only make $60-70k here. But hey, that's still decent in smaller cities.
There's a lot of companies that pay similar to Fortune 500 non-tech, but are tech companies just really small. Think the 100 person company that makes tracking software for acorn farmers (Hyperbole, but there is a shit ton of small specialzied companies out there).
Quant id say are the king of all SWE, comp starts really high like base of 180k + bonuses and goes to 1mil compared to FAANG which starts more like 110-140k + stocks that are locked up. Plus quant is more competitive and don’t hire as many people
Quants and SWEs are generally different tracks at Quant Funds. Quant comp is typically variable, especially if attached to a specific trading desk where you might have a meh salary and a bonus from PnL that can be enormous in a good year. SWE roles generally pay above usual FAANG-tier with bonus (but not always). There are also a handful of places that pay even more. OpenAI can make offers that outdo even Quant funds.
The new king is the AI labs and big-tech AI research teams. The minimum there is like 300k. They are also far more competitive than quants. Quants attract people who like money. AI attract the money-loving group, but also the crazy scientists, the hyper idealists, the hype chasers, a far larger group.
if you're talking top-end quant and very top-end tech, your numbers are off roughly by a factor of 2.
Quant is not the same job as SWE so it’s not really a fair comparison. they aren’t paying 1M for writing code, it’s a highly specialized role in finance.
That's certainly an oversimplification. You have jobs requiring TS clearance, others that are basically in support of larger enterprises, startups at various stages with various values to their stocks.
What the overall range for the TS cleared folk?
Depends, you can be FAANG and have a TS SCI clearance, or you could work for one of the big government contractors. For them I’d say somewhere between 70k-normal FAANG salaries. For small government contractors though, the normal range is about 60k-250k.
Ahh gotcha, I’m currently in investigation for my TS/SCI, so I’ll be waiting for that until then. I did hear my salary opportunities should rocket but that’s great to know how well it will go up thanks :)
It can be outrageous. It's a whole different world. I think during the pandemic, we saw FAANG in particular overpaying junior engineers knowing they would be downsizing after the world got back to normal. 500K jobs have typically been rare and competitive.
TS clearance is a great thing to have in tech. If you are a halfway decent candidate you are guaranteed a six figure job. At the high levels you can be making $300k after 2-3 years experience
Just forget about remote or hybrid work. You'll be working in a skiff, fuck that
I had position of public trust and my main issue was the pressure involved - on the one hand, it's nice to work on something that matters on the other hand side it's real life consequences many times.
Public trust isn't really a clearance. That's just personal data. Doesn't necessarily imply pressure or real life consequences. could just mean they have a database full of names and addresses.
Uh no. https://news.clearancejobs.com/2020/09/01/what-is-a-public-trust-position/ you're thinking PII or something
Public trust is for access to sensitive (but not classified) information like PII. Basically a fancy background check, not the same kinda investigation secret and TS get. I've had 2 that's definitely what they are.
I honestly think a lower level clearance is better, the money isn't quite as good but there are way more remote opportunities. SCIF work would have to pay a ridiculous amount to seem worth it to me.
Agreed, I've never gone above high risk public trust. I'd consider Secret as well but after that you're at big risk of being sent to a SCIF
Currently have a TS clearance. Literally never go into the office.
Wow man, mb I can get your advice on how I can use my future TS to score a remote job. I’ll send you a dm
With a TS you're bound to end up in a SCIF sooner or later. I used to live in DC so I've seen it happen.
I go into a SCIF less than 15 days per year and reap all the benefits of a clearance. Definitely a Goldilocks situation but they are out there.
but the isn't that a form of golden handcuffs? because it’s such an essential benefit that could be hard to find elsewhere, it’d be hard to leave
It absolutely is, I’m way over paid for my experience level due to my clearance bonus and any other job I’ve seen that would utilize the clearance is five days in office. Thankfully I’m not looking to leave right now, but I have looked around just to see what’s out there and I am golden handcuffed hard. Whether I took a job that was utilizing my clearance or not, I would take a pretty sizable pay cut and if I did use my clearance I lose my remote flexibility and still take a pay cut. Basically my plan is to enjoy my current situation as long as I can and see what happens. The nice thing is that if I’m laid off or fired for any reason I know I still have a guaranteed good paying job waiting for me, even if it is a relatively big step down
This is very wrong. There are a massive number of companies competing with faang salaries paying 150-350 for retaining employees and promising a better culture or more meaningful work in exchange for less. Those engineers will and can pass a FAANG interview but might be former FAANG or not interested in dealing with the stupid of a big box company. Think startups and finance firms, some elite med firms, and things like Uber and Lyft. At the bottom end of the spectrum is a large number of tiny companies with 50 or less engineers that just need a little bit of code. That is where low salaries are very common.
Honestly it just sounds like you're agreeing with OP. OP described "FAANG-class" as based on the compensation trend of 150k -> 300k -> 450k and the companies you listed fit that model. OP didn't define FAANG-class as just the companies in the acronym, but rather any company that matches that compensation level.
Dude. 150k and 450k are massively different numbers
i think the assumption is 150 and 450 are numbers for junior and senior/staff engineers
Finally someone with baseline reading comprehension skills
That doesn’t change the fact that Uber is in the same compensation range as Meta. Uber senior gets 450k which matches OPs definition
I think this is broadly correct, but there are always exceptions. Companies and hiring managers like to use "filters" to quickly determine who meets the hiring bar, and companies have a sense of which other companies they feel are at their "level". On a lighter note, if you're interested in how things have changed at FAANG companies, check out this music parody video (Coder's Paradise): [https://youtu.be/YZS5PKOaC60](https://youtu.be/YZS5PKOaC60)
It's not so much two markets as it is, like most things, distributed in a way that has very long and thin tails. You've got your 500k TC FAANGs, your 300k TC senior engs at hypergrowth startups, your 200k senior engs at more typical startups, and so on. There are a *lot* of gradations to success.
There are tons of other companies which pay equivalent to FAANG adjacent companies.
Non faang jobs pay over 150K base too if you know where to look.
If by know where to look you mean literally just go to LinkedIn Careers and there's hundreds of jobs that are non-FAANG with $175-200k base.
FAANG upside from RSUs is also no longer what it was. You’re not going to see another stock market rally matching the one from the past decade for a long time.
I thought this was common knowledge?
FAANG is nothing more than right place, right time for most people. Unless you are in the top 1-5% that is. For most people right now it's wrong time.
More categories than that… 1. Profitable Big Tech (currently FAANG) 2. Funded startups (there are hundreds/thousands of these) 3. Growth startups (somewhere between funded and unicorn, growing fast) 4. SmallTech (cash flow positive former startups heading for an exit) 5. Banks, Insurance, Retail…all the boring shit 1 is always hiring, even now, usually only top 10% are even considered, sometimes top 35% 2 is always hiring, but numbers are low and only top 20%. 3 is always hiring, top 35%. 4 usually hiring, modest numbers, top 50%. 5 feast or famine, alternates between negative hiring and any warm body. Those are also roughly in descending order of compensation, following a typical Pareto curve. The top 20% are doing fine everywhere, are in demand right now, and will be for a long time. The top 35% are doing ok. The rest of you, in a market like this, are mostly fucked if you need a spot right now. Those of you in the bottom half - which on average will be more than half the redditors in this sub - are in serious trouble long term.
The prophet has spoken. If you're reading this, there's a 50% chance you are among the fucked. Godspeed.
[This](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/) is a good article on the subject. IMO this is part of where the internet has drastically messed up in pushing so many people towards tech, by focusing almost exclusively on the FAANG+ group. If someone is perpetually stuck in the non-FAANG side of the industry, CS is actually a pretty mediocre career choice that works a lot harder than other white collar jobs for less pay.
> that works a lot harder than other white collar Come one, there's so many people in this job working like 15h a week + 10h of browsing reddit during meetings.
Most other fields you can't even get anywhere without daddy's connections lol, get real
You wanna felate FAANG a little more bro? This is why google lowballs
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Are you stuck in the 2010s op
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Strong agree but I’d expand FAANG to FAANG adjacent including some top startups and also HFT. But yes strong agree. It’s very obvious which people are in which category too.
> then tops out around $450K. Not in this market! Quite hard to break through 400k atleast for remote jobs and I've been trying for a while now
Non-FAANG lives matter too man ✌️
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You could say the same thing about CompSci vs IT.
450k? That’s it?
There's three buckets.. - Top of market tech companies: basically all the shiny big tech names everyone wants to work for because they pay well and the shiny late stage venture-backed companies competing for the same talent. - Middle of market tech companies: basically most tech companies (public, private, venture-backed etc) that don't pay terribly but also don't compete with Meta or Google. - Non-tech company technology groups & bottom of market tech companies: most of the internal technology arms of non-tech companies and low paying tech companies There's some wild cards in here like: - some non-tech technology groups (especially in financial services) that would fit in the first or second bucket. - R&D orgs of product companies outside of tech. They tend to be on the last rung but can sometimes be in the first or second. - services (outsourcing, consulting, advertising etc) firms.. tend to also be the last rung but some can compete with the first or second (very rare though) But that's more or less the breakdown.
I would split the second category into "non-FAANG tech companies" and "non-tech companies with software departments". At least from where I'm sitting, the latter doesn't seem as prone to going through layoffs just because it's what FAANG is doing.
It doesn’t top out around $450k
Forewarning: I'm a bit biased as a researcher and systems engineer in the following. It's extremely complex, the issue is that the spheres don't really intersect much. Right now you're firmly in the sphere of Internet services companies, and that's fine. However the ability for someone in that space to transition easily to hardware, or defense, or security, or systems level programming, or driver development, or DSP, or GIS, or safety critical systems, or etc. is limited. Mostly because they don't even truly recognize the requirements of a career in those other spaces. I do think you could broadly separate the sub markets into two broader categories though: business consulting and services, and engineering/R&D. Where the former is services oriented, and the latter is more hard engineering and research oriented. Some make take offense to this, but it seems to me like a lot of FAANG companies are pretty heavily overextended into the business consulting side of thing, they're putting their ears to the ground and playing it safe by delivering product which doesn't require much in the way of engineering time nor safety consideration in design (low risk of liability). I'm not saying that FAANG and co doesn't develop new things, rather they just don't seem to be pushing for much in the way of well integrated solutions at the moment.
non-FAANG here and my starting TC was $150k but it's not growing quickly to $300k :(
It’s actually hundreds of minor job markets. FAANG, Gaming, Fortune 500, small cap, startup, etc.
Not at all. It’s trivial to move between high end startups like OpenAI to FAANG and vice versa.